Blast - Cosmetologist to the afterlife

“I’m a big fan of blush. This right here is my secret,” the young man says, pulling out a small, circular tin from a cosmetics tray. “A little bit of this, just dab it on, it really adds a lot,” he says, running a large powder brush across the top of his hand.

In a tidy pinstriped suit, bright-blue shirt and golden geometric tie, this 24-year-old with long hair and light chin fuzz could be a grandson of the older woman resting inside the casket. But Tyler Pray is actually a young funeral director, the one who arranged this small service on behalf of an estranged sister who wanted to bury her broken relationship as soon as possible.

With the collar popped on his black trench coat, Tyler grasps a silver bar affixed along the side of a gray container. His father and grandfather help march it out a back door, balancing the weight within.

The three generations of Pray men stand in as pallbearers and family for the petite woman who spent her last few years in a wheelchair. Under soft, pink lighting, she appears asleep in such an unnatural position – hands crossed in front and glasses shielding her closed eyes. An assistant cranks the casket closed and the woman’s body slowly tilts back into place, her stiff, clasped hands freeze in the air as if reaching for one last handshake. The men lift her closed casket into a black hearse. Only 10 people show for the funeral. Two attend the burial.

Still, Tyler makes sure she looks great. He sets her hair in neat curls, dresses her in a stylish leopard-print blouse and brings her pale skin back to its natural glow. It’s a chance to do something for her that she can no longer do for herself.

“It doesn’t do anything to my skin, really, but something that’s really pale, like, look at our hands. They’re red. They’re fleshy. It just makes it look like there’s blood flowing through there again. Not that they’re alive, but just a more natural appearance.”

He flips the blush case over. “Oh god. This is so cheesy,” he says. “This is called Sparkling Wine.”

Reputation is important, not only in the bereavement business, but in this small community. The Pray family handles roughly 150 deaths each year in Charlotte, a town of 8,300 near Michigan’s capital of Lansing. Blunders in this small place don’t go unnoticed.

“I don’t want to put too much red on somebody … if they didn’t wear red lipstick,” Tyler says. “Same as with a man. I want to put color on his lips but look at my lips. They’re a pretty red. And I’m a guy not wearing any makeup.

“When I first introduce people to their person in the casket, a lot of times I’ll kind of read and listen to them, ask them if everything’s OK. And people say, “God she looks terrible. There’s too much red on her.’”

Families suffer the most intense episodes when they enter the home and see their deceased for the first time, he says. They hug and cry uncontrollably; some collapse. But that’s how they deal. And sometimes, the Prays are all that families have. Tyler is most proud when someone says their dead relative – not breathing, laughing, smiling like they once did – looks good.

“People who don’t get a chance to have this final moment always seem to be disconnected with what’s really happening,” he says. “Like it’s not true. Like they’re going to come home tomorrow. But they’re not.”

Tyler walks all of 60 feet to work through a back alley from an old, gray colonial, one of three houses the family owns. It’s a prime location for a job with no set schedule. And he’s made it a hub for his creativity. He stands at the kitchen table flipping through some poetry publications that arrived in the mail today. In another room, a guitar stands upright on display and an old typewriter rests on his desk, both ways for Tyler to turn out inspiration. He’s particular about his feng shui, too, demonstrating how the mounted flat panel TV looks cleaner when the DVD rack isn’t directly underneath. He says the spacious apartment is a peaceful getaway from the extreme hours next door.

But the schedule is nothing new. His mother spent her first Christmas as a Pray without Tyler’s father, who was busy preparing three funerals.

Tyler’s day often begins with a 2 a.m. phone call. He rolls out from under the covers and suits up in a small walk-in closet he calls the “Bat Cave.” Here, he selects a suit from a row of 12 (two are his and the rest are his father’s hand-me-downs), then grabs a shirt from the color-coded array, a belt, and either funeral or cemetery shoes, depending on the occasion. He says he’d “totally love” to be in a Charlotte Most Eligible Bachelor contest one day.

“Funeral directors who always wear black give us a weird name,” Tyler says.

From the tacky “On Eagle’s Wings” muzak playing throughout the funeral home to the wall colors and decor in his own bachelor pad, Tyler cares about details and presentation. But his boyish looks fool many who make arrangements. “You don’t look like a funeral director,” they often remark. Despite his professional appearance and calm phone voice, Tyler is still young. The “cools,” “awesomes,” and six empty Labatt Blue Lights in his kitchen sink prove it. But inside a small diner at lunch, he explains why he’s as cautious as a local politician or celebrity when he’s out in Charlotte, for the sake of the family name. One drunken escapade or slip of the tongue could send families who’ve trusted Pray on Seminary Street for years to the rival funeral home only two blocks away.

