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More women undertake mortuary careers

Written by DeadGirl
Monday, 05 June 2006
By Mike Stevens COLUMBIA NEWS SERVICE NEW YORK - Earlier this spring, Erika Haas, an assistant funeral director at Heffner Funeral Chapel in York, Pa., suggested to a grieving family that they televise the recent Pittsburgh Steelers' Super Bowl victory during their 26-year-old son's funeral. The son had been a lifetime fan and spent many weekends at the stadium or watching the game on TV. The family was so taken with her suggestion they did her one better and shaped the whole service around the Steelers. Flowers came in the football team's black and gold colors. Snapshots showed tailgate parties and family members sitting in the living room on Sundays, with scenes from the game playing in a background. Friends arrived at the funeral carrying footballs and rally towels. And as mourners filed by the open coffin, they could take note that the son would be buried in his favorite Steelers jersey. Haas, 32, got her football idea while gathering information for the obituary from the dead man's mother. A male funeral director many years Haas' senior had sat in on the interview, but he had offered no suggestions for anything special. "Men are picking out facts, and I'm listening for a story," Haas said. "Inside that story is the key to personalizing a funeral." Haas thinks that making a personal connection is what accounts for the growing number of women in the $11 billion funeral industry. Long dominated by men, the business of death is increasingly being handled by women. Last year, 57 percent of new mortuary-science students were women, according to the American Board of Funeral Service Education. Many think the increase in the number of women entering the business represents a fundamental shift in what people expect from a funeral director. The industry once required only a somber face, a black suit and a knowledge of modern embalming techniques, but today, people expect a sympathetic figure when they walk in the door, said Amanda Robarge, 24, a student at Cincinnati College of Mortuary Science. Robarge thinks these changes benefit women. "I just think instinctively if someone's crying, we're not as afraid to go up to them," she said. "Even a handshake -- guys will give a one-handed shake, whereas women usually shake with one hand and then kind of tap on top of their other hand. It's a sign of sympathy. It says, 'I see that you're hurting. I don't know what to say, but I'm here."' Dan Flory, 62, president of the Cincinnati College of Mortuary Science, has witnessed the funeral industry's demographic shift firsthand. When he started at the college in 1978, he said, about 5 percent of the students were women. In the past several years, half have been women. In America's early days, women were much more likely to be the ones most intimately involved with caring for the dead, said Gary M. Laderman, author of Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in 20th Century America. It was women who washed, shaved and dressed corpses for quick burial services, a necessity before refrigeration or modern embalming techniques took hold. After the Civil War, the domestic chore of making a loved one presentable after death turned into a profession. Male "experts," often licensed and educated at a growing number of mortuary-science schools, prepared the dead for burial using modern techniques to preserve bodies much longer, Laderman said. "Embalming takes hold and becomes the bedrock of the industry," Laderman said. "It's at that point that the gender shift takes hold." After this change, the women who did become funeral directors most likely grew up in or around a funeral home, Laderman said. But even as women take charge in school, some funeral homes resist hiring them. "The women tend to have to look harder and farther than do men," said Gene Ogrodnik, president of Pittsburgh Institute of Mortuary Science. "It's getting better, but it still exists that owners think they can't do the job." http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/living/14597547.htm

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Taphophilia?

taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)

ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"

DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries

Taphophiles Speak

Have you decided on eternal repose?

	earthen burial
	entombment
	cremation
	donation to science
	cyrogenically frozen
	you mean I'm still alive?

Quote Repository

“Of present fame think little, and of future less; the praises that we receive after we are buried, like the flowers that are strewed over our grave, may be gratifying to the living, but they are nothing to the dead.”

Charles Caleb Colton