It was a wet cold night with nearly fifty of us Goths packed into the dark and cozy 1901 Gallery for the 32nd Chicago Goth Meetup. As people shuffled about finding seats, I waved to Jasmyn Du Bois. It had been several months since I had met Jasmyn and she agreed to do an interview. She now wore a cast on her left leg and hobbled about on crutches with "Zombies" being the only explanation forthcoming.

When Jasmyn mentions being so Goth she doesn’t even need to wear black anymore, it’s not just funny, it’s very true. Not only is Jasmyn an embalmer and licensed Funeral Director, but she also recently moved out of her apartment and into the Undertaker’s cabin at a large and prominent Chicago cemetery. On Hallowe’en. It just doesn’t get any Gothier than that.

Jasmyn was immensely generous with her valuable study time in giving us a lengthy interview, allowing us an inside glimpse into the funeral service industry.

Hi Jasmyn. Thank you so much for being here with us. Where is it that you work?

I work at a place called the Anatomical Gift Association of Illinois

What is your title there?

We really don’t have titles. There’s the director and then there’s the office manager and the secretary and then me, so my title’s probably resident embalmer.

There's only three other people where I work, and they are all office staff, so that leaves me as the head embalmer by dint of being the only embalmer.

You mentioned that you had recently earned the distinction of Funeral Director as well. What’s involved in earning that title?

Yes. Essentially you end up getting what amounts to two Associate’s degrees to end up with a Funeral Director license. You have to get an Associate’s degree in Applied Sciences and then you go on to the funeral program, which is another year and then once you’ve done that, you technically get the Funeral Director degree, but you don’t officially become a Funeral Director until you serve a year’s apprenticeship. I finished that up in January. Now I’m officially licensed by the State of Illinois to play with dead people.

How did you get into the profession?

Honestly, it was a complete and total mistake. Well, I guess mistake wouldn’t be the right way to put it. You know when you see a packet of Johnsonville sausage and it says, "Comments or questions, please call 1-800-blah, blah, blah"? That’s the place I worked for.

We were the "comments or questions" people. We also handled USA Today, Honda, Acura, and about six other accounts. I mostly did Honda. We were shut down because the lease on our building was up three days before any of the company’s other buildings. They decided they were going to shut down an office and since our lease was up first, we were the lucky ones.

The company brought in someone from the city who said, "Well, since you’re all getting laid off, we have this program where the City will send you back to school and we’ll pay for X amount of it." The guy handed out a list of everything you could do from Milwaukee Area Technical College.

I was looking through the list, and it had things like horticulture and baking and welding listed. One of the things way down on the list was "funeral service". I went up to the guy, and asked, "Is this really supposed to be on the list? Can you really do this?" And the guy kind of looked at me really confused and went, "I don’t know." I don’t think anybody had ever actually asked him that question before.

I decided, "Okay. Well, it’s on the list so I have to assume that you can." I filled out the application and went through the whole process. The city wasn't happy about it because of the whole apprenticeship thing, so I offered that if they just pay for what they were willing to pay for, I’d work out the rest. So they paid for a good portion of it.

How was it getting through the curriculum?

Since it’s essentially a technical college, I was able to Clep out of a lot of it. I managed to get through the Associate’s of Applied Sciences in about a year, and by the time I hit the Funeral Directing portion of it, the city kind of choked and said, "We ain’t paying for that," so I paid for the rest of it with student loans and very, very understanding friends.

Wow. What wonderful friends! What happened after graduation?

Let’s see, I graduated in ’06 and then right after I graduated, I was offered a job with a funeral home in Chicago. I was part of a float in the Pride Parade. As I was walking along, I saw the funeral home float as part of the parade towards the end. I bounced up to the guy that was walking along, and introduced myself, telling him, "Hey, this is my name. This is who I am. This is really cool that you guys are here."

And he went, "Yeah. Well, we’re looking for somebody. Here’s my card, give me call." I called him and they pretty much kicked me around for six months.

So this place that left you dangling for six months isn’t Anatomical Gift Association who you’re with now?

No, no. I actually moved to Chicago because they said, "Yes, move! Get yourself settled in. Give yourself a week or so to unpack and then let us know that you’re here in Chicago, and we’ll fill out all the paperwork and get everything done." So I moved and then it was, "Oh, we can’t do this right now; come back next week. Oh, we can’t do this right now; come back next week." And it went on like that for six months while my finances went the way of the dodo.

