Last week at a workshop the teachers played a game of jeopardy, in which we answered trivia questions about each other. The categories were things like "awards won," "previous jobs," etc. We had turned in a sheet of answers, and on mine I wrote that I wanted my next job to be as a funeral director.
A number of my close friends know about my desire to enter the funeral business, and while I've often been met with "Really?" or "Why?" everyone has taken it in stride and thought that it'd be a pretty cool thing.
When the question was read out loud and someone who knew me answered, the room fell silent. I was embarassed, which surprised me, but I figured that people probably didn't really know how to react around the whole death thing.
Since then, four people have approached me to ask if I was serious or if I made it up to be funny. I'm coming to realize that the silence in the room was people thinking "Why would she say that?" And now I wish I never had. I can't believe people would think that I would lie or make up that I wanted to be a funeral director. Who would do such a thing? It's hard for me to wrap my brain around the automatic assumption that I did it as a joke. Surely they know my sense of humor better than that! I'm a funny person; that "joke" would not be funny.
I've wanted to enter into the funeral home business for several years. It's my plan to intern over a summer with a funeral home to find out if it's really something I can do, then enter into a Mortuary Science program (the U of M might actually let me in this time!) I guess I know people act weird around death, and it's probably easier for people to think I was kidding, but I wasn't and I think it's pretty bad karma to lie about death.
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