One of the most valuable pieces of information I’ve ever been given is that you shouldn’t put Vicks VapoRub under your nose to shield the smell of decomposition, because then all you can smell is decomp and Vicks. 

This is not some metaphor for facing life head on or whatever. This is what my mom told me when I was 9 years old, and she went to mortuary school to help my grandma run her small funeral home. 

My grandma’s funeral home was a staple of my childhood, almost a sister to my own home. It is white with purple trim, with lace curtains and glass angels everywhere. It has a big window that fills the inside with light. Each year during Christmas, they fill the window with photos of children that have died in the community since the 1970s. 

Me, my cousin and my two younger siblings spent countless hours in the funeral home, reading books, playing with blocks, asking for money to walk to the store nearby, and gossiping hard about small-town rumors, while my grandma was working in the back.

When my mom followed in my grandma’s footsteps to become a funeral director, I wondered why someone who cried at the end of every episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition would choose to put herself in that kind of setting forever. Her casual answer stuck with me: “Because someone has to do it.” 

Growing up in a family-owned funeral home in a small town gave me a very different perspective on death. The world where death is a taboo and chilling subject, kept hush-hush out of fear and controversy, is foreign to me. In my family, death is as casual as a trip to the grocery store. 

However, a trip to the grocery store sometimes meant me or one of my siblings were sitting on the cot in the back because there weren’t enough seats in the work van (that occasionally doubled as the family car). A trip to the grocery store commonly involved my mom taking a detour to drop off a death certificate, and occasionally one of us riding with an urn on our lap so she could deliver it on the way. 

When we got to the grocery store, or when I went anywhere in public, I had an almost daily interaction with someone stopping me to say how much they appreciated the way my mom and grandma had taken care of their mom and grandma.

My mom and my grandma have given me plenty of advice over the years, though I can’t exactly say it’s come in handy very often: “Lift the casket with your legs, not your back.” “You gotta remove the pacemaker so it doesn’t explode in the crematory.” “Know where all the church bathrooms are.” “Embalming should be sooner than later, before the body clots too much.”

There were some life lessons I learned all by myself. 

For instance, when we were very little, my cousin, brother and I were playing hide and seek in my grandma’s yard. My brother, the youngest of us three, was the seeker, so my cousin and I stumped him by hiding together in the back of my grandma’s hearse. It was the greatest spot of them all, and we won by a longshot. After 20 minutes we knew he gave up, so we decided to hop out of the hearse and claim our victory. 

That’s how we learned that if you’ve ended up in the back of a hearse, you’re generally not trying to get out, so the back doors of hearses don’t open from the inside — we had to slide our tiny bodies through the cab window and into the front seat. 

I also learned that death can be theatrical at times. Every Christmas for as long as I remember, our festivities have been temporarily halted because my mom and grandma had to go to work. Many of our plans growing up revolved around their “pendings” — their term for people who are close to passing away.

If we were to have family weekend adventures, they were conditioned upon not having funerals scheduled, and being close enough to town and always in cell-phone range. This way, if someone passed away, my mom could turn around and take care of them. And if one of their clients was very close to passing, we pretty much had to push back whatever family plans we had for the weekend. 

That’s not to say we didn’t get out. Often, if my mom had a long drive to the morgue, and if it happened to be during when school was out, she’d end up throwing me and my brother in her van and strap my little sister in the car seat for a fun, two hour Sunday morning road trip. We would chat, keep each other company, go shopping, and do the removal when they were ready for us (always accompanied by security, or the morgue attendant nervously saying, “Oh! You brought your kids”). 

Then, we would grab some food at a drive thru and make our way back home. We typically don’t acknowledge the body in the back of the van, outside of cordial salutations. (They don’t have much to contribute to the conversation). That is unless putrefaction, the natural post-mortem process of fluids and gasses exiting the body, prompted us to roll the windows down. And no one batted an eye.

Now that I’m older, I understand that my childhood definitely wasn’t conventional. There were nights when dinner was in the mortuary at 10 pm because my mom was up late embalming. My high school job was handing out programs and setting up chairs at funerals. My mom knows how to sew, but she can’t make me new clothes — if you know what I mean.

But I got to grow up with the two strongest, most powerful role models imaginable. 

I’ve watched my mom and grandma help grieving people, while experiencing debilitating grief themselves. I’ve watched them throw funerals all over town and make everyone feel like theirs was the only one. I’ve watched them wake up at 2 am and drive hours to go meet families on the worst night of their lives. I’ve watched them make sacrifices forever and still always be present. 

And I’ve watched them do all of this while looking professional with their forever-matching purple hair. They are the most important women in my life and I love them so much. I sincerely hope that I can be as full of life as the two morticians who raised me. (My dad also raised me — love you, Dad — but he’s a roofer.)