Finally one morning they had said, "Be here at 7." And I asked, "Okay. Am or pm?" because in this industry, you do have to make that sort of distinction. I got there at 7 and was there until about 10 in the morning when the money man for the funeral home showed up and asked, "What are you doing here?" I told him about the guy telling me to be there at 7 and he’s like, "I don’t know why he would have told you that. He’s not going to be here for another hour." Crap, I figured I had waited that long so another hour wasn’t going to kill me so I waited around till 11.

When he finally showed up, he just made some excuse about "Oh, I’ve got to go do this thing. Why don’t you come back around 2." And that’s about when I had it. That was it. I told him, "When you actually want me here, call me." And I haven’t heard from him in two years.

How did you finally come to work at the Anatomical Gift Association?

Basically I got the job because the guy that I was apprenticed to was friends with a friend of my boyfriend. Back when I was in school, my boyfriend’s friend introduced me to him and was like, "Well, he’s a Funeral Director. Maybe you can talk to him about some different stuff." The Funeral Director said he’d keep tabs on me while I was going through school.

One day, he called me and said, "Hey, I have a line on this job. Would you be interested? But it’s probably not going to come up for two or three months yet." And I went, "Yeah sure," and promptly forgot about it; I was at the point where if it wasn’t cash on the barrel, I wasn’t going to get my hopes up on anything. I had had so many funeral home doors slammed in my face at that point I had "Welcome" permanently tattooed on my forehead.

And then out of the blue, he called me up and asked if could come in for an interview. I thought that it was for an office position because that’s what I’d mostly been applying for through different job service sites. When I got there, they ran me through the whole interview process and then took me in the back and went, "Okay. Here’s our embalming machine. Here’s the prep room. Here’s this. Here’s that. Here’s where we store everybody." I was like, "Oh, okay. This is like an actual job in my actual field!"

And then they asked when I could start. I flippantly said, "Oh, I can start tomorrow." They said, "Okay. Be here at 8am." I started work the next day at 8am, but I think it was still a week before it sunk in that I actually had a job in my field doing what I’d been trained to do.

Are you doing the same thing at the Anatomical Gift Association as you would be doing at a funeral home?

No. Actually what I do is different from what funeral homes do. Funeral homes are embalming the person, preserving them for the funeral, which is generally within a week of when the person dies. What I’m doing is preparing bodies that people have donated to medical science for whole body donation.

You are embalming for a scientific reason rather than an aesthetic reason?

The way I like to put it is the Funeral Director is embalming to make them look nice. I’m embalming to make them last for up to four years.

Is a typical workday for you fairly predictable?

No, not at all. The death industry is very unpredictable. You never know when you’re going to get someone, and in my case I never know whether I’m going to get zero people in a day or eight.

There are some days where I’m scrubbing sinks and doing other general cleaning work because I don’t have anybody in, and there are other days when I’m there for ten hours and practically pulling my hair out because the bell keeps ringing and the Funeral Director keeps bringing more people in.

What’s the aspect of your job that you look forward to the most?

Honestly, it’s getting up and going to work. I mean I’ve done everything from working in a used bookstore to fast food and I was an office manager for a college in Milwaukee for a while.

I never really enjoyed going to work. You know, it was the thing I did for the paycheck. It was the thing I did to pay the bills. And this job I actually get up and while I’m not particularly a morning person, once I’m actually on my way it’s still like "Yeah, I’m going to work. Hey, this is pretty cool!"

I’m getting to do what I love all day. And the fact that these people have made this absolutely wonderful gift in hopes of further medical science makes it that much easier.

So it’s a job you’re really passionate about and it feels good to go in?

Well, yeah. There’s still some grief associated with it, but it’s not as much grief as you get in a funeral home because the families that have donated understand what their loved ones are going for and why they are coming to me. And that does, I think, actually lessen some of the grief. Obviously, that’s a personal opinion.

Have you had the experience of working elsewhere within a funeral home?

I actually did my internship at a funeral home and realized fairly quickly that I was happiest in the embalming room (or the prep room is what they’re called) just working with the bodies, doing the embalming, and making them look nice.

It’s much easier making the families happy with the way their loved ones look as opposed to being out in the front office and talking to the families because I’m a very empathic person. The last thing you want in that situation is for your Funeral Director to burst into tears.

