When I was growing up, I often got ghastly looks when I said my father ran a funeral business. I would respond with comments like “it’s recession-proof,” or I’d offer up a joke, like the one about why there’s a fence around the cemetery (because people are dying to get in). I was always amused when someone asked if we had bodies in our basement.
Until the early 1990s, my father, Gayle King, didn’t prepare bodies or arrange funerals on a regular basis. His business, Anatomy Transporting in St. Louis, was essentially a delivery service. It wasn’t until I was in high school that Dad’s business became a crematory, and the name changed to St. Louis Cremation. His work in his home office involved only phone calls and paperwork, so we had no bodies in the basement or anywhere else.
Dad loves to tell the story of my reaction when he got his first “client,” when I was about nine years old. We were all seated around the dinner table, and while Dad—talking on the phone in his very somber funeral-director voice—made arrangements with the family, I jumped up, clapping and yelling, “We got a body!”
My two brothers and I adjusted to the business just fine, probably because it wasn’t that different from Dad’s “other job” as the embalmer for a medical school. But there was usually someone who was a little freaked out about it.
Around our ten-year high school reunion, my childhood friend Kathy finally mentioned how weird it seemed when Dad said he’d bought us a VCR because “business is good.” And I’ll never forget how my friend Vanessa reacted during one drive in the family car, which happened to moonlight as a hearse. Dad, Vanessa and I sat across the bench seat in the front, and, as usual, Dad slung his arm across the top of the seat. His fingers must have rested on Vanessa’s shoulder because she was certain a dead person had come to life in the back of the car. She probably would have climbed out the window if she hadn’t been sitting in the middle.
Even after Dad hired a part-time employee, he was still going full-tilt. We got used to hearing the phone ring in the middle of the night and Dad’s tired footsteps coming down the old wooden stairs. Despite the workload, he found time to cook dinner for the family every night.
Dad’s sense of humor shows through in subtle ways. His personalized license plate still says “CREM8,” and when people who see it say, “I bet I know what you do for a living,” he offers a discount—“but only if you go right now.”
Although I was never employed full-time in the business, the subject seemed to follow me around. As a college intern, I wrote newspaper obituaries, and my husband, like my father, is an embalmer. One of my brothers is now our company’s marketing director, and I help out as a writing consultant of sorts. And yes, I still love to see the look on people’s faces when I tell them about our family business.
Michelle Kowalski is a freelance writer based in Mexico, Mo.