The women taking over the funeral industry.

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“WINTER IS OUR BUSY season,” Lucy tells me apologetically, explaining why her co-workers are reluctant to commit to interviews. It never occurred to me that morticians would be slammed in Q1, though in retrospect the reason is obvious—pneumonia, influenza, and now COVID-19 return each year to collect their annual tolls. I’d dismissed the threat of winter as a relic of Romantic literature, but it seems no one is immune to nature’s enduring clichés.

I met Lucy at a Halloween party in 2023. Dressed as a pregnant Mia Farrow from Rosemary’s Baby (1968), she blended seamlessly into the crowd of disaffected twentysomethings—until she mentioned that she was an embalming apprentice. Once I realized this was not just glib seasonal humor, our small talk quickly tipped into big talk: ghosts, rigor mortis, sin-eaters, you name it. Beyond the hair-raising anecdotes, what surprised me most was that nearly all of Lucy’s co-workers and former mortuary classmates are women, specifically young women in their twenties and thirties. “There were only three guys in our class and one of them was a trans man. There were a lot of queer people,” she explains. I’d assumed she would be a quirky outlier in a class of gaunt, poorly socialized men, but as a tattooed lesbian with a warm Midwestern disposition, Lucy actually represents a growing majority. A quiet changeover has taken place in mortuary science—one largely obscured by the shroud separating the death industry from polite society. Over the past four decades, female enrollment in mortuary programs has grown from five percent to roughly 75 percent of recent graduating classes. As a journalist who came up during the peak of girlbossery, I’d been pitched all manner of “female first” stories—“Would you like to interview Chobani’s first female yogurt sommelier?”—but this felt more substantial than a corporate puff piece. So why this generational shift? And why now?

To see how this transition was playing out behind the scenes, I spent a few weeks interviewing three women who work in the deathcare industry. When you speak with a mortician, their tone gives away the questions they’ve answered hundreds of times before. Don’t you get scared? No. Morticians are more afraid of doing a bad job. Have you seen a ghost? Sadly, no. Once, a cosmetologist thought a body was shaking, but it was just an earthquake. Do you get grossed out? Not really, but they’re only human, and the medical field can challenge the senses. The questions themselves hint at a broader problem: outside of urban legends and crime procedurals, the average American knows very little about the death industry. Any specific knowledge usually originates from some yearly gruesome report on a morally and financially corrupt funeral director—see HBO’s The Mortician (2025). I ask Lucy, “What is the biggest misconception about morticians?” Without hesitation, she answers: “That we’re in it for the money.” In reality, the average embalmer earns between $40,000 and $50,000 a year—enough to meet basic needs and not much more in a city like Los Angeles or New York. She emphasizes, “I don’t want to seem like I’m complaining, though.” Beyond the common misconception that morticians are creepy, the profession’s most pernicious stereotype is greed—a characterization that hit the mainstream after Jessica Mitford’s exposé on the subject, The American Way of Death.

In 1963, Mitford—widely dubbed “the communist” of the infamous British clan of aristocratic sisters—published this scandalous tell-all on abuses in the American funeral home industry. The main thrust of the best-selling book was a criticism of the rapacious business practices used to exploit grieving families. Like Evelyn Waugh’s satirical novella The Loved One (1948), it plays on an enduring English disdain for American culture, skewering the tarted-up “burlesque” of our funerals, the bizarre practice of “pickling” (embalming), and open-casket funerals. Yankee ribbing aside, Mitford ties these excesses to a deeper pathology in the United States: cutthroat corporate capitalism. As she pulls at the thread of the death industry, she unravels a familiar American story: struggling mom-and-pop funeral homes were absorbed by corporations like Service Corporation International (SCI), which now dominate the industry across North America. She investigates “Big Death” in great detail, from the upselling of increasingly elaborate high-tech coffins to lobbyists in Washington, DC, passing law after law enforcing citizens’ dependency on funeral home services. Pulling further at that thread of the corporate death industry is difficult: mortuaries have notoriously strict publicity policies, which is why most names in this story have been changed to protect their anonymity.