What else about working in the prep room makes you happy?

I tend to listen to punk music or NPR or whatever it is that I feel like listening to that day. And I can pretty much be who I am without having to hide it too much. That makes me happy because I had to hide who I am for a really long time in the corporate world and I hated it.

Is there much paperwork to be done working in the prep room?

Oh, yeah. We have a lot. The office manager enters everybody into the database, the Funeral Directors require state paperwork so they handle that, and I have my own database to keep absolute track of where every body is at every minute.

When the deliveries go out, the ones where we’re sending the bodies to the schools, I’m the one who sets up and manages all the paperwork for that. When they come back to us from the schools, they’re cremated and the ashes are mailed back to the families. I know precisely where they are through that whole process.

What sort of precautions do you have to take against accidents when in the prep room?

When you’re in the prep room, you have to wear what are called PPEs, Personal Protective Equipment. That involves a mask, a face shield, and gloves. I also wear a lab coat plus a set of scrubs over my regular street clothes.

I have a different pair of shoes that I put on when I get to work and take off before I come home. That’s important because all the chemicals I work with and a lot of what can come from the bodies is really slippery. If it gets on the floor, you can step on it and then basically land flat on your butt, and that’s not fun.

What about biohazards?

You’re working with highly toxic, dangerous, flammable chemicals. So you have to be really careful about that too. Inhaling most of it is not a good idea which is the reason for the mask and the face shield. Even though I wear glasses, sometimes sprays or droplets of chemical can go up and come back down and then they’re in your eye. I’ve had that happen once, and it sucked.

You also have to be careful because you’re dealing with very sharp instruments and you can accidentally cut yourself very easily. Of course, anytime anything like this happens, you immediately have to go to the hospital even if it’s just a tiny little needle stick. You don’t know what that person had and there are times when the family doesn’t know. Nine times out of ten the person themselves didn’t even know, but you have to take that precaution and go to the hospital.

Have you ever had to take that trip to the hospital?

No. I am – well, at the risk of making pun, I am pathologically careful about that sort of thing.

Have you had any dangerously close moments?

There have been a few. It wouldn’t be professional to talk about them. Let’s just leave it at there have been a few times where there has been an "Oh, shit" moment from across the prep room.

Why did you get into the Goth scene?

I got into it kind of for that aesthetic when I finally gave up with the whole punk scene. Well, not gave up, but just admitted defeat I guess would be the way to put it. I was always fascinated with the Victorian and the Renaissance times and the music and everything.

How did being a Goth affect your choice to become a Funeral Director?

I honestly would say that being a Goth really had nothing to do with becoming a Funeral Director, at least in my case. I mean, I have been listening to this kind of music since I was 14. I’ve always called myself an accidental Goth because I started out as a punk kid and then one day I kind of looked around and went "Huh, damn it. I guess I’m Goth now".

When has being Goth proven to be beneficial?

Funnily enough, when I was in school, I did a paper for my Psychology of Funeral Service where I sent out a questionnaire to a bunch of people on some of the online Goth lists I’m on. One of these is Corp Goth, which I think is the one I got most of my responses from.

Basically, the questionnaire asked "Would you describe yourself as a Goth?", "Has anybody you ever loved died?", "Would you say that being a Goth affected the way you viewed the funeral?", and "Would you say that their death affected the way you viewed being a Goth?" I answered these myself because I figured it was only fair.

Has being Goth given you a unique view of the Funeral industry?

When I was working in the funeral home, it definitely gave me an appreciation that not all funerals need to be cookie cutter, and not all celebrations of a person’s life fit into one box.

I mean, there are some people who are perfectly happy coming into the funeral home and hearing the strings of a waltz and having a very solemn ceremony. For some people that’s actually a wonderful celebration of their life. Then there are some people where a proper celebration of their life would be to crack open a case of PBR and sit there listening to The Cramps. I happen to live with somebody who would be like that.

How do people in the Goth culture react to you when you tell them what you do for a living?

I was at Neo once talking to this guy who was a friend of a friend of a friend. He asked me what I did for a living, and when I told him, he called me a liar. We got into an argument and I showed him my license. He called me weird and freaky, and this is a guy that not 20 minutes before had been telling me how he sleeps in a coffin. I’m thinking "You sleep in a damn coffin and you’re calling me weird?"

How often do you get that kind of reaction from people?