Tyler runs everything with his dad, Joe – a slender 49-year-old with swooping hair, tan skin and looks that could land him a modeling gig in a department store catalog. Tyler and his father share the same radiant blue eyes, obsession with details and passion as caregivers – for both the living and the dead.

Standing outside a preparation room, Tyler reaches for a golden door handle. This staging area feels like a junky garage, contrasting the serene, homey visitation room nearby. It’s where they store the tools, keys to the limo, the hearse, the vans, and freshly delivered flowers. It’s the green room of the afterlife business. Wooden cupboards line the ceiling and two brown doors are marked with “Do not enter” placards. A bleach stench permeates everything. The last body had a contagious infection that was resistant to antibiotics, so Tyler scrubbed down everything - even more than usual - to avoid anything spreading to employees and guests.

This is the embalming room. Its entrance isn’t as jarring as expected; no bodies, just equipment. Two gurneys sit pushed against a wall – one is wrapped in a red, white and blue quilt and the other in a plush, forest green blanket with “Pray” stitched in gold on the side. Tyler prefers the quilt. The other one, he says, is too “territorial.”

He walks into the back room. It’s a spacious, surgical-like area, dimly lit by natural light peering through small windows. Light-blue hospital gowns hang behind the door and a cabinet stocked with rubber gloves and goggles stands near the entrance. A sink station hugs the back wall next to a long, porcelain table. A fluorescent light dangles above the white slab where two thick tubes – one orange, the other clear – slither to the table’s end and into a regular household toilet. They connect to the body’s main vein and artery in the neck, sending blood out one tube and a light-pink embalming fluid in its place. Fans above swap air every minute to reduce the formaldehyde, which is a carcinogen.

“It’s really pretty unremarkable, wouldn’t you say?” Tyler says, looking around. “I don’t know what people think is in the embalming room, like saws and who knows. People get some wild ideas.”

Preserving the dead goes back to ancient Egypt, when bodies were covered with salt from the desert to absorb moisture, essentially creating a dehydrated cadaver, says Jason Meyers, curator of the Museum of Funeral Customs in Springfield, Ill.

Embalming was introduced to the United States in 1840 and became commonplace during the Civil War, when bodies were prepared for the long trip home. Before the procedure, burials were so quick that no one even bothered with cosmetics. Abraham Lincoln’s funeral is the first documented case in the country that involved makeup. Attendants touched up his skin with paint to hide bruises that surfaced as he stopped at several cities on the way to Springfield. Today, restorative art is especially important after accidents or diseases that damage recognizable facial features.

So far, Tyler hasn’t had a friend or family member staring up from the table. He hasn’t painted their colorless skin, sewed their mouth shut, dressed them in their favorite outfit or played their favorite rock song. He’s been fortunate enough not to lose anyone close except his great-grandfather years ago. He is remarkably caring toward others for someone who has not experienced a similar loss himself.

Maybe growing up with the business helped. His grandparents live next door to the funeral home and Tyler spent his childhood in a white house across the street. Tyler’s great-great-grandfather and great-grandfather originally bought a furniture and undertaking business in downtown Charlotte nearly 90 years ago. They sold furniture in the front and embalmed bodies in the back, transporting them for services to a rearranged living room at home for ten years. Then, the family purchased a house that doubled as quarters for both the living and the dead until 1949, when the current funeral home went up next door, blending perfectly into the historic neighborhood. It’s been expanded and remodeled throughout the years, in keeping with tradition and new health and safety standards.

Grandpa comes out of retirement almost every day to help with embalmings, arrangements, lifting, driving, etc. Fresh pipe smoke lingers in his office, decked in retro olives, oranges and browns. Visitors usually see only the renovated rooms in the home, sandwiched between this old apartment-turned-office space above and the basement that serve as family time capsules. Mementos stacked to the rafters also form a funeral business timeline. Dark, gothic-inspired furniture, dusty antique bibles, a worn podium, an old-fashioned gurney, and several generations of computers are stashed tightly in the basement, pushed down by modern décor in clean beiges and mauves.

Sometimes Tyler comes upstairs and gazes out the window at the park. It’s where his father played catch with him between services, still clad in his funeral best.
“Our kids used to say, ‘Where’s daddy?’” says Lori Pray, Tyler’s mom. “I’d say, ‘Well someone’s family needs daddy more right now,’”

Tyler insists he had a normal childhood. He attended funerals once in a while, but his life wasn’t about death. His father, on the other hand, used to sneak downstairs with cousins and look at the casket displays. The boys shut off the lights and the girls screamed. Grandpa always waited upstairs with a paddle in hand.