Having been assigned The American Way of Death in mortuary school, Lucy condemns the greed of the old guard and resents the enduring stain on the profession’s reputation. “Let men run any industry and they’re just going to try to make money,” she says. “Men are the problem?” I ask. She nods: “They ruin everything.” In an industry lambasted by Mitford and “ruined” by greedy men, it raises the question of how some mortuary science programs have garnered between 72- and 100-percent female enrollment.

When I ask Lucy what personality type characterizes the modern mortician, she answers, “Girls that like taxidermy and reading books about the Salem witch trials.” Or, put more simply: “Goth girls.” So just goth kids that committed to the bit? In a sense, Lucy says, but she assures me that years of intensive medical training sift out “the ones who are doing it to be weird.” Although Lucy is a self-described “grandma goth”—interested in pathology as well as teacups and doilies—her path to becoming a mortician was not linear. It started years ago with a brief romance with a male funeral director. “I got butterflies and thought, Maybe I’m straight,” she laughs, but explains it as a misattributed desire to explore the funeral home on the parlor floor of his house.

The day the funeral director and Lucy broke up, her grandfather died. Although she’d attended a dozen funerals, this was the first close family loss. “They had a classic open-casket funeral,” she recounted. “I later learned he’d had a heart attack and fell on the stairs, but the reconstruction was incredible; I couldn’t tell. I was so grateful to see him and place something in his casket. It was therapeutic.” Even in her grief, she discovered a grace that allowed her family to lean on her heavily through that time. At the time, Lucy had a steady career in the arts, but she changed course during the pandemic. She explains: “During COVID, I felt stuck. People were dying and I felt so helpless. I don’t do well with living people, but in these cases, the worst has already happened—they’re dead, let’s pick up the pieces. I’m good in those emergencies.” Inspired by her former beau, she applied to get her embalmer prerequisites, and the rest is history.

In Lucy’s case, it was neither money nor a preexisting penchant for the macabre that drove her to mortuary science, but a sudden calling to a higher purpose. What brought other women into it? I had a hunch that breaking up with a funeral director and losing a relative on the same day would not apply to the exponential number of women entering the profession. Lucy suggested that I speak with her former colleague Jane, who has been in the industry for 10 years and whom Lucy calls “the best and most creative embalmer in the biz.”

Despite her winter workload, Jane agrees to call me on her commute. Her voice has a sweet, unhurried calm. Her path to mortuary school mirrored Lucy’s, with a childhood marked by frequent funerals. Having grown up in Central America, she describes these funerals as cinematic, with people screaming and throwing themselves on the casket. At her first US funeral for a granduncle, she was struck by the tranquil open-casket affair: “I remember walking up to the casket and thinking: Why does he look like that? I became so fascinated with the mortuary that day.”

Like Lucy, a funeral in Jane’s adult life galvanized her professional shift. Jane had received a studio art degree and was a committed artist, but her priorities changed when she attended her grandmother’s funeral: “She was shipped from New York to my country, and I swear to God, she looked horrendous. Just horrible. My grandma was a wrinkly old lady, and she looked nothing like that. She just looked smooth and swollen.” That was the turning point. “I knew in my heart that I could have done something better for her. Anything would have been better than what that funeral home did.” She followed that instinct to mortuary school and has since become something of an industry darling among her embalming peers.

Perhaps one reason embalming was long considered a “man’s job” is the unexpected amount of physical labor it requires. If you are familiar with slapstick crime capers, you know that getting a body from point A to point B is no easy task. Bodies must be wrapped, lifted, and hoisted into refrigerated shelves using a pulley system that can “leave you panting,” Lucy says. Contrary to what we’ve seen in movies, she explains, rigor begins about two to six hours after death, peaks at about hour 12, and will fade on its own after about 24 hours. If it has set in, the limbs must sometimes be manually manipulated in order to remove clothing. But beyond the physical demands, embalming is part science and part alchemy—a creative practice more akin to cooking than the precision of baking. “As an embalmer, problem-solving is key,” Jane explains. Every case is different. Has the decedent come in jaundiced? Face purple from dying face-down? There are color-correcting embalming fluids for that. Have they been autopsied? Donated organs or long bones? Been in an accident? Some problems require a simple trip to Home Depot for wooden dowels; others demand days of painstaking facial reconstruction requiring the nuance of a portrait sculptor and the skills of a cosmetic surgeon.