I actually get that quite a lot. There are people who think that I’m just saying it just to make myself seem more Goth. And it usually ends up with me pulling out my wallet and showing them my license and going "No, really. See? Registered with the State of Illinois".

I came to the realization pretty quickly that – and this isn’t a hack on anybody – there are a lot of Goths out there that are absolutely fascinated with the trappings of death and all of the clothing and the accessories, but the actual cold, hard reality of it freaks them out. I can understand that. Death is not an easy thing to deal with.

How do you feel our Western society deals with death?

As a society, we have pushed death farther and father away from our personal lives with every year. 100 years ago, if a family member died, they were laid out in the living room. It was the women of the family that bathed them and dressed them and took care of them for the funeral. The funeral was held in the house. The children were brought up to say goodbye. And it was very much an ever-present daily fact.

Now we take our elderly and stick them in homes and we’re not there when they die. One minute grandma’s at Happy Haven Rest Home, and the next minute grandma’s in a casket looking all nice and pretty and we’re laying her to rest. Nowadays most people aren’t there for the intervening time period.

How does working with deceased people affect you?

I can’t say it mostly doesn’t. It does some, but again, I view it as these people have made an absolutely wonderful gift. So for me, working with them is a privilege. I will admit when I was working at a funeral home, the elderly didn’t – well, I can’t say they didn’t bother me, but it was easier to deal with. It was the kids that really got me. And our policy at Anatomical Gift Association is we will not take anybody under the age of 18.

What has affected you the most emotionally?

Sometimes someone comes in that looks like a friend or looks like my dad or my mom, and that kind of creeps me out. It does. And there have been a couple of times where I’ve had to stop and go outside and have a cigarette and sit down for a minute before I go back to work.

Has working alongside death for so long affected your own feelings of mortality?

Quite frankly, death is scary. I’m not particularly wanting to die any time soon. I happen to be very attached to being alive. I love the fact that I can walk outside and go for a walk on a sunny day with my dog and that I can go sit in a coffee house and read a book. I mean, I love it, but I’ll admit having worked in this field and having been inundated with this for so long, I’ve come to accept the fact of my own eventual death with probably a lot more calm than most people would. I would avoid it at all costs if I could, but you know that’s not going to happen.

Just a question about choice of words and etiquette. You’ve used the term "people", "loved one", "body", and "cadaver" at different times. What’s the best time and place for each term?

I’ve actually put some thought into this and did some research on my own because I didn’t want to commit a faux pas.

When a person is the subject of a murder or a crime, they’re a "corpse". When a person is going for a burial through a funeral home, they’re referred to as a "decedent" or at least in-house, they’re referred to as a "decedent". Obviously, when you’re talking to the family, you always refer to them as "your father", "your mother", or "loved one" and so on and so forth.

When a person comes through my doors, they are a "cadaver". But I refer to them as "people" mostly because the way I look at it, I need to be giving every person that comes through my doors the respect that I would hope someone would give my father or mother or grandmother or grandfather should they have chosen to make that sort of decision. I feel responsible to treat them as such.

Does referring to them as "people" make it uncomfortable to prepare them for scicentific study?

I’ll admit, I wonder about their lives sometimes and what sort of people they were, but for the most part, I feel that this body that I work on deserves my respect for the person that they were and for the fact that they were a living, breathing, feeling person who loved and was loved.

In western culture, we embalm our dead, but not all cultures do. Why do you feel we embalm?

They go through this in the history books, and this has been a question that people have tried to answer. Embalming originally started in American civil wars as a way for the soldiers to be shipped home for their families to be buried in the family cemetery.

Otherwise, they were buried in the battlefield and the families never got them back. They never knew where their dead were. They would probably get a letter a month later saying "We’re very sorry. You’re son died on the field of battle". And that’s it. So embalming was originally developed in America for the purpose of sending the soldiers home.

And that brought embalming into common practice?

It was actually Abraham Lincoln’s death that really brought embalming into vogue. He was embalmed and then sent on his train ride. If it’s good enough for Abraham Lincoln, well, then we want to do that because that’s just a good thing to do now.

From there it just became the norm where you have the person and you embalm them and then you have the big ceremony and everybody says goodbye and says how natural they look and then they go to the cemetery and bury them.

When a body comes in, how long before you embalm it?

