A Noble Undertaking
11/5/2008 | | The U's first class of embalmers, from 1908. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE MORTUARY SCIENCE PROGRAM |
By John Rosengren
On a sunny Monday morning, a reporter talks into a TV camera on the campus of the University of Minnesota where a high-profile patient is being treated, making national headlines. But the news crew is oblivious to the fact that they’re overlooking an even bigger story of national note, right over their shoulders. The University’s mortuary science program—the first of its kind in the United States and one of the top in the nation—turns 100 this November.
While the reporter does another take outside instructor Jody LaCourt’s classroom window, the students in her Restorative Arts class quietly go about their work on life-size rubber heads, repairing simulated injuries to the flesh. They use tools and their fingers to restore the misshapen features with sculpting clay. “If you don’t recreate the wrinkles and lines around the mouth, the family will notice something’s different,” LaCourt (B.S. ’96) says. “We try to get it right the first time, because there are no do-overs in funeral service.”
The lab provides a hands-on application of the anatomy the students have learned from textbooks and lectures. It’s also preparation for the embalming lab, where they’ll work with mortuary wax on human cadavers. Most important, it’s preparation for the work they’ll do after graduation.
It’s serious work, but that doesn’t mean it has to be grim. LaCourt, a licensed funeral director, uses humor to lighten the mood and instruct. She cracks that a certain disfigured mask looks like “a bulldozer fell on him” and reminds students that just because their fingers can fit in the heads’ noses doesn’t mean they should shape the nostrils that large. “If you’re serious all the time, it takes the fun out of learning,” LaCourt says, while also impressing upon her students the need to be tactful. “I encourage humor, because in the death business you have to have a little humor—otherwise it would be a very drab and uncomfortable profession.”
Preparing the dead is the core of funeral service; caring for the living—often by carrying out the deceased’s wishes—is at the heart of the funeral director’s job. The U’s mortuary science program emphasizes that distinction in its mission to prepare graduates “to serve bereaved members of their communities in a manner that is proficient, dignified, and caring.” Students quickly catch on. “The funeral is for the living, not the deceased,” says Robin Butter, 23, a senior from St. Cloud. “It’s going to be an everlasting memory for the family, part of the mourning process that will help them move on.”
Butter did not grow up dreaming of becoming a mortician, or funeral director (the terms are interchangeable and preferred over the dated undertaker); she originally wanted to be a family physician. She enrolled in premed studies at St. Cloud State University and shadowed a physician but couldn’t see herself enduring the repetition of dispensing five-minute diagnoses day after day. At the urging of her father—whose own father had been a mortician—she volunteered at a funeral home and realized that funeral service would play to her strengths as a people person, allowing her to spend more time with individual families. Drawn to the idea that she could “actually make a difference and help someone,” Butter transferred to the University. Her decision was reinforced by the tearful hugs people gave her after funerals she helped plan during her two-month clinical rotation. “They thanked me for what I did,” she says. “That’s the kind of payment I’m looking for.”
In the United States in the early 1900s, the funeral business was loosely run. The undertaker was likely the furniture maker who built coffins and had a side chapel for funerals attached to his store. He learned embalming methods from traveling salesmen peddling the chemicals, first arsenic and later formaldehyde.
Embalming is an ancient practice. But from the introduction of contemporary embalming, which allowed the bodies of fallen Civil War soldiers to be preserved and returned home for burial, there were no rules or regulations until the end of the 19th century. Undertakers labored under the stereotype Mark Twain describes in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that of the silent man “who slid around in black gloves and his softly soothering ways . . . the softest, glidingest, stealthiest man I ever see; and there warn’t no more smile to him than there is to a ham.”
Wanting to raise industry standards and improve their professional image, a group of local undertakers proposed a six-week course of study at the University of Minnesota. In the fall of 1908, Frank Wesbrook, dean of the College of Medicine and Surgery, approved the School of Embalming in the medical college, making the University of Minnesota the first state university in the country to organize a mortuary science program.
During its first 50 years, the U’s program grew from a six-week to a 36-week course, then, in 1951, became a two-year curriculum conferring an associate degree in mortuary science. That expanded to a three-year program in 1955 and eventually to the current four-year bachelor’s degree with the mortuary science major in 1968. It remains the only program housed in a medical school that awards bachelor’s degrees in mortuary science. It’s the only mortuary science program in the Big Ten and the only college program in the state. In fact, 86 percent of the funeral directors in Minnesota are University alumni.