Respect for the decedents is the omnipresent force in the workroom, shaping even the language embalmers use. They are not bodies or corpses, only decedents. It is not a coffin but a casket. “It’s actually illegal to cuss in front of them,” Lucy tells me. If she slips up, she apologizes directly to the loved one. Beyond the physical labor of the job lies a more difficult thing to define: the almost doctor-patient relationship between morticians and the dead, where the ancient, almost metaphysical work of deathcare takes place.

“There are cases that stick with you,” Lucy tells me. “Days when I drive home with no music, just silence. Processing.” Recently, her mortuary received a young girl who died after being left in a hot car. One might assume that constant proximity to tragedy would breed the callousness associated with the Mitfordian mortician; instead, it often sharpens their sense of purpose. As a tight-knit community, Lucy explains, they process tragedies together. When faced with hopeless situations, morticians focus on what they can control: supplementing despair with hard work, tragedy with ritual. For instance, if a pregnant woman dies, it is customary to place the baby in her arms.

“Every embalmer has something that hits them hard,” Jane says. “What drives me is caring for everyone who’s died of suicide. I’ve been there; I’ve felt how they felt. I make it my mission to care for everyone who’s battled with depression, as a reminder that this could be you. I am empowered to do right by them. It’s a constant reminder of how important life is.” For many of the morticians I spoke to, their work inspires a vitality and presence I rarely encounter in our terminally apathetic, irony-poisoned generation. Their emotional fluency in the face of tragedy often forges strong bonds with the decedent’s family.

In the life of a mortician, the greatest high-wire act of emotional dexterity happens when presenting a loved one to the family. Lucy and Jane stress that this is a delicate task. Lucy explains: “Sometimes they’re screaming. Sometimes [the decedents] don’t look like themselves and [the family members] get mad at us. Some are grateful because [the decedents] look better than [they did] in the hospital. Sometimes they have notes on the cosmetics.” The “cakey look” is a frequent battleground. Jane alludes to a common culprit: “Most people go hard on the first layer of makeup to cover the discoloration. Not to be sexist, but most guys don’t look at the details—they just pound it on.” When families are unhappy, Jane collaborates with them, working in painstaking layers to adjust color, contour, or texture until the decedent looks like themselves again.

Advances in the cosmetics industry have given morticians more sophisticated tools for restoration and, Jane believes, helped usher more women into mortuary school. “A lot of people [born] in the early 1990s and 2000s got into makeup because of social media and YouTube. When you get a cosmetics degree, you take special effects classes, and [mortuaries] started to get people that started in the cosmetics industry.” Zooming out to examine the trend overall, she repeats, “Not to be sexist or whatever, but women are compassionate, empathetic and their attention to detail is phenomenal. We just set the tone a lot differently for a funeral than a male does.”

When we step back to identify what tone men have set for the industry, we arrive back at the Mitfordian bogeyman of the corrupt American businessman, a character that has become the mascot of a larger problem Mitford diagnoses in the title of her book as the “American” way of death. “What exactly is the American way of death?” I ask. Lucy says, matter-of-factly, “The American way is to put them in a nursing home. [When] they die alone, [you] ship them to a funeral home, put them out, say hi, and put them away.” Jane concurs but adds some compassionate exposition: “The US is such an expensive place that a lot of people struggle to find a balance of caring for the elderly and high-stress jobs. Americans work 90 percent of the year.” With a marked decline in intergenerational living and the fact that 74 percent of Americans must continue to work past the age of 65, it is perhaps not only American self-centeredness that is to blame but also the conditions of life in the United States itself. This epidemic of neglect was put on full display during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“COVID was a blur,” Jane tells me. “We were working 16- to 18-hour days. I saw people that have been doing this for 20 years just fall apart.” With triple the workload, they quickly ran out of tables and coolers and had to rent space and equipment. “We use the same personal protective equipment as hospitals, but we were never given any resources. We even had to get the vaccine on our own. Hospitals and the coroner received aid, but the funeral homes and their staff were forgotten.” With a backlog of cases and decedents whose funerals were months out, embalmers had to improvise ways to preserve bodies for months instead of mere days. “It put us all to the test as morticians,” Jane explains. “We got to see how long our embalmings would last—that has never happened.” Viewings were limited to 10 minutes and only five or six people. When I ask if, post-pandemic, people are more interested in in-person rituals, she says, “We’re still seeing the remnants of no-contact. We have a high rate of direct burial, direct cremation—no viewing, none of that. People are becoming less attached to their loved ones and funeral practices.”