Generally, when a person comes in, I always try to embalm them within 24 hours of arrival. Some days I bring them in and take them straight into the prep room, and I’m embalming them within 20 minutes. Some days they don’t come in until 5pm when I’m just about to walk out the door, so I embalm them the next day.

What happens after they’re embalmed?

24 hours after embalmment, give or take, I take out the brain because we send those to neurology clinics. After that I put them in a body bag. Each person gets their own individual body bag and their own individual tray. Then usually, if I can, I’ll keep them for at least two months. That way I can go back and make sure that everything is as perfectly preserved as I can make it.

What’s the average time you keep a body before sending it to a school?

This all depends on demand and time of the year and everything like that, but after about two months, that’s when I’ll send them to a school. The school will keep them for two semesters.

How long will the school have a body before returning it to you for cremation?

Depending on how the school’s semesters work determines when we get a body back. Sometimes their anatomy courses are only during the Fall semester, so they’ll have the body for one semester and then return it. Sometimes they’ll keep it until the next Fall semester before sending it back.

Is a body used by more than one student throughout a semester or several semesters?

Honestly, I don’t know. For the most part, I believe there’s more than one student per cadaver, but I honestly can’t tell you.

I’m actually trying to get into some of the anatomy classes. I just want to go through the anatomy class, a) because the whole subject fascinates me, and b) because I want to see personally what the students are doing so I can do my job better for them.

That would be fantastic. Then you’d see firsthand what your customer’s needs are. Essentially, these people are your customers?

Exactly. If there’s a consistent problem that I don’t know about because I’m not the one that’s dissecting the bodies, then I can go back to the prep room and say, "Okay, I need to change this part of what I’m doing to make this better."

How long does it take for you to then embalm someone that’s come in?

Honestly, that is so variable, it’s not even funny. I mean, some people I can have completely embalmed in an hour and a half. Some people I might be standing there for five hours.

Do you accept autopsies as donated bodies?

We don’t take autopsies because the person needs to be whole. If a person had cancer, if they died of some sort of infection, if they died of a bad liver, we’ll take any of that. But autopsies, unfortunately because parts of the body may have been removed, we cannot take them. Since these bodies are going out to pre-doctors, they need to be able to see where everything is.

Do you receive and prepare organs from organ donors?

We don’t do organs or anything like that. That’s Gift of Hope and not my work at all. It’s anybody who’s donated their body, like a whole body donation, to science then they come to me, and I embalm them for anatomical dissection. Basically any school in the state of Illinois that uses actual human cadavers for their anatomical dissection classes are getting them from us.

People that have donated to us have donated under the idea that they wanted to make this gift to Illinois schools; so we make sure they stay in Illinois because that was the understanding.

Is formaldehyde still used as an embalming fluid?

Yes. For most funeral homes, the formaldehyde is actually part of the mix of chemicals that you put in. Usually you have different types of chemicals for different types of problems, jaundice being an example. If somebody dies of liver failure, they’ll be jaundiced. There’s a certain bottle of chemical that will help correct that.

There are certain bottles of chemicals that are dyes so you don’t have to put on quite so much makeup. There’s a ton of different blends you can make. Most Funeral Directors have their own blend that they’ve come up with that works really well for them. But all of those chemicals already have formaldehyde in the bottle, whereas I actually have the formaldehyde separately.

Is having the formaldehyde separate because you’re sending these off as cadavers for science purposes?

Correct. I use a mix that was specifically developed for anatomical embalming. And it does have a little bit of formaldehyde in it, but not a lot. So what I do is I’ll add formaldehyde to each of the chemicals that I’m putting into the person. That’s not common practice for funeral homes. It’s more of a medical science thing.

You mentioned that Funeral Directors have their own secret blend of chemicals they use. Are there trade secrets in the world of embalming?

Oh, Lord yes. There are definitely trade secrets. We’ve got the top guys in the field with their mixes for both the funeral home embalming and anatomical embalming.

There are superstar mixologists for these blends, just like there are in other fields like chefs?

There are guys that nobody outside our field would have any clue in the world as to who they are, but if you’re in the industry and you hear their name, you’re like "Ooh, yeah".

So if someone were to read about you and your profession and what you’re doing and they thought "hey, you know, I want to try that", what would you suggest to them?

I would say first off, if anybody wanted to get into the industry, make sure you can handle death. Make sure that you can be next to someone who’s dead and not freak out. I spend my days surrounded by anywhere from 100 to 400 cadavers, and I actually find it very peaceful, but not everybody has that mental makeup. This is not a profession everybody can handle. In fact, it’s a profession very few people can handle.

