I have been trying to go back to college for 12 years. I even worked at a state university, but I could never afford to do more than audit a class here and there. This is about my long up-hill slog to reach the place where I am now. It's the third highest place in my personal life (the first two being the births of my son and daughter), but it is the highest point to date in my professional life.

So, I think in all honesty, the completion for this task actually started in 2003. That was the year I got laid off from a very boring job as a CSR for a company that did customer satisfaction surveys for places like Honda, Acura, Johnsonville Sausage, etc. You know those numbers on the packages that say 'For Questions or Comments Please Call 1-800-555-5555'? Well, that was us. My boss had big-fish-in-little-pond syndrome, to the point where she tried to tell me I couldn't have my CorpGoth mouse pad at my desk under the rule of 'No religious iconography'. This on top of her favorites having crosses, Bibles, and crucifixes hanging at their desks. I ended up having to go to the HR person to show them the mouse pad, show them CorpGoth, explain was it was and have him tell her to lay off. Either way, the company decided to close our location by way of our lease was up 3 days before any other center in the company. As a result, they brought in people from the city to explain a program that would allow us to go back to school on the cities dime because we were laid off.

During the meeting I was looking through the list of offered programs, and one of them caught my attention, Funeral Science. I asked the guy if this was really a course offered by MATC, and he got flustered. I don't think anyone had ever asked him about that particular course before, and he didn't know how to answer. Either way, I applied and got accepted, even though my case worker kept trying to dissuade me from the course under the idea that it was actually a 3 year program so technically it wasn't valid. I told her fine, pay for the first two years and I'll figure out the rest.

I ended up finishing my Associates in Applied Sciences in a year and a half by dint of taking lots of weekend and night courses, and CLEP testing out of several other courses. By the time I actually reached the year of Funeral Science I was paying for things by Pell grants and government student loans.

I didn't get along with the majority of my classmates or either of my teachers. I think that coming into class with blue hair and occasionally bringing in my bass in its coffin case probably didn't help. Most of my classmates were from small towns in upstate Wisconsin where their families had been running *the* funeral home for 100 years. Me, on the other hand, was coming into this as a 3rd career and was, quite frankly, a freak of the type that they had heard of and possibly seen on TV but had never encountered in real life. Most of them thought that the fact that they were in the 'big city' of Milwaukee was amazing, and they would talk about that one time that they had gone to Chicago when they were 10 with awe. And here I am talking about the 6 months I spend biking through Brazil, the year I spent living in Australia, or the years I spent in Ireland and England, not to mention the other US places I had lived. Frankly I think most of them thought I was a bald-faced liar because it was beyond their comprehension that someone could have done these things and gone to these places.



Plus, I would constantly argue with my teachers about various things like the fact that grief is not the only response to death. I felt that I was paying their salaries, so it was encumbent on my to pay attention, learn, and ask questions, and it was their duty to teach me and answer. The other pagan in class (who was one of the three people I was friends with and still am in contact with) and I petitioned the NFDA to change the definition of pagan to reflect the modern religion, as opposed to 'Ancient forest dwellers with no belief in any religion.' We won, but that set me (and her) further apart from our classmates. I made it through the year of schooling eventually, with friends helping me pay my rent, bills, and school fees that either I or the government loans couldn't cover.

During this entire time I was also working full time, moved twice, dealing with the fact that the majority of my classmates were 5-10 years younger than me, and I was playing bass in a band. I eventually quit my job and went to work for the worst funeral home in the Milwaukee metro area. It was run by a father and son that were racist, bigoted, and mysoganistic. Conversations would ensue that started with things like 'So, would you ever f*ck a n***** b*tch?' followed by a listing of the races it was OK to sleep with and in what order. I became a very not nice person in that time period because of all the stress. I eventually left there and found a job with a very nice Black funeral home that was a few blocks from my house in time for my summer internship. I hired on there with the understanding that it was only for the summer, which I was fine with.

Once I completed my summer internship I was officially graduated but not yet a licensed Funeral Director / Embalmer (Mortician). I had been offered a job at a Chicago Funeral Home, so once I had completed everything for my schooling I packed up my house and moved to Chicago. I had been driving to Chicago once or twice a week for years at this point, in part because the band I was in was based there, but mainly because that's where my boyfriend lived. A (then) acquaintance offered to help me out and let me live the garden apartment in his building for reduced rent (I had to pay back the difference of full rent when I could) until I got a full-time job. So, with housing and job taken care of I moved, thinking that everything was right in my world.

