It’s a Wednesday morning like any other in a classroom on Manhattan’s West Side, and Lindsey Raymond is carefully molding pieces of wax in the shape of a nose. If it weren’t for the display of coffins and gravestones in the room next door, you’d think you were in an academy of fine arts. But this is the American Academy McAllister Institute (AAMI), New York’s oldest – and only – school for morticians.

Fittingly, Raymond, a 30-year-old from Maryland, studied art. But instead of pursuing a career as an artist she decided to follow her father’s footsteps and become a mortician. Now she’s using her talent in sculpture to help people recognize their loved ones in a casket and bid them goodbye. “I can actually say that my previous work is bleeding into a new one,” she says.

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People don’t come to New York to die. But every year, hundreds of students like Raymond do come to this (nearly) century-old institution from all over the United States to learn the art of taking care of the dead and their families. About 60% of them are female, something Raymond’s father would not have expected when he was studying to become a funeral home director in Louisville, Kentucky, 45 years ago. There wasn’t a single woman in his class. Today, he’s pleased Raymond decided to work with him.

Lindsey Raymond, former AAMI student

This shift in demographics is confirmed nationwide. According to the American Board of Funeral Service Education, there was a 30% increase in the number of female graduates in the funeral service sector from 1996 to 2016.

Raymond took most of her courses in funeral services online, then came to New York to attend two weeks of practical classes on site. Becoming a licensed funeral director requires earning a degree in mortuary science​. Graduates then take an exam​, tackle a 12-month apprenticeship in a funeral home an​d​ pass a state examination.

Raymond studied in order to be able to perform all the functions required of a funeral home director. From embalming and reconstructing bodies (they must not be simply restored and “beautified” but prepared to look “human”, the way their loved ones want to remember them) to techniques of cremation, to the characteristics of the different materials used for coffins and gravestones.

Left, bodies restoration tools. Right, Lindsey Raymond practices rebuilding a nose with plasticine during a nose restoration workshop

She and her classmates also learned how to organize various types of funeral services, constantly exercising two fundamental virtues: respect and irony.

“I like this job, and my friends are now used to it. But when it comes to dating, it can get a little weird,” Raymond says. “Until they downplay it, saying that one day they’ll need me.”

The profession of mortician appeals in particular to someone who wants to undertake a new career after working in nursing, social work, counseling and event planning. “It’s like event planning, but for funerals,” says Raymond. “I like the idea of helping people get through a difficult time, but I also like the creative component of my job.”

According to the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA), the two major new trends in funeral home service are the increasing number of cremations and more “personalized” service.

More and more people are not only asking for funerals according to different religious tradition, but also the hobbies and interests of the deceased.

“When I train my funeral directors, I ask them to take a good look at the living rooms of the family they’re talking to. Usually that’s where you can find hints about the loved one’s interests,” says Kurt Soffe, a NFDA member who runs a funeral home in a Salt Lake City suburb, in Utah. Recently, he and his staff had to wear Harley-Davidson leather jackets instead of dark suits for a biker’s funeral, and on another occasion they turned their funeral home into a museum of Yankee memorabilia, for a deceased Yankee fan who collected more than 200 items related to his favorite baseball team.

Embalming classroom

“Not long ago a client asked us to have the casket in a bar,” says Kendall Lindsay, a 31-year-old funeral director at a 90-year-old firm in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn. Her family is not new to the funeral business and AAMI. Leafing through the school’s yearbooks you’ll find her grandmother, Marguerite Thompson, the only woman to graduate in the class of March 1963. In the class of September 1978, Lindsay’s mother, Lynda Thompson, was among the 22 women in a class of more than 100 students. In 1993 class photo, you’ll find her aunt, and in the 2015 photo, her cousin. When Lindsay graduated from AAMI in December 2016, she was one of 14 female students in a class of 24.

Although Lindsay is now fully committed to what she does, finding it “emotionally and spiritually rewarding”, her path to this profession was not quite so linear.

After graduating from high school, she pursued her studies in communication, but then became pregnant. She started working in retail, doing a night shift at Nordstrom. That meant she could not take care of her baby the way she wanted to. “You can’t work in retail if you have a baby, I needed an adult job.” She eventually enrolled at AAMI, and began her career.

Working in a funeral home now seems almost natural to her, not only because she grew up in a family of morticians and got the story of the “goldfish and the funeral home at the same time”.

Different types of headstones at the casket showroom inside AAMI

It is something that resonates with her identity. “We African American women have always dealt with human remains in one capacity or another. In Africa we were responsible for cleaning the bodies, and in time of slavery, we were the ones who prepared the bodies for burial. This is nothing new for us,” she explains.

One of the things she finds most rewarding about her job is hearing stories from her clients. “Something that grandpa did, people joking over grandma’s recipe for a pie that no one is able to figure out … things like that.” For the African American community, “mourning is not a sad time per se. We don’t see it as the end, but as the beginning of something else.” What Lindsay likes is that “a family that’s mourning can still find something to laugh about”. After all, their loved one is now in a better place, “free from the ills of living, meaning taxes and bills, getting up, all the things that worry us”.

Yet the job is still a hard one, especially when it comes to serving low-income families who can barely afford the cost of being buried in New York City. “A grave in Brooklyn starts at $5,000 for one person, and that’s the lower end of the situation,” she says.

The challenges faced by Gloria Booker, another funeral home director who graduated from AAMI, are quite different. She lives and works in New Jersey, in an area where graves that can go for $524. When, in 2001, she and her husband opened their first funeral home in Garfield, New Jersey, they received an award for being the first black-owned business.

Gloria Booker, former McAllister student

Discrimination, in Booker’s experience, has to do more with gender than with income disparity and race. “A few months ago a funeral home director, a friend of ours, asked me if there were any promising funeral directors coming out of AAMI with me. I mentioned a colleague, a female, and he immediately cut me off and said no, he was looking for a male director.” It is, in Booker’s words “disheartening to see how hard it is for these young ladies to get a fair chance.” Even if women are now outnumbering men in funeral service schools, more than 70% of the people employed in this sector are men. Booker and her husband hire mostly women.

Born in New York City to Puerto Rican parents, Booker had a job in television advertising before pursuing her career as a mortician. After 16 years helping her husband in the office, she eventually decided it was time to get licensed in order to be able to work directly with grieving families and the bodies of their loved ones.

She enrolled at AAMI and graduated last December, a few months before a five-year-old scandal involving student cheating resurfaced and rocked the school.

Booker was not involved in that scandal and can’t comment on it. She does say however that she’s glad she commuted to New York to study at AAMI. The instruction was, in her words, “excellent”, and she formed lasting relationships with some of her teachers.

A casket showroom inside AAMI

A few months ago, when she had to reconstruct the face of a young mother who had been killed in an automobile accident, her professors offered precious advice. “The only thing that mattered to me was ensuring that her children would recognize her,” she remembers.

This was one of those cases where Booker felt that being a woman could make a difference.

“As the mother of four kids, I think I had particular empathy and compassion in that situation.” And to anyone who says that women aren’t strong enough to do this work, she’d say: “I can’t lift a casket by myself, but I don’t know a single man who can do that either.”