Thank you to everyone who sent me the New York Times profile of funeral director Doris Amen. Well done correctly identifying a bad bitch.
Let me explain. That last time we heard about a female funeral worker in New York was a few months ago, when New York Magazine did a profile on Elizabeth Meyer.
According to that profile, Elizabeth is a “a stunning 26-year-old brunette who went to NYU and began her professional life interning for designers and fashion-PR firms.”
“…the mortuary started her as a receptionist, a role that included collecting bodies from homes and morgues. “The first time they asked me to do that, I was wearing suede Gucci loafers. I was kind of concerned about them,’’ she says.”
No disrespect to Elizabeth’s true Buddha soul here, but she represents a somewhat disturbing trend of publicizing “party planner” funeral folk. Young women who loathe to get their Gucci loafers soiled with a little corpse juice and just loooove planning theme funerals for the wealthy. It doesn’t help us engage with death to think of funerals as parties hosted by chipper young women wearing “significant pearls.”
That’s why the Time’s profile of Doris Amen is such a refreshing palate cleanser.
Doris is a woman who does it her damn-self. She’s not a death party planner, she’s a mortician, in the truest sense of the word.
“Sometimes you got to do it all yourself,” says Ms. Amen, who is perfectly capable of collecting a corpse, transporting it and doing its makeup and hair without help.”
Doris is cheap ($1,999 to start for a wake), honest, and does it all drinking Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and puffing on her electronic cigarette. In the days of tacky, whitewashed corporate funeral homes with no character to them whatsoever, Doris has her viewing room setup like a 1970’s mourning paradise.
She rolls to the medical examiner in her 1978 silver hearse and gets things DONE. The Order of the Good Death is suitably impressed, and salutes her efforts. She’s an inspiration to all of us mort ladies hauling around corpses and not trying to pretend we’re anything but servants to death.
Please read the whole article on Doris, I can’t really do her justice here.