When Your Life is Death

Death.

It's one word which will never become desensitised. The one experience your whole life has been leading up to. When your voice is silenced and there are words left unsaid. It’s the closing curtain. The ultimate fullstop.

Now of course there's the afterlife. Heaven and Hell depending on your relationship with God. Dust and dirt for the realists. But death is the full stop to a tangible existence. And when you're six feet under; when you're scattered across the Earth or sitting in an earn, your life-once-lived tears apart the lives of the people you once knew. Death cripples us with grief, because once someone you love dies, a part of you is stolen, and your whole existence is uprooted.

Most of us are fortunate to be touched by the potency of loss only a few times in our life. But what about the people who swallow the poison every day? The people whose life is death? Whose weekly wage relies on car crashes, and heart attacks, and cancer? The funeral directors who we pay to deal with death for us.


“You can never become desensitised. That's not what this is all about. You have to be exactly the opposite. You have to be compassionate, and sensitive, and strong. You're dealing with people's grief. People's lives. People's death...” The room which hears these words feels bare in Peach Bloom paint. There are a few framed paintings on the walls of single-stemmed flowers, and a painted sunset on the horizon, but apart from the desk and chairs it feels empty. Until she speaks those words. They warm the hollowness and excite the whispered secrets that have been absorbed by the walls.

The warmth comes not only from her words, it’s in her laced gold necklaces and the blonde streak through her black hair. It's in her "welcome" which reads every mood, calculating your emotional state. Cheryl is like your loving aunt who gives great Christmas presents, or the canteen lady who gives you lunch when you forget. She’s kindness, compassion and warmth personified inside a building which houses lacquered caskets and conveniently placed tissue boxes. This warmth radiates through the fear of the unknown as she smiles. “It’s rewarding," she says. "The follow up calls from families saying thank you mean the most. The thankyous fills up your cup and make you keep going”

To keep going, to not take on the pain of every lost mother, every overdose, every SIDS death is Cheryl’s job. So why would someone chose to enter this field? How do funeral directors manage the same heavy pain of a death of a loved one every working day? “It’s either in you or its not, it’s not something you can learn. The people who don’t have it go in and out of the funeral business very quickly. You sink in this industry if you don’t have the right equipment to deal with it.”

I find death uncomfortable. The weight of loss in my little experience has felt like my heart has been ransacked and I never realised the importance of the pieces stolen, until all that was left were fingerprints. I’m left feeling somewhat incomplete, like I missed out on something I’ll never quite know. So I find it hard to understand how people can face it as an occupation every day - to face people in that intensity of shock and emotion. Cheryl looks at my confusion in sympathy. “It’s being able to help,” she says. “To help them say goodbye and to help them move on... With the families we see, there’s a line we try not to cross. If you take on everyone’s grief you take on too much so you don’t let anything stay with you for too long. You don’t want to hang on... But there are always some you cannot forget. I’ll always remember my first funeral. They were young parents whose little boy drowned in the back pool. I became physically sick because I felt so deeply for them... I still don’t like doing children... or suicides...”

The funeral industry doesn’t receive a lot of press. It profits from the most commonly dreaded social event. Cheryl’s brows knot together. “I hate that there is account attached to what we do, to our sympathy. Charging is the hardest thing about this business.”

But what about when dealing with death is no longer just a job responsibility but it becomes a first hand experience? How do the people who deal with death everyday deal with it within their own circle? She taps her fist on the table laughing nervously, “Touch wood that’s something I never have to face... I don’t think being in this industry makes you deal with death any easier, or better, or quicker. But it gives you more of an appreciation of life.”

In all the reminders of the end, with the soft orchestral background music, the cremation fliers, and the scattered boxes of tissues, life becomes the focus. Yet with the uncertainty of faith and the gamble of time, does working in this industry become life with the volume turned up? “You say everything you need to say, so there is never a lost goodbye or 'I love you'. Because people have to die to make life worth living.”