In the beginning there was the Word

Death and I began our relationship when I was just five years old. There was a death on my mother's side of the family, and I was going to attend my first wake.

A few important key moments I distinctly remember:

1: I wore a matching top-and-skirt set which was dark blue and had giraffes on it,
2: I went to use the bathroom at the funeral home and didn't realize the seat was up which landed me in the actual toilet bowl and soaked my skirt, and,
3: When I approached the casket and asked my mother what was going on, she told me to speak quietly because our dead relative was sleeping.

That third point changed the course of my life completely. For one, it certainly made the following day's burial incredibly traumatic. Are you telling me, a five-year-old with a parade of imaginary friends, who got up in front of an audience of children and adults at her end-of-the-year Pre-School Pet Day and weaved incredulous tales about her Pound Puppy, Spot as though he were a living breathing creature for a tight five, and who would regularly tromp around the house pretending to be different cartoon and movie characters, that my relative is sleeping in this bizarrely uncomfortable looking bed with a lid and now some men are going to lower said bed into a hole in the ground and cover it with dirt and grass? The years of insomnia and night terrors that followed this core memory were likely not what my mother had anticipated, but let that be lesson to anyone who skirts around the truth "for the sake of the children".

For years to come, I would lie awake in my normal human bed, working myself into a mini existential crisis while worrying about what was going to happen to me when it was my time to fall asleep Forever. It wasn't until I started learning about religion that these fears gave way to new and dreadful musings.

I have a memory of my sister and I from the early 90's, sitting in the old family Chevy Suburban during one of my brother's baseball games. My sister tells me something to the effect of, if you say any curse words a cumulative 100 times, you're going to Hell. This is non-negotiable. I knew that she must be telling the truth because, not only is she 21 months older than me, but she used to sit in the bathroom and have conversations with God back when we lived in New Jersey. Obviously she got this information directly from the source.

All of this to say, even though my family weren't church-goers, and I hadn't been baptized, I was familiar with the concept of Heaven and Hell. What I only realized as I got older was that, because of my pretty chill and not definitive relationship with God, I was absolutely going to Hell whether I said 100 curse words or not.

Attending more wakes and funerals as I got older filled me with a deeper curiosity regarding what happens to us after we die, as well as an intense aversion to the smell of lilies. I noticed a lot of death-specific consistency as I learned more about different religions, though those with deviations around the postmortem lifestyle certainly intrigued me. I dug deeper, looking for answers which simply did not exist in any uniform and finite way which would appease me. I wanted to figure out where I belonged and what my end-of-life journey would entail, but I also knew that pushing further may continue to leave me with no true relief from gnawing fears of the unknown.

I danced around the idea of following my curiosity into the funeral industry. As someone who does let their curiosity get the better of them in spite of every red flag I swat out of my face like a thin spiderweb strand, I applied for, and began, my first job within a funeral home in my early 20's. As I learned more and became closer with the Funeral Directors, I thought to myself, maybe that could be a career route for me...one day. This led to the motivation to take on a position with a hospital as an anatomic pathology and autopsy technician for about three years, which was certainly a crash course in anatomy, scalpel work, and seeing some of the most horrendous things I have ever witnessed to be done by, or happen to, human beings. And this eventually led do...

...a drinking problem.

"You're a different person when you come back up from the Morgue. You don't say anything or look anyone in the eye. Eventually you come back to us but...you're scaring people," my manager told me one day after a particularly difficult case.

I wish I could have told him that I was scaring myself, too, and that I needed some help. I would take a deep breath and count to five before opening a body bag, unsure of what I was about to see each time. I would always get a brief about the case from a pathologist, but it's nothing like coming face to face with someone whose body was suck in a clenched-fisted death scream because they knew what was coming, or a peaceful looking accident victim, blissfully unaware they now resemble Two-Face from Batman.

Another Jack & Coke, please. Hold the Coke and make it a double.

A 12 year break was exactly what I needed to clear my mind and make sure I had the right mental healthcare in place before pursuing my dream. It sounds so breezy and simple when I say it like that! Because it's kind of a lie and went a little more like this:

I stepped away from my death curiosity because it was doing my head in a bit. I spent 12ish years sowing the ever-loving crap out of some wild oats (comedy, theater, etc), and when I was done doing that, I remained stagnant and unaware of where life was going to take me next. Don't worry - death was about to help me figure that out once again, in the worst way possible.

In April of 2020, I was in a terrible car accident. I will say, I do refer to my accident a lot. It was a major event and turning point in my life. My dog and I were driving home from the vet. Thanks to some helpful strangers, he was absolutely physically fine and out of harms way within minutes, though I was stuck in the car for almost an hour. Eventually, I walked away with a few cuts, bruises, and torn ligaments which healed with a lot of time and physical therapy. I did take with me, though, a level of PTSD I was not prepared for and ill-equipped to handle on my own.

I spent several years working through therapy to remove the phrase "I should be dead" from my vocabulary and "I wish I were dead" from my thoughts. I feel incredibly fortunate for the people in my life who recognized that I needed help and supported/pushed me to get it, because I do not think I would have do that without them.

Five months after the accident, I started seriously researching what it would take to become a Mortician in the state of Illinois. Over the last decade or so, it's the one consistent thing that has come up as something I would love to do, and something I thought I'd be good at. It started to feel like more of a calling after everything I'd gone through, and I knew it was time to follow that dream and make it come true. I virtually toured one school in Pittsburgh, and reconnected with a school I'd toured almost a decade before here in Illinois. I reached out to friends and former colleagues for recommendations, collected my transcripts from former colleges, wrote essays and assessed my financials. I talked through the pros and cons with my husband, my family, and my therapist. And this eventually led to...

...going back to school to follow my dreams.

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