The Phoenix Network:
 
 
 
About  |  Advertise
 
Big Fat Whale  |  Failure  |  Hoopleville  |  Idiot Box  |  Lifestyle Features

Death becomes her

The future of funerals is fresh-faced . . . and female.
By SARA FAITH ALTERMAN  |  February 27, 2009

090227_morturary_main
BEAUTY SLEEP: Our job is to help the families, and to “make the deceased look the best we can,” says mortuary student Megan Peterson

Funeral recession: Death is inevitable; limousines aren't. By Julia Rappaport

Really going green: Eco-friendly cemeteries. By Alan R. Earls

Slideshow: Femme Fatales

Like any other 20 year olds, Megan Peterson and Mackenzie Byles chatter like hyperactive squirrels, excitedly finishing each others' sentences as though they're alien twins with melded minds. The young women, juniors at Mount Ida College in Newton, are bright, well-spoken, and trendy, perfectly French-manicured and perfectly flat-ironed. Peterson sports black hipster glasses with tiny rhinestone butterflies on the rims. Byles resembles a healthy Lindsay Lohan with spindly eyelashes.

It's incongruous to imagine their manicured hands expertly slitting a corpse's neck, fishing around under flesh and sinew with sinister-looking hooks for the carotid artery, exposed muscle tissue looking as plump and juicy as pre-packaged raw chicken breasts.

These fresh faces are the future of funeral service.

As President Obama tries to resuscitate a flat-lining economy left for dead, a new wave of young females like Peterson and Byles are breathing life into the business of death. With increasing fervor, women are permeating what was once a male-dominated industry. According to a study conducted by the National Funeral Directors Association, women now make up approximately 60 percent of the country's mortuary-college enrollment; the average mortuary student is a female who falls between the ages of 18 and 24, and does not have family ties to the estimated $11 billion industry.

Both Peterson (of Quincy) and Byles (of Groton, Connecticut) are studying funeral-home management and bereavement at the New England Institute (NEI), one of the area's two mortuary colleges and an academic subset of Mount Ida. Here, students learn every aspect of the industry: technical skills, such as restorative art and embalming (the odors churned up by an embalming "kind of depends on the person," notes Peterson. "Once you start, you can smell faint formaldehyde and cavity fluid, but that's really it."); scientific fields of study, such as anatomy and microbiology; and the "human" side of mortuary science (bereavement counseling, marketing, and funeral-home management).

Yes, the funeral business is multi-faceted, and in many ways like a regular business — albeit one in which corpses play a critical role. But its stigma still makes the choice for women to go into this field a difficult one.

"I'll never forget what happened to me at freshman orientation," says Byles. "I was in a crowd of students and a girl asked what my major was. I told her, and she made this terrible face at me and then just walked away, as if I was so bizarre and weird. Dead bodies don't gross me out, but I'm not obsessed with the dead. People assume that I should be weird and goth. Or that I should be in fashion or something. Because I'm a girl, I guess?"

"Everyone looks at us like, 'Really?' " says Peterson, scrunching up her face in imitation of a skeptical classmate. "Usually people don't remember my name — just my major. I think it's because there's a lack of information out there as to what [funeral directors] actually do. We interact with families, help them, give them advice. We try to make the deceased look the best we can."

1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |   next >
Related: Slideshow: Femmes Fatales, Really going green, Funeral recession, More more >
  Topics: Lifestyle Features , Barack Obama, Boston University, Mount Ida College,  More more >
| More


ARTICLES BY SARA FAITH ALTERMAN
Share this entry with Delicious
  •   INTERVIEW: ANDY RICHTER  |  November 25, 2009
    We have a chub for Andy Barker, P.I. (just released out on DVD), because we have a major chub for the show’s star, Andy Richter. Richter plays an accountant who is mistaken for a detective-for-hire and decides to just roll with it. 
  •   REVIEW: SPREAD  |  August 19, 2009
    If only there were some way to watch a con-artist houseboy give his cougar sugar mama a squirming reach-around, charm the pants off a candy-necklace string of countless empty-eyed Hollywood stick figures, lose his heart to an untouchable social chameleon, and, in the process, find himself .
  •   NORTHERN EXPOSURE  |  July 29, 2009
    While New York is grittier, Los Angeles juicier, and Boston is wicked smahter, for some odd reason it is Montreal that, for two weeks every summer, becomes the epicenter of the comedy universe.
  •   JUST FOR LAUGHS  |  July 27, 2009
    Blogs, Tweets, and comedy video direct from moose country
  •   BEAT THE TWEET  |  July 22, 2009
    Warm weather is supposed to be accessorized by lackaday, by a breezy sensibility best enjoyed with a frosty tall boy in one hand, the sloppy product of a back-yard barbecue in the other. Instead, I find myself struggling to balance my beer between my knees and my overstocked paper plate on my thigh as I furiously poke at my BlackBerry.

 See all articles by: SARA FAITH ALTERMAN



  |  Sign In  |  Register
 
thePhoenix.com:
Phoenix Media/Communications Group:
TODAY'S FEATURED ADVERTISERS
Copyright © 2012 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group