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Requirements for a Career as Licensed Funeral Director Essay

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Your cell phone rings in the middle of the night and you are notified that you have to go to work. After hastily getting ready, you find yourself walking down a hallway; you turn into an empty doorway and enter a dark, cold room that is filled with lifeless bodies waiting to be attended to. This may be an unfavorable situation to many, but to a funeral director, it is just another day at work. In order to become a funeral director, one must be genuinely interested, willing to fulfill the job requirements, be able to cope with death on a daily basis, and still maintain a positive outlook on life.
Usually, people take on the profession of becoming a funeral director, or mortician, because of exposure to a family business or pure interest. An …show more content…

They must also attain a state license in order to practice what they have studied (Education Portal. 2014.). Internships are not always paid so one must really love what they are instructed to do in order to pursue their goals of becoming a mortician. Not many people are willing to work for free for such an elongated period of time. In New Jersey, funeral directors are also embalmers. In other states, it may be more common to find that the funeral director and embalmer are two different people (Park-Mustacchio. 2013). Kevin Sinclair, an embalmer of twenty-two years, advocates for a person to have a certain personality in order to become an embalmer (Bradley.2013). He does this because like everyone may know, “it can be traumatic (Bradley.2013.).” Anyone may be want to become a funeral director or an embalmer, but it requires a lot of emotional stability to deal with many dead bodies that have been distorted because of an accident. Another mortician humorously said from his past experiences, “If you can be a successful waiter, you can be a successful funeral director (Giang. 2013.).” The comparison between the two occupations may open one’s eyes to a different kind of perspective. For example, a waiter would be accustomed to a pizza being placed in an oven just as a funeral director would be accustomed to a corpse being placed in a crematory to be cremated. Dealing with death, more so cadavers, takes a large amount of self-discipline and

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