By Victor Greto
When Joe Swipes retired as the utility man for a machine shop, he had a dream.
He saw himself in a graveyard.
But this was not a nightmare. Swipes didn’t envision his own death. He was working.
Nor was the dream a Hamlet-Yorick moment, a setting for staring dreamily at his fuzzy navel for some ultimate meaning — “Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay,/ Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.”
For Swipes, the dream instead pointed a bony finger toward a second vocation.
“I’m not making that up,” says the Brandywine Hundred resident of his dream of a second life as an on-call funeral worker. He works part-time for McCrery Funeral Homes in Wilmington.
Nor are many part-time funeral home workers, whose jobs entail carrying out the practical aspects of death, on-call pall bearing, picking up and delivering bodies, or driving the deceased’s family to and from the church, funeral home and cemetery. Because most part-timers do not have licenses, they cannot embalm or orchestrate a funeral.
Since his dream, Swipes has worked at dozens of funeral homes, from Philadelphia to Lancaster to the Delaware beaches.
He sounds like any retiree who has happily latched on to a second career.
“You’re with people, and it gets you out,” he says.
He’s not making that up, either — although being on call for a funeral home is markedly different than, say, running auto parts to mechanics, or delivering pizzas.
For one thing, a death can occur at any time during the night or day.
“A cartoon ran last year, of a guy standing in front of mortician’s Help Wanted sign,” says John Lodge, an on-call funeral worker. “‘What are the hours?’ the guys asks. The answer: ‘We never know.’”
Still, this job is not really about death, despite the “death is a part of life” cliche that many funeral workers perfunctorily murmur.
That squeezed-out bromide crashes head-on into the literal fact that death is simply the end of life.
What the statement refers to, of course, is that the death of one person is undeniably an integral part of the social life of the many people left behind.
“I do it for the living,” Swipes says. “That’s the best way I can put it.”
For many, that’s the basic attraction of the profession.
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Once you have inured yourself — as the rest of us mostly have not — to contemplating the dead in relation to ourselves, working a funeral is primarily about comforting, caring for and making things as easy as possible for those left behind.
“Death is a profession,” says Lodge, a former New Castle County police officer who works part-time at Mealey’s Funeral Home in Wilmington. “You insulate and separate yourself from the event and person while providing a necessary service.”
Lodge sees himself coming full circle with his second career.
“Both are demand-type services, something not everyone likes to do,” he says. “For 24 years I saw what humanity can do to each other, and the funeral home business deals with what’s involved after that.”
It also helped Lodge satisfy a curiosity he had a police officer.
“You see an accident, and think, ‘How are they going to put this back together?’”
The magic of the reconstruction and embalming process is something in which most part-timers do not share.
Lodge has, however. He sometimes assists in undressing and dressing, shaving, cleaning and “casketing” the body — but he cannot do the embalming itself.
Lodge’s experience as a police officer is not the only occupation that allows for a relatively easy segue into the funeral business.
“Death has never bothered me,” says Gayle Ryle, 71, a retired Baptist minister who works part-time at McCrery’s. “It never did.”
That’s because Ryle had been around it so much during his career as a minister, counseling the sick and dying, or those who are trying to deal with the death of someone they love.
“Most don’t know what to do when someone dies,” Ryle says.
Ryle does. In fact, he obtained a doctorate degree in death and dying as a counseling experience nearly three decades ago while a minister.
“I’ve seen a lot of people die,” he says. “It’s a real opportunity to minister to families who are grieving.”
Like any profession, it has its ups and downs.
“Some days are better than others,” says Chuck Hennings, 68, who splits his time between Delaware and Florida. While here, he is on call for Mealey Funeral Homes.
After a regimented 29-year career with the General Motors assembly plant at Prices Corner, Hennings decided to experience the more unpredictable hours of the funeral business.
“You’re on call different times of the week, and you’re involved no matter what time of day or night to do the removal, late at night, early in the morning, whatever it takes,” he says.
Like learning any profession, Hennings says, “In the beginning it was difficult.”
But there’s a difference with the funeral business.
“I was never exposed to this sort of thing as far as seeing different circumstances,” Hennings says, “such as what condition the body was in.”
Dealing with death and families is all in the details, says Jeffrey Clark, 58, who also works part-time at McCrery’s.
A Navy veteran and former head administrator at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., Clark knows all about concentrating on the little things.
In fact, he wanted to become a funeral director when he was a teenager.
More than four decades ago, he delivered papers to Mr. McCrery, who subsequently hired him to cut the grass and wash the funeral cars.
“The first time I went to a viewing, I realized it was a service thing,” Clark says. “It was for my grandmother, and they were very nice to us.”
But Clark was drafted in 1971 after two years of college. Only after he retired from the Navy did he think about fulfilling his childhood desire.
No matter how used to being around death one is, everyone seems to agree, the worst part of the job is when a child is involved.
“Sometimes the way things are, you wonder why you do this,” Hennings says. “When it involves young people, you ask yourself, ‘Why this child, Why now?’”
Even Ryle, who perhaps knows death better than anyone, says, “The only thing that bothers me is when I have to deal with a little child. But I tell myself that this is just the body where they lived.”
It’s also difficult when picking up the body at home, Clark says. “You’re stepping into a very delicate situation.”
One that Swipes and others say you learn to understand and react to as you gain more experience.
Swipes has had many conversations with fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters of the deceased as he has driven them to and from the cemetery.
“Sometimes it’s like walking on eggs,” Swipes says. “But once the funeral is finished and you eat, they often open up.”
Swipes is a man who unabashedly enjoys his work. He especially loves the processions to the cemetery, escorted by police.
One of the more memorable moments he experienced was going down to Dover to pick up the body of Navy Seal Lt. Michael Murphy, who died in a firefight in Afghanistan in 2005 and subsequently received the Medal of Honor.
With Murphy’s father Dan beside him, Swipes drove a limousine from Dover all the way to the family’s home in Long Island, N.Y.
“He was telling me all about his son,” Swipes recalls.
The limousine was met at the New York state border by four state troopers. They were soon joined by 16 motorcycle cops.
Swipes can’t help but smile when he recalls the procession and the boy’s father’s pride.