“SOMETIMES you got to do it all yourself,” said Doris V. Amen late one recent weeknight as she hopped up onto the back of her hearse, clamped her high-heeled pumps onto the back bumper and yanked a stubborn corpse on a stretcher out onto a windswept Brooklyn street.

She wheeled the body into the embalmer’s office and left it next to a pair of unclothed waxy bodies stitched up like handbags. Then she headed back to the Jurek-Park Slope Funeral Home, where she is the funeral director.

Ms. Amen — yes, it is her surname, pronounced like laymen — bought the business in 1989 from a Polish family. Her clientele is still largely Polish, though she is not.

“Italian, but Brooklyn, born and raised,” she said, sitting in her tiny office, which is full of memorabilia and which rumbles every time the R train goes by.