As They Lay Dead

The 89-year-old woman has been dead for three weeks, but she looks lovely. White beauty-parlor hair frames high cheekbones and still, painted lips. Wearing a pair of no-nonsense glasses, the woman is the essence of grandmotherhood; as gentle an image of mortality as one could hope for. The only indication that she's waited longer than usual for the grave lies at the tips of her hands. Like twigs exposed to wet soil, her fingers have begun to shrivel and rot.

Because it's Carry Lee Starry's job to intuit how people react to death, she notices that I can't take my eyes off those fingers. "Our bodies start to break down right after we die," she says in a tone both reassuring and practical. "We go back to the earth."

Starry nods approvingly as she looks the woman over. Her colleague, Mark Arnold, has worked hard. He's brushed the problem fingers with cover-up and applied a fresh coat of nail polish. "Cosmetizing work is very creative," Starry says, calling Arnold a master craftsman. As we turn to depart the chapel, something catches Starry's eye. She leans over and polishes away a smudge on the casket with the edge of her raspberry golf vest.

I'm reminded of the first time I saw Starry. She was driving a hearse over a grassy hill toward my uncle's waiting grave. Even then, at that sad moment, she struck me as unusual. Not just because she was a woman in a profession I'd forever associated with morbidly weird men, but because she seemed so forceful, so competent and so, well, normal. When we sit to talk on the overstuffed leather couches that furnish her family's business, the David Lee Funeral Home in Wayzata, I'm not surprised to learn that Starry loves to golf, play hockey, and cheer on her sons at their baseball games.

Her father, David Lee, bought the black-shuttered colonial house in 1964, when Starry and her brother were kids. "The first year he moved out here, there were four funerals," she tells me. "We lived upstairs in a little apartment until my parents had another child." At their new home, Starry's mother, like many funeral director's wives, answered the business phone from the kitchen. "When I was a kid we had two phones," Starry remembers. "The skinny one was the house phone and the fat one was the funeral home phone. If we were at supper and that phone rang, we knew it was work and we stopped talking."

While the funeral home business is often passed down from generation to generation, Starry never imagined she'd become a funeral director. "I wanted to be a vet," she says. "But then I got a C in organic chemistry. My brother Mike was in mortuary science at the University of Minnesota and he suggested I talk to them. I went there and really enjoyed it." Unlike many of her fellow students, she hadn't spent much time at her father's workplace. "In embalming lab there were a lot of people who had been in the prep room and I hadn't. The first time in there I looked around and said I was going to go out and get a drink and then come back."

Starry, Mike Lee, and Arnold are the home's only full-time employees. They perform just about every task, from meeting with families to embalming to choreographing the funeral procession. The only job they don't do is hair. "I can't even do my own," Starry says. Also, because of her small size--she's an extremely muscular 110 pounds--she can't take on some of the more physical demands of the job, such as carrying a very large body, without help. "But it's amazing what you are capable of when you have to be," she says.

The best part of the job for Starry is working with families. "I think it's a great privilege to do what we do," she explains. "We would love to put up a sign on our door that says, 'Live long, we can wait,' because in a perfect world we would all die in our sleep at age 90. But it doesn't work that way. Our job is about helping people say goodbye." Even the more emotional aspects of her work don't depress her. Sometimes that's a matter of will. "I'll look at someone young and your heart breaks over what the family goes through," she says. "And you kind of separate yourself a little bit because it would be easy to sit here and cry, but they came to you to take care of things."

Starry makes a point of saying that she chose this career and that the tragedies she encounters remind her of her blessings. Perhaps such close and consistent proximity to death serves as a reminder that life is short. When asked whether she thinks about her own demise, she answers, "I'm not afraid of death. But I hope to be here for a while. I feel like I need to spend more time with my kids. Like we all do." When asked whether she's thought through her funeral arrangements, she laughs. "We are such advocates for pre-planning and writing it down and setting the money aside," she says. "And I know that I'd like to be buried in the same cemetery with my dad. But do my husband and I own graves? No. Do I have anything written down in my file? No."