One hundred years after its inception, the University’s mortuary science program has flourished into one of the nation’s best. It places students in two-month clinical rotations at any of 50 funeral homes around the state; at many other programs, students must make their own arrangements for clinical study. The U’s students learn embalming in one of the country’s top facilities after a recent remodel; most schools do not even have embalming labs. Through the Medical School’s anatomy bequest program, students are able to work on human cadavers—another aspect of study not all programs offer.
The mortuary science program’s affiliation with the Medical School sets it apart. And being part of the Academic Health Center allows for unique collaborations. At the moment, the mortuary science program is working with the School of Dentistry to find a way to remove dental fillings from the deceased before cremation to prevent mercury contamination of groundwater. The two programs are aligned in their philosophy of care. “I’ve thought of it as a continuum of care,” says Michael LuBrant, director of the program of mortuary science who speaks in a lecture hall voice seated at a table in his office. “We’re the only school that offers neonatal to end-of-life care—from the womb to tomb. The care of human bodies doesn’t end with death. The focus of physicians is to do all they can to prolong life, yet there comes a time when life ends. That’s when there has to be a trained professional there who can step up. We do that.”
After graduation, students must pass a national exam and be licensed by the state where they intend to practice. LuBrant measures the program’s success by its low attrition and high placement rates. A student or two may drop out of the program each year, but every student who has completed the program since 2004 has found work in funeral service. “That speaks to the quality of what we’re able to do,” LuBrant says. “They complete the program and are employable.”
Alumni credit the program for their success. Bob Dowson (B.S. ’86), market director of operations for Service Corporation International in California, has worked on the funeral service for U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, Senator Lloyd Bentsen, Vice Admiral James Stockdale, and Representative G.V. Montgomery. He was named the program’s Alumnus of the Year in 2007. “Going to the U set me up for my career,” Dowson says. “They teach students to treat each client family as if they’re your own, like the Golden Rule. They really send that home: to create your business around integrity and honesty and that if you follow that, you’ll be successful.”
Leo Hodroff (’37), the program’s 2008 Alumnus of the Year, thought so highly of the program that he recently made the nation’s largest donation to a mortuary science program. His $200,000 gift will be used to set up a scholarship that—with the help of funding from the President’s Scholarship Match—will be the country’s first to provide a full ride to a new mortuary science student every two years. And this past May, William McReavy (’52), owner of Washburn-McReavy Funeral Chapels, and his family made a major gift in the spring of 2008 to create the William L. McReavy Teaching Center, an innovative space for teaching the skills necessary for making effective and meaningful funeral arrangements.
Butter, who wears a small gold cross necklace and likes to shoot hoops or watch movies when she’s not studying, is fairly representative of the 30 students admitted each fall to the U’s two-year mortuary science program from a field of more than 70 applicants. They have already completed prerequisites in biology and chemistry in addition to courses in accounting and public speaking—necessary skills for funeral directors, many of whom run their own business and are looked to as community leaders. About two-thirds of the students are from Minnesota. Others come from North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Montana, and New Jersey. About 20 percent come from families involved in funeral service. Many, like Butter, say they were drawn to the profession as a sort of vocation, driven by the desire to help people in a time of need.
As a woman, Butter represents a major shift in mortuary science programs across the country. When the U established its program in 1908, mortuary science was a man’s domain. Forty years ago, Mike Mathews (B.S. ’69), an instructor in the U’s program since 1976, had one woman in his class at the U. When Jody LaCourt graduated from the U’s program 12 years ago, men still made up 60 percent of the class. Today, more than half—about 55 percent—of the mortuary science students at the U and nationwide are women. That’s in line with the percentage of women enrolled in college.
In that respect, funeral service has come full circle. Caring for the dead used to be women’s work. Prior to the Civil War, men built coffins and dug graves; women dressed and prepared the bodies. With the advent of embalming practices during the 1860s and funeral services in the 1880s, men took over the duties women had performed. Prejudices against women in funeral service are eroding, as they are in other formerly male-dominated professions. Mathews remembers people telling the lone woman in his 1969 graduating class that she would not be able to find a job in funeral service. Now, he says funeral homes ask him to recommend women. “The roadblocks have come down,” Mathews says. “Gender is not significant any more.”
Almost every aspect of the industry has evolved over the past century. The changing demographics of Minnesota over the past few decades have transformed the local funeral industry. In the Hmong culture, for instance, wakes last three days with burials on a Monday morning. For Muslims, burial is preferred on the same day as death, without embalming the body.