When I got to Chicago the funeral home that had offered me a job dicked me around for the better part of 4 months, telling me to come in to take care of paperwork, and then when I did buying me lunch and telling me that we would take care of everything next time. This culminated in one day when the Funeral Director told me to be there at 7am (something I verified with him several times during the conversation. I got there at 6:50am, and proceeded to sit there until the money guy showed up at 10am. He asked me what I was doing there, and I told him that the FD had told me to be there at 7am. He responded that he didn't know why he would have said that since he wasn't going to be there until 11am. I figured at that point another hour wouldn't make much of a difference if this was going to be the day everything was finally going to start. The FD showed up at 11:30am, asked me what I was doing there, insisted that he had told me to be there at 11am, and then told me to go hang out with the casket guy while he took care of some stuff. Around 1pm he came down and said that he had to go do some things but that he would be back at 3pm and we could talk then. At this point I was extremely fed up, so I told him to call me when he actually wanted me to be there and went home. That was 2006 and I haven't heard from him since.

A friend of my boyfriends eventually got me a job at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which helped pay the bills a little, but I was mostly surviving on money loaned to me by my boyfriend and other friends. During this time I interviewed with many funeral homes and crematoriums, and either got led on and then ignored, told that they would hire me if I was union, or if I was already licensed, or if I had gone to school in Chicago, or turned down completely flat. I swear that at one point I had 'Welcome' permanently embedded in my forehead from all the doors slammed in my face. After a year I gave up looking and found a job at a dog groomers as a dog washer.

Shortly after I got fired from that job for taking a vacation that I had been given time off to take, a colleague of the friend that got me a job at SAIC called me. She had introduced me to him when I was still in school since he was a funeral director and ran an anatomy lab at a university in Chicago. He kept up with me throughout my schooling, seeing how I was doing and offering advice. He called me to ask if I wanted to work with him and be his apprentice if he took on this job at a body donation facility. I said sure, and then promptly forgot about the conversation since I had long since decided that I had a useless degree and would never find a job in my field. A month later I got a call from a guy asking me to send him my resume and would I like to come in for an interview. I had sent out so many resumes, mostly for office positions, that I assumed that this was one of those and scheduled a time to go in. Imagine my surprise when I got there and the FD that I had been in contact with over the years was there. I was interviewed, given a tour, and at the end asked when I could start. I flippantly replied that I could start the next day, to which they replied 'Great! Be here at 8am.' You could have knocked me over with a feather. I filled out all of the application paperwork right then and there.

There was a lot of work to be done, as the people who had been working there previously had left the place in ruins and with absolutely no organization. I cleaned the place, organized it, created databases for tracking, etc., all the while becoming the FD's apprentice and learning the ins and outs of embalming for medical dissection and how to run the back of a place like this. I also worked weekends at a funeral home to complete the other half of my requirements for licensing and continued to work at SAIC.



To complete my apprenticeship and obtain my license I needed, in the course of a year, to work 24 funerals/arrangements and perform 24 embalmings.



In the course of that year I worked at 24 funerals/arrangements, and embalmed 234 cadavers, give or take a few. And that year was no picnic. I learned very quickly that the FD that had been so nice to me in school was in fact a petty tyrant who was extremely paranoid, tried to make me think that everyone was against me and that he was my only ally here, and when I refused to turn myself into a perfect carbon copy of him or believe his paranoia turned against me and has done everything in his power to make my life miserable, up to and including contradicting himself on a daily basis, forcing me to write a daily log tattling on what everyone else in the office is doing and saying, insulting me about my lifestyle and appearance, and threatening to fire me regularly. As an example, the day after I injured my shoulder and was in a sling he threatened to fire me if I didn't remove brains from the cadavers that had been embalmed the day before. When I pointed out that I was in a sling, he told me that I could do it one handed or pack my things. When I got hit by the car and was on crutches he insisted that I stand for hours on end embalming and that I push around tables with bodies on them. In both cases he told me flat out that both instances were purely my fault and/or that I was faking to get sympathy and get out of work, which he wasn't going to let me do.



All in all it was a year from hell. But as of January 28th, 2009, all of that is over. As of January 28th, I am a licensed Funeral Director / Embalmer in the state of Illinois, so he no longer has any power over me.

There are many people that during this time period have supported me, paid my bills and rent, showed up at my door with food, fed me at their own homes, took me out to shows, bars, to go dancing or just generally have fun, let me vent, cry, and sometimes just be a flat-out bitch, and for some God awful reason put up with me and didn't walk away when I honestly wouldn't have blamed them if they had.

So, to Andy, Caias, Reuben, and Cris, this is for you. I know I will never be able to pay you back for everything you four have done for me, but I hope this makes all that you have suffered through for and because of me a little bit worth it.