Carrie Lee Starry was getting dressed for church one Sunday morning when her sister called to tell her that their father, who had been sick, had died. “I took off my pantyhose and put on my sweats,” she says. And went to work.
Carrie and her brother Mike, both licensed funeral directors, initially had reservations about preparing their father’s body for reviewal. Carrie was upset, caught up in her grief, but as she and her brother set to work embalming their father, a peaceful feeling took over. She was grateful for the unique way she was able to give back to her father. “I thought how cool it was that we could be there for him,” she says. “It was like we were home.”
They were, of course, where they had lived as children and where their father had started the business they eventually took over, the David Lee Funeral Home in Wayzata. Carrie was also at home in her work, where she inhabits the largely misunderstood world of death. That world, once dominated by men, is gradually giving way to women like Carrie Lee Starry.
As teenagers, my friends and I parked in the Dairy Queen lot adjacent to the David Lee Funeral Home to freak ourselves out. The shadow cast by ground lights against a lower roofline formed a perfect silhouette on the funeral home wall of a man resting in a coffin. Curious about what happens after we die, I knew the funeral home held clues, but I found myself equally attracted to and repelled by what went on inside.
Let’s play a little word association game. Mortician. Quick, what comes to mind?
Probably not suburban housewife, youth hockey coach, petite, caring, empathic. That’s Carrie Lee Starry. When people meet the 45-year-old mother of two teenage sons, they can’t believe she’s a mortician, or, funeral director, to use the industry’s preferred term. She’s petite, spunky and fashionable–a far cry from the somber man in black often depicted by Hollywood. The common image of funeral directors is riddled with misperceptions.
Carrie recently gave me a tour of the David Lee Funeral Home on an overcast winter afternoon. She apologized for being dressed casually–jeans, long-sleeve T-shirt, no makeup–but explained she had just come from helping her husband at the Sport Hut he owns across Wayzata Boulevard. She sold her share of the David Lee business to her brother Mike last year and plans to build her own funeral home in Maple Grove this year. I’d known Carrie from a distance at Wayzata High School, a sophomore when she was a senior. We chatted briefly about her boys–she was in Owatonna that weekend coaching her younger son’s Bantam B hockey team–before the talk turned to death.
The Lee family had two telephones in the kitchen of their house. (They had moved out of the cramped two-bedroom apartment above the funeral home when Carrie was five-years-old.) Dad’s business phone was bigger than the other. “When the chubby one rang, we had to be quiet,” Carrie says. The call meant someone had died. “That’s when I started to realize what my dad did.”
She did not dream of being a mortician herself. She wanted to be a veterinarian. A “C” in organic chemistry at the University of Minnesota changed the course of her career. Mike, already studying in the U’s mortuary science program, urged his younger sister to check out the program. She did, liked what she saw, and enrolled.
Not all funeral directors come from families that ran funeral homes. Nationwide, two thirds of recent graduates from mortuary science programs had no prior direct family relationship with funeral service, according to the American Board of Funeral Service Education. At the University of Minnesota’s mortuary science program–the only one in the state–that figure is under 20 percent.
When Michael LuBrant, the director of the U’s mortuary science program, attends health career fairs, no students choose to sit at his table. “I’m always alone,” he says. “The only people who come up are those who can’t find a place at the other tables. They avoid eye contact and don’t speak to me. There’s still a stigma or taboo attached to death and dying.”
LuBrant asks those who do apply to his program why they want to study mortuary science. Most tell him they had a funeral director ease their experience with the death of a loved one. “Many say ‘The way we were treated by the funeral director made our time so much less painful, I want to give that back,’” he says. “They use language like ‘call’ and ‘vocation.’ Many will frame it as a ministry.”
Carrie does not use the words “call” or “vocation” specifically, though she speaks about her own work with a sense of awe and reverence. Death is obviously a spiritual experience for her and working with families who have just lost a loved one is deeply personal. “It’s such a privilege to do what we do,” she says. “To be let into a family at a time like that. Whenever I’m having a pity party for myself, I walk into work and feel humbled. This place puts things in perspective. I feel I’m blessed to be here.”
Carrie had only worked for five years as a funeral director when her father died in October 1990. Already caring and compassionate, Carrie says going through her father’s wake, funeral and burial heightened her sensitivity and gave her a deeper level of empathy for clients. “I think I’ve become a better funeral director since my dad died,” she says. “Until it’s in your own house, you can only imagine what it’s like.”