The U has adapted its program to prepare students for the changing field. It recently added a course on the diversity of cultural attitudes toward death taught by an ordained minister. “Things have changed,” says the Reverend Gloria Roach Thomas, senior pastor at Camphor Memorial United Methodist Church in St. Paul, who teaches Death and Dying Across Cultures and Religions at the U. “When we look at all those rituals, it is important that we can be culturally competent, aware of new trends and new groups, so we can provide cultural sensitivity and respectful funeral service.”
For example, a funeral director may remove a body from a hospital or home and take it to a mosque to be cleaned and dressed by the family and religious leaders, then return to transfer the body to the site of the funeral ritual. Or certain religious and ethnic traditions may dictate that women not be present at specific junctures in working with the dead. “We talk about that, that this is not personal but that we are in a traditionally male role,” Thomas says.
A funeral director may also be called upon to help cultures find alternative ways of carrying out rituals such as sacrificing animals, a funeral rite the Hmong practiced in their former countries, or firing guns. “It’s a collaboration and a partnership,” Thomas says. “That in itself is a new way of working and thinking.”
Thomas introduces her students to those new ways of working and thinking through guest speakers from various cultures and religions, as well as visits to a Hmong funeral home and a Somali funeral. “That helps them develop sustainable cross-cultural competency skills as funeral directors and develop methods of thinking more globally in order to provide appropriate, respectful funeral services,” Thomas says.
Cremation is rapidly gaining popularity in the United States and has presented the biggest change in funeral service in the past 50 years. In 2008, 42 percent of Minnesotans who died were cremated, up from less than 2 percent in 1961. LuBrant believes that in coming decades, advancing technologies will be the most significant transforming agent in funeral service. He points to scientists in Sweden working on a process that removes fluid from the body and to the Mayo Clinic experimenting with “resomation,” a process that reduces the body to ash by heating it in water. He’s also seeing a trend toward eco-friendly burials—where bodies are interred in biodegradable caskets, shrouds, or blankets without embalming or concrete vaults. Several green cemeteries have already been established in the United States.
The constant along with death will be the way that society turns to funeral directors to guide them in the way they honor the dead. “Anything that has been around 100 years endures that long because it has meaning,” LuBrant says of the U’s program. “That speaks to the fact that there is a need for what we do.”
Three students linger in the Restorative Arts classroom. They understand what it means to be studying mortuary science in ways their friends and families don’t. Friends joke, “pretty lively in there today?” says Jim Boulger, a 23-year-old senior from Fargo, North Dakota. Some female students recoil when he answers their question, “What’s your major?” “Morticians aren’t exactly seen as chick magnets,” he says. “I agree it’s a weird profession.”
It took them awhile to adjust to it themselves. “Nobody’s comfortable on day one of embalming lab,” LaCourt says. Yet, acquiring ease with the unusual physical and emotional demands of funeral service has been a necessary part of their preparation.
“Now it does feel normal to walk into a room with a dead body there,” says Nicole Henke, a 22-year-old senior from Beulah, North Dakota.
The work of the mortuary science major—preparing bodies and working with newly grieving families—is more emotionally involved than studying economic theory or analyzing the role of women in Shakespeare. Their coursework stretches the understanding of their friends and families. In a phone call home, Boulger told his parents about a class field trip. “We went to a cemetery that was really cool,” Boulger recalls. “They said, ‘OK. . . .’ They didn’t really want to know. They can’t relate.”
So the students turn to each another for understanding and support. They empathize with mistakes such as putting the wrong clothes on someone or the challenge of restoring the body of someone killed in a car accident. “It’s important for the students to tell their stories,” LaCourt says. “But it isn’t appropriate to discuss private details with their families or other students at a bar. We stress in class: Say this happened to your family member, would you want others to be talking about it outside?”
So the students of the program in mortuary science learn to lean on one another, maintain a low profile, and be ready when called upon.
John Rosengren is a Minneapolis-based freelance writer.
 | | | |  | | Funereal Ephemera | | In honor of the mortuary science program’s 100th anniversary, an exhibit of historical items will be on display in the University’s Owen H. Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine. Objects include pallbearers’ ribbons, trade books, embalming equipment, and other funeral industry artifacts and rare books. Many of the items were donated to the University by alumni, including Terry Lamon (’64) and William McReavy (’52), or are on loan from funeral homes in Minnesota. The exhibition—“Respecting the Dead, Comforting the Living: A Perspective on the Funeral Profession and Mourning in America”—runs through December 15 at the Wangensteen library, Fifth Floor, Diehl Hall, 505 Essex St. SE, on the East Bank of the Minneapolis campus; 612-626-6881, www.wangensteen.lib.umn.edu.
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