Joe sometimes tries to lighten the mood by telling families that story while they shop for a casket. “Now I promise I’ll leave all the lights on,” he says before leaving the room. The Prays use a lot of subtle humor around here, but not everyone gets it. Some people are so “dead serious - no pun intended,” Joe quips.

One year, a new hearse was delivered on the same day as Tyler’s first birthday party. Rather than hiding it in the garage, the Prays took the children and their families on rides around the block. They don’t believe in covering up what they do; rather, they speak openly about it. Joe purposely bought a hearse with a clear back window to remind passers-by that a procession isn’t just a stream of cars with special road privileges - it honors someone who died.

“Sometimes I feel weird about what we do. Like, are we really necessary? I question that all the time,” Tyler says. “Do we really need to do all this stuff? And I feel like yes, something needs to be done. But it can’t be the same thing for every person.”

The sister at today’s funeral shows little emotion before the service. The women hadn’t been close for years. But after the pastor finishes speaking and the woman sees her sibling one last time, she walks out frail and confused, blotting her eyes with a crumpled tissue.

“Yes, we should have contact with our dead, meaning we should see them, touch them, if we want to,” Tyler continues. “And also we should have the right to choose to do whatever we want to do that’s going to help us understand, help us feel better, and help us grieve. And of course we’re not going to know exactly what we want to do but we might have ideas. A funeral director should be able to help people put that together.”

These days, it’s all about “personalization,” which Tyler calls a bullshit catchphrase. He enjoys providing more options, but he hates being a salesman. “Funeral directors are crappy, crappy business people,” he says.

High costs and the peddling of unnecessary knickknacks have pigeonholed funeral directors as wealthy individuals profiting on others’ grief, which those in the business say is the biggest misconception. The small showroom hidden in the Pray basement has an extensive selection of grieving gadgets and death furniture. In fact, it looks like a furniture store’s mattress section with rows of fluffy pillows and warm, cotton-stuffed comforters – different sizes, shapes, colors and prices. A company even introduced a larger casket line called “Dimensions” for its sizable clients.

An average funeral can cost more than $6,500, not including cemetery charges. Joe agrees that’s too expensive, but what part should he scrub? Today, people want to tailor their final celebration as much as possible, especially if they’re cremated. About 32 percent of Americans who died in 2005 chose cremation, and more than half are expected to opt for it in 20 years.

You can wear your dead aunt’s final thumbprint as a necklace, or replace removable casket corners with golf or kitty plaques to give the final sofa a dash of character. They can mix your ashes with a cement chunk called an Eternal Reef; drop it to the ocean floor and you are forever bonded with the sea. They can even keep you in a painting by mixing colors with ashes, literally putting the remains of you in your likeness.

“We can put you in a candle. We can put you in an eagle,” says Tyler as he examines a display cabinet.

A hunter’s family replaces flowery pictures with moose heads mounted above a camouflage casket. Bikers roll in a display Harley for visitation, and roll out in a motorcycle gas tank urn called “Rider’s Last Ride.” As more people accept cremation, the industry is even developing new ways to turn the dead to dust. Sweden is even considering a method called “promession,” which some scientists claim saves the environment from burning fuels. Bodies are soaked in liquid nitrogen and vibrations shatter them to pieces.

Even with all the extras to spruce up funerals, a director’s starting salary is on a par with new teachers, averaging between $25,000 and $30,000 during the last decade, according to the American Board of Funeral Service Education, and the median annual income is about $49,000. People often forget the overhead that comes with running a home, Joe says. Cars, heating, cleaning, supplies and more, not including the breaks given to those who can’t afford basic funerals, pile up on top of running his own family dwelling. He says he’s happy they don’t have to answer to public shareholders’ demands to increase earnings. Families or small private companies still hold the majority of U.S. funeral homes while public corporations own only about 11 percent, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. But creative advertising doesn’t lure customers; they call when they have to.

Ninety miles away in Detroit, associate professor Peter Frade walks the halls where Tyler and family learned their craft: preserving bodies, sculpting faces, making up features and selling death. The former mental institution at Wayne State University is Michigan’s only mortuary science school, one of 56 nationwide. With his animated personality and perky bow tie, it’s hard to believe Frade teaches about such a grim subject. But he grew up around it, too. His brother has been in the funeral business for 45 years.

“I’m very comfortable in cemeteries,” says Frade, who bought a PT Cruiser because it resembles a mini hearse. “Maybe that makes me weird.”