In the basement, there’s a white door at the end of the hallway marked “PRIVATE” in raised gold letters. Carrie leads me inside. We walk into a long, narrow room, maybe 20’ x 8’, with white walls and a faint smell of disinfectant. She calls it the “prep room.”
There are two empty metal carts–”portable biers”–parked along the walls, a clothes rack, wooden cabinets that hold dyes and other fluids, and a ridged porcelain body tray. The tray, tipped toward the foot, drains into a sink that flushes into the treatable sewage line. Next to the body tray, there are tools laid out on a blue cloth: razors, nail trimmers, scissors, tweezers, combs. There’s a large machine that looks like an oversized blender with a five-gallon container which pumps the embalming fluid–basically, formaldehyde. At the moment, the body tray is empty. Picture yourself in it. This is where we go when we die.
I’m preoccupied, however, with the TV mounted in the far corner and the stereo system alongside one of the portable biers. These accessories strike me as out of place. Carrie explains that she watches the news when she prepares bodies, “as background, not entertainment.” Sometimes, she listens to country or faith music. Other times, she prefers to work in quiet without distractions. “It’s my time,” she says. “Reflective.”
The embalming machine has flow and pressure controls for two tubes. Carrie explains how she makes a two-inch slit near the neck and places a cannula inside the carotid artery. The machine simultaneously drains the blood from the veins and replaces it with formaldehyde in the arteries. The process usually takes about two hours. Once the embalming is finished and a body is dressed and groomed, the person waits in the prep room for the wake. Carrie does not say “body” or “corpse.” “It’s very important for someone loved by others to be treated like you want your loved ones to be treated,” she says.
Our greatest fascination with death may be what happens to the body but the funeral director’s work with the dead constitutes only a small percentage of her time. The majority of the work involves helping the bereaved make decisions about how to memorialize and bury or cremate lost ones, then carrying out those plans. “The time with the deceased is a small part of what we do,” LuBrant says. “It’s about serving the living.”
There are phones throughout the funeral home, even in the prep room. When someone dies, the funeral director–not the pastor or rabbi–is usually the first one called. That’s where Carrie’s job begins.
She must address immediate practical details. Where is the deceased? When should she come pick up the body? There are emotional and spiritual considerations. How would those close to the deceased like him or her remembered–reviewal, funeral or memorial service? Burial or cremation? Finally, there are the financial aspects. The bereaved must purchase a casket or urn along with a vault and pay for the reviewal, funeral, memorial service and/or cremation services. This is, after all, a business.
Sales and services are the funeral home’s sole revenue streams. Markups on caskets and urns in the Twin Cities range from 10 percent to 300 percent. The least expensive route–cremation without a reviewal, memorial service or casket–costs close to $2,000. On the other end, a wake, funeral and burial with a plush casket and other extras, can run $15,000. The David Lee Funeral Home averages about 200 burials and cremations a year. Between 40 and 50 percent are cremations. Expenses include salaries and benefits, rent (Carrie’s mother owns the house), utilities, hearse maintenance and repair, equipment and supplies, and advertising and marketing. “The perception is that we make a lot of money, but that’s not true,” Carrie says. “When I graduated from college in 1985, funeral service was the lowest entry level position for a four-year degree, starting at $16,000 a year.”
The median salary for ‘06 graduates from the U is $32,500. A funeral home manager with 10 years experience in Minnesota can expect to make between $60-70K, according to LuBrant.
Carrie does not like to have to talk to people about money when they are grieving, but recognizes it as essential part of the funeral planning process. “We have to tell people how much it is going to cost before we do anything for them,” she says. “It’s hard to talk about money at a time when people are so emotional and vulnerable. But it’s a reality. The ramifications are bigger if you don’t talk about it.”
The day my father died, we called the David Lee Funeral Home. Carrie and an associate drove their hearse out to my parents’ house to pick up my father. The following day, my family met with Carrie to plan my father’s wake, funeral and burial. In the casket showroom downstairs, she did not foist a Cadillac casket on us but allowed us to choose the one we thought most appropriate. Having death visit my house gave me a deeper appreciation for the skills required to work in the funeral industry.