Another thing is, you have to be a natural stickler for cleanliness. I mean, if you are a slob in your personal life, then this industry is not for you. You have to be cleaning every minute that you’re not actually doing something with a body. And not just the surroundings in your prep room, but you’re cleaning the body itself. Sometimes it gets a little bit disgusting, and you’ve got to be able to handle that as well. Also, attention to detail is another one. You’ve got to be a very, very meticulous and detailed person. Constantly.

What alternatives to embalming a body are there?

In this country, cremation’s been on the rise. A lot of things have developed that can be done aside from embalming. There are always new things coming up in the field. It takes them a while to catch on. Like cremation 50 years ago. It wasn’t unheard of, but it was fairly rare. It’s a regular option now to cremate or do you want to have a funeral.

What are some of the other new things that have come up as alternatives to embalming?

There’s also promession http://tiemanator.blogspot.com/2008/02/swedens-new-funeral-rite-bodies-freeze.html where a body’s freeze-dried and then turned into a fine powder by vibration. The body’s then buried in a biodegradable box and the family is encouraged to plant a tree on the burial spot.

Then there’s an alkaline hydrolysis, which is essentially the same as promession except you’re using alkaline to do the drying and powdering, as opposed to liquid nitrogen. Green alternatives and cemeteries like this are becoming very popular.

What would you like done with your body when you die?

I’m actually planning to have my body sent to what is known as the Body Farm. The real name is Dr. Bass’ University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility. Basically, it’s where they do body decomposition studies to aid police, FBI, so on in establishing time of death for murder victims.

That’s where I want to go when I die. I actually wanted to do that for years before I even thought about doing this as a career. I can think of no better thing to do with my death than to help catch people who are ending other peoples’ lives.

There’s supposedly one in Wisconsin, but I haven’t heard anything more than rumors about that one. If they do open a body farm in Wisconsin, I so want to work there!

What sort of myths do you often encounter about the funeral industry that you dispel for people?

Well, the first one being that Funeral Directors are always tall, thin dark-suited men. Most people have this image of Funeral Directors that’s born from the old movies. You know, they expect Funeral Directors to be these tall, thin men that look like they’d be perfectly at home in a cemetery. I dispel that by being 5 foot 6, tattooed, and female.

The other one is that Funeral Directors have no sense of humor. People think they’re just very quiet, very stoic... just unflappable. You can’t make them laugh because that’s not part of the profession. Quite frankly, Funeral Directors probably have some of the weirdest senses of humor out there, but it comes down to the fact that we have to.

Why do funeral service professionals need weird senses of humor?

We are in an industry where grief and despair is the norm, and the only way to keep yourself from getting sucked in is to sometimes have a really strange sense of humor about things.

What does it take to be a Funeral Director working with families of the deceased?

To be a Funeral Director, you need to be empathetic, but also be able to not become emotionally involved, if that makes any sense.

Empathetic yet detached. That sounds difficult.

It is. It is. And, like I said, that was one aspect of it that I was not good at. It’s tricky in the fact that you have to reach the right balance of not being too emotionally involved, but not being too distant.

There were plenty of people in my class that had that perfect balance. Unfortunately, I was not one of them which is fine. I’ve always been more interested in the scientific part of it. I pretty much knew what end of the industry I was heading towards when I got into it. I realized really quickly that I was more effective in the back, as opposed to the front. And there are plenty of people who are very effective Funeral Directors

How do you feel about Funeral Directors?

I’m acquaintances with several different Funeral Directors from all over the state. I can’t say I’m actually friends with anybody who’s a Funeral Director, given the fact that I’m in the Goth scene and they think I’m pretty much one of the only people in the Chicago Goth scene that does this.

So I’m acquaintances with a bunch of different Funeral Directors. Some of them I really like. Some of them are really great people. Some of them I would really love to know on a friendship level. And some of them just remind me of used car salesmen.

Used car salesmen in the slicked-hair hustler way?

Yeah. Don’t get my wrong. There are plenty of really nice people in the industry, but I take a look at the news, and it just takes one bad apple to queer the whole bunch.