In one classroom, an older woman’s face sits tilted on a laboratory table, her faux skin covered in an abnormal, bright-pink hue and surrounded by the gray ringlets of a long wig. A tall, wire shelf in the corner stores about a hundred green, foam heads tossed in like soccer balls in an equipment room. Along another wall, clay models are displayed in a row, each refined to match its creator’s face in a nearby photograph. A collage plasters the wall above with magazine cutouts of models, regular folks, and celebrities like Jay Leno and his famous pronounced chin.

Most mortuary students these days don’t grow up playing hide and seek in casket rooms or washing the family hearse. In fact, Tyler was the only legacy in his class of 30 students, which educators there say is normal today. Almost all his father’s classmates were from families nearly 30 years ago.

So what attracts newcomers into caring for the dead? Many have some form of unresolved loss in their lives; others were always curious, but thought people wouldn’t take them seriously for choosing a career in funeral service, says Frade, also the program’s director. “What can I say?” he says, “it turns people on.”

A large cooler serves as the school’s centerpiece, with three doors leading to an attached embalming room, autopsy observation and anatomy lab. Frade opens the heavy silver door, exposing several long, white objects stacked on metal trays, chilling at a cool 35 degrees. A single foot peeks out from its covering – the only visible flesh among dozens of bodies whose identities are concealed under plain white sheets.

Outside the main lecture hall hangs a plaque for the Restorative Art Award given out to each class. Tyler’s name is engraved under 2006, a few rows away from his dad who holds the 1979 title. Class composites lining a nearby wall show the growing diversity among the students. Today, half the graduates are women and there are more minorities, better mirroring their future clients, as death doesn’t discriminate between genders or ethnicities.

“In funeral service, you never get a second chance,” Frade says. “So first impressions, accuracy, sympathy, come first. And if they aren’t there, a grieving populace will see it.”
Tyler recalls the first funeral he arranged. He did everything taught in school, but as he cried during the eulogy, he learned that sometimes there’s also a little humanity involved.
“They’re going to have questions and they don’t want to talk to someone too distraught to answer,” he says. “At the same time, I don’t want to be so cold that people are turned off by that.”

As the procession pulls into the cemetery, a pickup truck with an attached shovel greets the hearse before leading it to the plot. Tyler is not happy with this performance.
“Look! There’s a backhoe driving around!” he says. “This is terrible.”

It’s all too mechanical, he explains with disappointment. Families often leave before the vault company manually cranks the casket six feet under, a backhoe swings the top on, and cemetery workers fill the grave.

“When someone in my family dies, I’ll be out there shoveling dirt,” Tyler says. “I want my suit to be nice and muddy when I’m done, maybe even ruined. But that’s just my opinion.”
Even though everyone encounters death at some point, it remains taboo. As Frade put it: “People don’t want to think about death. There’s too much to think about in life. When it happens it happens.”

Although the Prays say they are more comfortable with death than others, they will never become numb to grief. It will always be difficult entering a home, not knowing what might be inside, says Joe, who still lies awake at night thinking about how he can care for people properly.

But the Pray name might not last through a third generation. Tyler earned degrees in mortuary science and English, so he’s eager to travel and experiment with words and music for a while, and isn’t sure he will carry on the family business himself.

Joe says the home will always be part of this small town, even if Pray is removed from the sign out front, because families count on someone to be there. And Tyler says he will see to it that the business is preserved.

For now, he wants to live – he’s looking to dabble in acting and other artistic ventures like poetry. In a way he’s had a lot of practice already; each funeral service is a performance of its own where he tweaks lighting, music, makeup and follows certain stage directions. But once a week, he escapes Charlotte for a few hours, placing himself on the other side of the cosmetics as independent filmmakers near Detroit transform him into his latest part of a political campaign adviser.

“I needed something creative to do in mortuary school because it was kind of a drag sometimes,” he says. ” I might even get stabbed at the end of the movie.”

At least then he can plan his own funeral.

Claire Cummings is a freelance journalist in Michigan. Reach her at claire.cummings@gmail.com

In Culture, Enterprise Articles, Features, People on January 1, 2008 at 00:30 with with Popularity: 4% [?]

2 Responses to “Cosmetologist to the afterlife”

Mike on January 2nd, 2008 2:45 am

I’ve never been so interested in something I knew so little about. Excellent writing and a wry writer’s eye unveil a coolly inviting story that hums around in my head and clasps hands around my heart.
Nina K. on June 24th, 2008 5:00 pm

There is a name for someone that does dead peoples hair.

What is it it’s driving me crazy!!!!!

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