Planning and overseeing what happens to deceased loved ones require a great deal of tact, patience, compassion and professionalism. It’s a delicate path to walk educating people about their options, discerning what they want and facilitating resolution among differing desires. The funeral director must navigate the family dynamics and dysfunction heightened by grief. “It’s like planning a wedding–there are so many emotions–except that you have a finite amount of time,” she says. “I end up doing a lot of listening and asking a lot of questions. You have to learn when to talk, when to listen.”
Customer service is the backbone of the funeral home. Since the majority of business comes from word of mouth referrals–not yellow page listings or church bulletin ads–how clients talk about their experience determines how often the phone rings. “The end result is still the same–the casket goes into the ground or the urn into the vault–but it’s how you get there that separates you from others,” Carrie says. “Service drives this business. Reputation is very important.”
She fully understands the business side of her profession, but it’s the emotional aspect she’s talking about when she adds, “You can’t take people’s pain away, but you can do little things. You can feel it when someone has had a good experience with someone dying. I feel bad when people don’t have the best experience possible. You can come through a funeral saying, ‘That was good.’ ”
Until recently, death was a male domain. Starry was one of only five women in her graduating class of 52 at the University of Minnesota in 1985. Not long afterward, a male female director, his tongue loosened by drink, told her over the phone what she suspected others thought, “You goddamn women funeral directors are trying to take over our profession.”
That hasn’t happened but the trend is moving in that direction. Today, between 55-60 percent of the students in the U’s mortuary science program are women, in step with the national average. Yet of the 1,407 morticians licensed in Minnesota, only 243–fewer than 20 percent–are women. The disparity may be explained by the head start men had in filling the field. It has only been in the past decade that women have outnumbered men in mortuary science programs. It may also be that the weekend and evening hours discourage women who want to start a family from staying in the business. When Carrie opens her funeral home this year in Maple Grove, it will be only the third funeral home owned and operated by women in the Twin Cities, along with Honsa Family Funeral Home in White Bear Lake and Sandberg Funeral and Cremation Services in North St. Paul.
Lifting bodies is not typically viewed as women’s work. It’s hard to imagine the 5’2” Carrie moving a heavy person, even though she’s surprisingly strong for her size. Though the David Lee Funeral Home doesn’t have one, there are now hydraulic lifts that can be employed in prep rooms and cots on wheels that can be lowered to the ground for pickups that have pretty much eliminated the need for a funeral director to possess brute strength. Carrie doesn’t hesitate to invite a male coworker along with her on calls. “I ask for help,” she says. “When I was younger, I was stubborn, but I’m not a girl anymore. I know my limitations. My back won’t let me do that.”
Some of the early hostility and resistance Carrie and other women encountered from what Mary Kay Sandberg calls “the old boys network” was probably insult added to injury. Women were paid less than men for the same work, yet the men in their industry resented them for it. “Women accepted jobs for less money to get into a place, which brought the pay scale down for men,” explains Sandberg, who took over her father’s funeral home when he passed away in 1998. “Men were irritated that was happening to them.”
Sandberg, Starry and Terry Honsa, who has run the Honsa Family Funeral Home since 1994, report that the reaction from families to them as women has been overwhelmingly positive, yet they still receive messages that others don’t see them as capable as men. People at funerals will approach a male employee, even if he’s only the guy driving the hearse, before they’ll approach one of the women, though she’s the one wearing the funeral director nametag.
Not long after Terry Honsa’s father died in 2004, she started receiving phone calls with offers to buy the family funeral home. She said she had no intention of selling.
“Who’s going to run it?” the callers asked.
“I am,” she said.
“You can’t do that,” they said.
“I’ve been doing that all along,” she replied.
“It’s inconceivable to me in this day and age that people would think I couldn’t do it because I was a woman,” Honsa says.
On the flip side, men seem to have been doing the work as well as women can. “The men in this industry have to be compassionate,” Sandberg says. “It would be nice as a woman to be able to say, ‘We cornered the market on how to handle this industry because the men are idiots.’ But that wouldn’t be a fair statement. The men have laid a good foundation.”
Women like Sandberg, Honsa and Starry are building upon that foundation, changing the face if not the practice of the traditional funeral home owner. In the meantime, Starry has not spent a day wishing she had become a veterinarian. The longer she works as a funeral director, the deeper her appreciation for what she does and what it means to others becomes. “I can’t see myself doing anything else,” she says. “I love what I’m doing.”
© John Rosengren