188. What it's like to date a mortician

12 Dec, 2024

[Disclaimer: there are some details about the stories of death and funerals in this post, just an fyi as trigger warning, if you're not into that kind of stuff.]

A screenshot from the game Eternally Us found on Game Jolt here

I recently read ava's "plans for your blog after you die" and it got me thinking about my ex, but not in a loving and yearning way, but in a huh, that happened I guess.

Also for my death, this is what I want:

1. A basic cremation service. Cheapest option. Don’t go through the funeral homes - call around. Don’t buy a casket - use a cardboard box.

2. Put my ashes somewhere cheap and safe. Distribute my ashes up in different cities like my grandparents did (if it's not too expensive).

3. Then have a memorial service separately. Much cheaper. If my relatives want to do a really nice celebration, that would be a sweet way to get the family together, but don't make it super fluffy and ostentatious though. Just make it simple and have good food there. Also, please bring all of my postcards that I have sent out. Put it on a giant poster board, then put them in a scrapbook so it can be passed down to my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren, etc. Digitalize all postcards please.

4. For notifying people: I have preserved all my passwords and accounts in a single document. I'll update this later.

Monologue by Julie Delpy in Before Sunset (2004)

I keep thinking about how I would process and heal these days. Maybe writing about my past relationships would understand myself better. Like why I made the choices I did, why I stayed longer than I should have, or left sooner than I wanted to, etc. Sometimes, I wonder if writing about it would feel cathartic. Other times, I worry it might feel like reopening a wound, poking around at scars I’ve already convinced myself I’ve healed from. But what if it’s neither? What if it’s just a way to sit with the mess of it all for a little while, to hold the good and the bad in the same breath, and let myself be okay with it? I feel like every relationship leaves some kind of mark. While some are like faint pencil sketches you can barely make out anymore, others feel like they were etched into stone, impossible to erase even after all this time. Maybe writing is how I figure out which is which. Maybe it’s how I can remind myself that all those marks, faint or bold, are part of the picture I’m still drawing.

Fun fact, I once dated a mortician. My friends called him 'Morgue Boy'. Whenever a date asks me about my dating history or just joking around with friends, I used to bring it up and I think it's really funny to me. My date usually feels a little intimidated. Not sure why. Perhaps it's a bad thing that I mention Morgue Boy... I mean, I also dated a dj and a stand up comic- but actually, so did everyone else! Disc jockeys and comedians are a dime a dozen. Why not spice it up with an undertaker? (As of now, I do not bring up Morgue Boy on the first date. If they ask, I bring him up past the 5th date lmao.)

Dating a mortician sounds pretty intense, but I really don't think so. My friends are always perplexed, but they just say something along the lines of, "okay, that tracks. I guess that's pretty on-brand of you, Kay." Often, "well, someone has to do it" or "I couldn't do that..." It depends on the person and how comfortable they are with death. Now, I think I'm really a sensitive person, so death often has a hurting feeling on me, even though I was momentarily surrounded by it and have been to a few share of random strangers' funerals and seen their crying families when I was waiting for him to be done with work. I like to think of it as an absurdity and make peace with it.

For the general stereotype, yep, dating a funeral director (mortician) was a bit intense. For the most part, they're no different than anyone else. Some people may think it's really creepy (like my mom did, but she thought my ex was quite nice though). I think that funeral directors are actually incredible people that do the things that many people don't want to do. Many are dedicated to their profession, which means a part of them never stops working - they are the job and the job is them. This can be challenging as their partner (especially if you aren’t in the industry).

That being said, I never want to be a part of the industry, not because of the corpses, it's just because of the tiring, and most times thankless, work. The schedule can be weird, depending on where you end up. Long nights, many days in a row without a break, evening visitations. Work has to be a priority, as there will be Friday evenings where you have to stay to do a visitation and clean up and you'll want to be home or out with friends instead.

In the industry, they call it death care. Personally, I found the lack of joy and (consistently) dark humor quite sad after a while. I mean, it's a little weird I was dating a 22 year old with a will. He typed out his will way before he could even drink legally in the US. I could never have a worse day than a funeral director, which gets annoying (not that it’s a competition). Somewhere, somehow, there are morticians that deal with the worst things everyday, but still have faith in humanity and above all, they care beyond any professional that I would know.

While I’m not particularly fascinated by death, I appreciated how much care he put into making the unbearable just a little more bearable for the families he worked with. Also, he would tell me awful stories about how the funeral industry is all profit and don't actually care about you. He didn't like that part of the industry, but he's grew up in it so it's normal to him. The funny thing is, I watched Six Feet Under years after we broke up and it was a little bit enlightening and I understood a lot of the references.

--

From my mortician ex-boyfriend, I learned from him that a lot of funeral homes are all about sales and mark-ups. He said that anything dealing with death has been completely capitalized to profit off grieving people. Funeral homes deliberately try to have you make decisions where you're at your worst emotionally, because you're more likely to spend money that way ¹. He would often talk about how predatory the funeral arrangers are because they really try to upsell you on the price of a casket or bouquet, when you're literally at your lowest.