Especially in this industry where you really have to be above reproach and have standards so high the Eiffel Tower wouldn’t top them, you know. And then you get things like the guy down in Georgia with the crematorium or those two guys in Jersey with the hidden room in their funeral home where they were doing bone and tissue removal. And these guys out at the cemetery in the suburbs. I mean these things come up, and everybody in the industry gets hit.

So, like I said, it really only takes one or two bad people to just mess the whole thing up. The funeral industry feels the effects of things like that for a good year after it happens.

Is there a noticeable difference in the public’s trust of the funeral service?

Oh yes, definitely. Think about it. We are the people that you’re entrusting someone you love to. And you’re entrusting someone that you love to us not only when you’re at your most vulnerable, but when they’re at their most vulnerable.

So there has to be a very high measure of trust there. When it comes down to it, most of the time you’re giving this sort of trust to somebody that you wouldn’t know if you passed them on the street. Given the high level of emotions that are going on surrounding the entire funeral situation, it’s incumbent on Funeral Directors to really just be pretty much pure as a snow.

You really have to come across as the most trustworthy person since Abraham Lincoln. That’s the way it is. In any group of people, you’ll find some that you just kind of look at and go "Ugh!" And of course, you have that in the funeral industry, just as you’re going to have it in any industry.

Are you able to steer people in need to Funeral Directors you trust?

I do have friends that come to me when someone they love has unfortunately died, and they say, "Hey, will you recommend someone?" I’ll generally give them the numbers of some of the funeral homes of the people that I’ve chatted with and that I have a really good feeling about.

Does the public have any awareness of the status of a Funeral Director or an embalmer? For instance, do people say "When I die, I want this person to embalm me"?

No. Not at all. That’s always more of a personal choice. Most people will go with the funeral home their family has used for however many generations if they live in the same town. That’s generally how it works. That’s why you don’t usually see ads on TV for funeral homes.

There’s not much advertising in the funeral industry?

It’s very much a word-of-mouth industry. Funeral homes do advertise, but most of the time you’re getting roughly 75% of your business from referrals. Your loved one has died and a friend suggests "Oh, if you don’t have a funeral home, you should use this one that buried our grandma for us. They were really great".

Have you seen an instance of someone’s funeral service not matching who they were?

Part of what made me want to become a Funeral Director was a situation like that. I grew up in this little tiny redneck town in the middle of Florida.

It was me and my friend Angie and my friend Travis. We were the freaks in a school of about 700 people in our class. Everybody else... if you weren’t a redneck, you were a jock. And if you weren’t a jock, you were a redneck. Most of the time you were both.

The three of us are into drama, but not about drama. We’re dying our hair weird colors and we’re listening to punk music and we’re listening to this weird band called The Cure. We’re talking about things like what a good band GBH is and this kid called Souxie, and nobody knows what the hell we’re talking about. We’re showing up at school with blue hair and pink hair and red hair and nobody knew what to make of us. I didn’t mind.

And then Angie died my senior year. We knew it was coming. She had a really dicky heart. She went in for open heart surgery which back then was still kind of... well, you had a 50-50 chance you were going to make it out. So we knew going in that there was a chance she might not survive the surgery and unfortunately, she didn’t.

Did you know what Angie’s wishes were if she died?

We had talked about it with her, what she wanted for her funeral if she didn’t make it. She wanted her hair to be re-dyed to her favorite hair color of fire engine red. She’d made this Victorian mourning gown that she would wear out to the club. She always said "This is my favorite dress. I want to be buried in this. This is what I want".

She wrote it all down and admittedly, we were 17, so that doesn’t hold any weight with anything, but I made sure that her mom knew that this is what Angie and I talked about, and this is what she wants. Her mom just said thank you.

And then I went to her funeral. Angie’s hair was this awful muddy brown and she was wearing this pink paisley dress and they were playing Paula Abdul. They were playing Paula Abdul when you walked into the funeral home!

What did you think of Angie’s mom’s choices for her memorial?

When I walked up to the casket, my first thought was "Angie would not be caught dead outside of the house looking like that". That probably shows you that I had a weird sense of humor right from the beginning because, of course, there’s a part of me thinking "Well, that’s really ironic", and there’s this other part of me going "That’s in bad taste", and there’s a third part of me going "But it’s true!!" Yeah, it is really ironic.

I spent the entire funeral being so angry that this was not who she was. This was not anything she was about. This wasn’t even what she spent the last four years of her life looking like. And it just made me so angry.

