PORT ANGELES – Only one of Jennifer Melberg’s friends dares ask the question: “How’s work?”
The friend, Melberg said, punctuates her query with “the empathetic head tilt,” since she expects work could be quite awful.
Melberg, 32, is a newly trained funeral director at Harper-Ridgeview Funeral Chapel in Port Angeles.
That means she does a variety of things.
She responds to phone calls at all hours of night and day. She goes out to pick up the deceased. She makes coffee for herself and the family. She embalms the deceased, does makeup, hair and clothing. She orders caskets and orchestrates services, burials and cremations.
Melberg, a Port Angeles native, became interested in the funeral profession while in high school, but instead went into accounting, which seemed more sensible at the time.
Some years ago, she talked with her husband, Ian, about her first career interest.
He urged her to go to the people at Harper-Ridgeview, and they took her on as an apprentice.
She soon found that she had a gift for this work.
“I love the attention to detail and I love the families,” said Melberg, who then sought out the nearest mortuary science school.
She completed the 18-month program at Mount Hood Community College in Gresham, Ore., last June.
The work’s inherent variety provides challenges and rewards, Melberg said.
“Every family, every survivor is so different. Everyone grieves differently . . . I feel like I can be flexible, to meet their needs.”
With each family she strives to “be some sort of stability in the midst of that.”
The best reward comes “when I know I’ve done a family right.”
“But this,” Melberg added, is also “a really hard business.”
The physical and emotional demands overwhelm her, along with the unpredictability that’s the nature of the job.
“You think your day is going to go so smooth,” she said, “and by the end, it’s in a shambles.
“We can go three days without a call. On the fourth day, you get five calls, with three of them within two hours.
“There are the 3-in-the-morning calls, and you have to respond. You have to be at your best,” every time.
Part of caring for a bereaved family, for Melberg, means letting the sadness in.
That’s the only way she knows how to do this job.
But it exhausts her sometimes.
For relief, she turns to her Ian, her partner of 11 years, and to exercise.
“Working out helps right now. I just like to walk and run.”
Funeral directors, generally speaking, “have either spirituality or drugs and alcohol,” Melberg said.
She’s stayed away from the latter and begun to explore the former.
“[But] I bring a lot of stress home,” she admitted.
“Sometimes I think I should be collecting a paycheck too,” joked Ian, who has a job of his own at Mervin Manufacturing, the Carlsborg snowboard factory.
“She doesn’t leave work at work,” he said, adding that his wife thinks about “her families” long after she’s organized their memorial services.
“But it’s something I know she loves,” said Ian.