Despite all the awful industry section side of it, he’d tell me interesting stories about his day. He once told me a story from work about a Catholic mass funeral he worked at that was almost completely empty. Apart from the priest, the organist, the funeral directors, and the church staff, there was no one there. The funeral had been prearranged years earlier by a nursing home social worker. It was pre-paid from the funds of the deceased’s personal savings as part of her long-term financial planning.

The woman who passed away had served as a medical professional overseas. It was a life full of history and service, but she had outlived everyone she knew. By the time of her funeral, there was no family or friends left to attend. She was, quite literally, the last surviving member of her community.

--

“It’s not about making them look alive,” he told me once. “It’s about making them look at peace.”

He would often tell me graphic accounts of freak accidents, like scraping a poor biker off of a busted motorbike and car collision on the freeway, or how he had to help his dad piece together a guy's face, which fell off because he was shot in the face while cleaning his gun, things of that sort. I would get concerned about how enthusiastic he would get, how wide his eyes would be, when he talked a lot of the gruesome details. I've gotten used to the dirty details, but it still was a bit bothersome over time.

Other times, he would tell me about the family drama- how families would get into screaming matches about the will and their inheritance, usually right after or even during the services. In my opinion, these were the worst stories, more sad than the death itself. On a lighter note, there was another story of the funeral of a local gang member and there were multiple girlfriends that showed up to the service, which caused a lot of drama at the reception. That's crazy!

I know he should have a healthy and a safe place for him to talk shop, especially with a romantic partner, but I felt a little bit uneasy and I didn't really like hearing how he would have to tell stories so stoically. It's a way to process and cope, but he would do it in such a detached way, that he's probably seen it all. Sometimes work would get so hard, that he sometimes lost a sense of humanity and he would be completely devoid of sentimentality that day, or even that week. However, this is usually caused by assholes he encountered, not necessarily the corpses he would work on or pick up.

He believed in a lot of supernatural forces at work, especially spirits and ghosts. He would often scare me a lot with the creepy ghost stories. I pay extra respect to the deceased and ask permission constantly, if I so happen to pitch a tent on a graveyard now (which happened a couple of times in my life!).

For the personal account ², Morgue Boy and I dated for about a year and a couple months when we were in our last years of university. He was in my technical writing course and had a bunch of other classes together. We were studying in the same program, actually. It’s been almost five years since we broke up. Time has this funny way of softening the sharp edges of heartbreak, though if I’m being honest, there’s still a touch of bitterness in there, tucked away, like a souvenir I didn’t mean to keep.

I think it's because he cheated on me with his coworker. I really didn't like that. Also the fact that I didn’t find out about his infidelity until months later, when he couldn’t keep the secret anymore (he thought that his brother already told me and was confused when I called him just to catch up after I moved because I thought that we were cool, but actually! we weren't!!!).

a funny conversation I had with my friend about this- looking back, um, well we don't actually like french men better lmao.

Although, by then, the relationship was already fraying at the edges. At the time, I was actually planning a big move. We had talked about long distance and that I was really unwilling to try it at the time, because I knew that he wouldn't enjoy it that much (Long distance for me is not big deal compared to my former partners' experiences). I was trying to end things with some semblance of peace, and meanwhile, he was growing callous, distant, and a bit of an ass, really.

If we go back to the very beginning, for a while, things were good.

He was a mortician when we first started dating and when we broke it off, he was still doing that, I think. He might be doing something else now, but he had a dream (more like his father's dream, though. But maybe as time passed, it's more of his dream?) of opening up a new mortuary. His work brought him into constant contact with death, and that gave him a unique perspective on life- one that I kinda admired, aside from the gruesome and gritty details, even if I didn’t always understand it. He had a great ability to be gentle and really thoughtful, all of which made him very good at his job. He was kind of born into this job though, since his father became a mortician at a very young age, as well. It's a family business and he wanted to continue doing it for his dad.

He was pretty sweet and did big grandiose romantic gestures for me. For instance, when he finally asked me to be his girlfriend, he brought me to his hometown, and I met his family and his best friend. He pulled out a rainbow rose bouquet to ask me to be his girlfriend, officially, which I thought was the most romantic thing ever when I was just a 20 year old. In retrospect, a lot of the big romantic gestures that he did, he did it for himself, like romantic things that he wanted to do, not necessarily for me.

honestly, in retrospect, a nervous 22 year old pulling this out and saying some sentimental words to a girl is a pretty impressive feat for people at that age, so I gotta give him props for that. It's actually a pretty long and painstaking process for the florist to dye all of these, so it was pretty cool. I don't want to be super ungrateful, these were excellent flowers... they're just not the excellent flowers for me lol 😳

At the time, though, I didn’t see it that way. I was 20, swept up in the excitement of it all. It was one of my first 'adult' relationships, even though we were still in school. The grand declarations, the thought that someone could want me so much that they would script a whole cinematic moment to prove it. And to be fair, he was kind. He cared for his family with the same big-hearted energy he poured into our relationship.