And it happened again and again and again as I went to funerals for friends. Some of them died because of their own stupidity, some of them died through either genetics or outside tragedies. At funeral after funeral it was just like "No! This is not who they were!"

How did you react to all of your friends being categorized like that?

It pissed me off that they kept all getting shoved into this one box of "This is what you have to look like and this is what the funeral has to be like". And the entire time I’m sitting there inside screaming "No!!"

So when the whole getting laid off thing came up, my first thought was "This is my chance to actually go in and kick ass and take names and make people understand that not everyone wants to wear the dark suits and have classical music being played and everybody’s coming in saying how natural they look".

That was my chance to actually get in there and say "Look! You need to understand there are subcultures out there. You need to understand that people live their lives in a million different ways and that their funeral should be a celebration of the life they lived, not the life you wanted them to live".

Do you feel you’re able to affect that change and be that voice for people in your role?

You know, I do in a way because of what I’m doing now. I don’t have a lot of contact with the families, but occasionally I’ll have one show up who wasn’t able to get to the hospital or the nursing home in time, and they come into the prep room to say goodbye.

Was that uncomfortable?

When I had blue hair, it was still kind of, but it’s one of those things where the families really didn’t care what I looked like. They cared that it was their mom there and they needed to say goodbye. The funeral industry isn’t about making a personal statement about your own values and/or the way you express yourself. It’s basically about being quiet and solemn and just being there for the families. I understood that when I got into it.

Whenever I can, I do my utmost to make sure that they’re able to come in and say goodbye. I’ll fix their loved one up and make them look as nice as I can under the circumstances.

Have you been able to convince the Funeral Directors that not everyone is the same in death?

I’ve had some Funeral Directors that wouldn’t have given me the time of day because I’m this short, blue-haired, tattooed chick with punk music blaring in the background.

Now they actually ask me how I’m doing or what’s up. They realized through talking to me that I may look weird, but I’m still professional and I’m still a nice person. So I think on some level it’s actually caused them to maybe understand that not everybody has to look the same way to be good people.

Do you have aspirations to someday run your own funeral home?

I do not want to own my own funeral home. God no. I have a hard enough time managing my own finances, much less anybody else’s. But I would like to actually continue school to become a forensic pathologist or at least something in the forensic field.

Forensics is the branch of science dealing with crimes and death, the medical examiners and the coroners? Like CSI?

Correct. I’m well aware that it’s not going to be anything like CSI or NCIS or anything like that. No exciting chases down the road, waving your gun and yelling "Stop!" and I’m pretty well aware of the fact that I’d be a glorified lab monkey for years before I ever got anything interesting, but that’s still where I want to go. I eventually want to get to the point where I’m helping catch the bad guys.

How much more schooling will you need to become a forensic pathologist?

It’s pretty much six years. Essentially you’re going for something between the Bachelors and the Masters dgree. When you get into the field of forensics, you almost never stop going to school. It’s one of those fields where you constantly have to take classes to keep up in your field, which I’m perfectly fine with. I’m an absolutely voracious reader. I love studying just because I think it’s fun, which I know is weird.

Certainly not with our guests at Chateau Grrr. I’m pretty sure brains are treasured here.

You know, I’ve got one room in my house that’s completely packed with books, and the books have spilled into every other room in the house. Pretty much my entire apartment is books stacked on top of books, which have collectible toys stacked on top of them and more books stacked on top of them. I have books on forensics sitting next to fantasy. I wound up being quite a lending library for several people.

You mentioned at the Chicago Goth Meetup that you have a lot of pets. What sort of animals do you live with?

Currently, as far as the herd goes, I have an English bulldog named Grace Kelly, I have two ferrets named Gizzee and Mila, and I have three cats named Death, Harlequin, and Dunwich. Up until recently, I had a Chinchilla named Cheech, but he died a couple months ago.

I also had a Ball Python for a while, but I couldn’t spend as much time with him as I wanted to, so I gave him to a friend. All of my pets are rescued. The Ball Python was a very random rescue. A friend called me up and told me that they’d found this snake in an apartment they were cleaning. He’d been there for two weeks and didn’t look good. I went and got him and nursed him back to health.

Jasmyn, thank you so much for all your time in speaking with us here at Chateau Grrr. I’ve certainly learned a tremendous amount about the funeral industry. We wish you the best of luck in your future studies and accomplishments!!