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At that moment, though, he was a shell-shocked soldier. With his mouth agape and eyes wide, he clearly wanted to run. Like me, he stayed put, scared stiff by the scream from a dead man. I am not very religious or superstitious, but standing in that room, I felt a powerful energy course through me. Harold, behind us in the hallway, was the only one with any composure. He strode in, got down on his knees, and dragged a squalling black cat out from underneath the bed. When he let go of the cat’s scruff, it fell over, writhing and still screaming.

As with most morning meetings, I was bored. Our manager, Hunter, is a numbers guy. So we have to hear about casket sales this quarter compared to this point last quarter. Up. Down. He whines either way. Just give us our daily assignments and be done with it, I want to scream. But I don’t. I just sit there and sip my green soda and hope Hunter and his spreadsheets will get devoured by a pack of rabid beavers on his way home. I say this because Hunter looks like Howdy Doody, and Howdy Doody is made of wood…you get the picture.

Either name you use, an undertaker or funeral director is a professional, licensed by the state he practices in to conduct funerals and manage all the details that accompany a death. So what does an undertaker do? To put it simply: we care for the dead. To some it might seem an extraordinary profession, macabre even, but one measure of a society is in how it honors its dead. —so the question remains, why should we? The answer is that we, as a society, must uphold a basic principle of humanity, the sanctity of life, through reverence for the dead.