Jane’s description of the pandemic inevitably echoed another moment when patients and caregivers were abandoned by institutional support. During the HIV/AIDS crisis, queer people—particularly lesbians—stepped to the front lines to care for those whom hospitals, governments, and even families had abandoned. While the circumstances differed greatly, both pandemics revealed the same pattern: when institutions fail, care falls to those who see it as a moral responsibility, not merely a job. That ethic of care has long been cultivated within queer and marginalized communities, where people have often depended on networks of mutual support when formal institutions fell short.

To better understand that tradition of community-based deathcare, I spoke to Jordana Rosenfeld, a Pittsburgh native who works with the New Community Chevra Kadisha, a nondenominational Jewish burial society. They perform the ancient ritual of taharah—traditional washing of the body—as well as dressing the body in simple linen garments (tachrichim) and keeping watch over it until burial. Jordana joined in the aftermath of the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting, motivated by a desire to “displace images of violent Jewish death.” Since joining, she has seen an influx of young members of the group, particularly queer people. While the Chevra traditionally maintains separate men’s and women’s groups, they are now in the process of forming a queer group that might be able to serve trans and nonbinary community members. “Formal structures in deathcare often default to the biological family,” she explains. “If there’s any disjuncture or lack of acceptance, the people planning the funeral aren’t the ones who really knew that person.” Like Lucy and Jane, Jordana was shaped by early experiences with grief—she lost her mother when she was 13. She says, “When somebody dies, a lot of people disappear. It’s a lonely time. This is when people need people.”

Lucy, Jane, and Jordana work in very different corners of the deathcare world, but each describes the same impulse: to bring care where they found neglect. The funeral industry professionalized in the decades following the Civil War, when embalming became a widespread practice, used to transport fallen soldiers home. Before that, care for the dead was largely domestic labor performed by women. Mothers, daughters, and neighbors washed the body, prepared it for burial, and tended to the rituals of mourning. As Americans have become increasingly estranged from death, a new generation of morticians—disproportionately women and queer people—is quietly restoring deathcare as an intimate practice rather than a disembodied commercial service.

In every interview, when asked about the emotional toll of their constant proximity to death, each woman emphasized that they found it created a more radical engagement with life. “I take living very seriously. I try to do as much as I can. I just want to keep going until I can’t,” Jane tells me. Most of us were raised to believe that reminders of death were distasteful, simply bad manners. In a country that champions efficiency, growth, and tech that alleviates any suggestion of physical or intellectual discomfort, death is quite simply bad PR for the American project. As illness and need are the primary antagonists of bootstrapping American self-improvement, it is the non-laboring elderly that present the greatest threat to that mythmaking. “You can tell right away if a person was cared for,” Jane says of the elderly—the majority of decedents they receive. “Small things, even just the nails—are they trimmed? Clean? If they have a bedsore, it means they haven’t been moved. Often we don’t get the full story, but it’s not our job to pry. We are here to treat everyone with dignity and respect. They become innocent in my eyes.” In a profession that’s largely invisible in daily life, morticians encounter the culmination of neglect. Their work begins where everyone else’s has ended. When asked how she confronts what I can only assume is a huge, unnameable despair in those moments, she answers with a steady matter-of-factness: “I treat everyone as if they were my little babies. When I get them ready for cremation or embalming, they are my babies. All the way to the end.”

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Featured image: Thomas Greenhill, Illustration from Nekrokēdeia: or, the Art of Embalming, 1705, is in the public domain. Accessed October 23, 2026. Image has been cropped.