As time went on, I started to notice the cracks in the fantasy. The romantic gestures began to feel more like performances- awesome and elaborate, but ultimately about him. It was less about what would make me feel loved and more about the story he wanted to tell. He would make weird cheesy videos on social media that I really didn't like. He was insistent and said that it was something he's always wanted to do and because I had a lot of friends, he said he should show that he's a good Instagram boyfriend... This ain't the Instagram bf I want tho. I actually like videos, but maybe edited videos shared between us and close friends, not to his old high school friends and coworkers from the mortuary... My ideal partner is off the grid, but if they have social media, they would only follow their close friends, me, and a bunch of pet animal accounts.

It’s not that I didn’t appreciate the effort- I really did. I even reciprocated with a grand gesture of my own, by planning a very elaborate birthday dinner for him and made him his favorite cake. When we arrived back at my house, we were just relaxing and scrolling through our phones, sitting by my siblings and parents (his friends were super busy unfortunately, his family was a state over, so we hung out with my family that day). He was receiving a lot of birthday greetings from friends and he was showing them to me and reading them out. He received a questionable message from his ex girlfriend, who used to be his TA in class (scandaloso), and I was surprised to see that he still kept the nudes she sent after they broke up...

I was a bit too nice to him because I remember pulling him to the other room, gritting through my teeth and saying,

"I know it's your birthday, so I'm not going to make a giant scene over it since my family is around."

He blinked and looked a bit afraid of my next utterance.

"So, do you, like, plan on deleting those anytime soon?"

I could hear the strain in my own voice, trying to sound casual when I was anything but.

--

He nervously laughed it off, like it wasn’t a big deal, and said something about how he “forgot they were there” and that it wasn’t like he ever looked at them.

--

I should’ve pressed him harder. Looking back, I wish I had said something stronger, something that communicated how disrespected I felt. But I was 20, and I still thought that being a “cool girlfriend” meant brushing off things that made me uncomfortable. So, I let it slide for that day, convincing myself it wasn’t worth ruining his birthday over.

We had a conversation about it the next day, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how casual he was about it, how little regard he seemed to have for how I might feel seeing that. It wasn’t just the photos; it was the fact that he didn’t seem to think it mattered, that it was my job to be fine with it.

--

That moment became one of those quiet turning points in our relationship, the kind you don’t recognize until much later. I started to notice other little things- how he’d press me on expressing my feelings when I don't feel comfortable to tell at the moment, making jokes at my expense, always expecting me to laugh along. How the grand gestures were often paired with small, thoughtless moments like this, and how those moments left me feeling bad in ways I didn’t have the words to articulate back then.

One of the worst things is - he didn't really get along with my friends. On the day I introduced him to the "Board of Directors" ³, we went to my friend's restaurant, where she worked as a server. We supported her throughout the evening by getting a table of 5 at her workplace and leaving a fat tip.

At this dinner, however, we got a bit wine drunk (we were at an Italian trattoria!), and he was saying a little out of pocket things like,

"Oh yeah, one of my old relationships back when I was 18, I was the 'Other Woman' and was the mistress, essentially."

Honestly, I recall that "meeting the friends" dinner was pretty wild. I was wine drunk and my friends were scrutinizing this man while I was being really chatty and doozy from the alcohol. They took good care of me because he shortly left the restaurant in such a frantic hurried state. I was so confused why he left in such a hurry. I find out later from him it's because he thought that my friends were really judgmental about him being involved in some cheating scandal when he was younger. Should have seen it coming!

I remember one time, the surprise party incident, where he failed miserably at being the “distraction,” was just one of those moments that perfectly encapsulated our dynamic. He could never really mesh with my world, and it became clear to me later on that he didn’t want to try after that. He was so caught up in his own insecurities, his own way of seeing things, that he couldn’t understand why I might want to surround myself with my friends, who he really didn't like either.

Me pitching this post idea to my friend and being reminded of how much exes do suck hehe. My mom had to call and fake an emergency in order to get me to my own surprise party. The whole group was so late to the reservation, I didn't have time to get ready before dinner because Morgue Boy held us up. I would rather be on time to my own birthday dinner than get laid. So selfish!!

At the time, I felt so torn. My friends are an important part of my life, and them not wanting to spend time with him should have been a big indicator.

Somewhere along the line, I realized that love isn’t just about the grand gestures. It’s in the little things, too: remembering my favorite tea, asking about my day, noticing when I’m quiet and checking in patiently. With him, the small things often got lost in the shadow of the big ones.

Looking back, I think he was chasing an idea of romance he’d seen in movies or read about in books, not necessarily the kind of love that grows from really knowing someone. And maybe I was guilty of that, too. At 20, it’s easy to get swept up in the magic of it all, to believe that love is supposed to look a certain way, especially when you're so young.

But for all his thoughtfulness, Morgue Boy had this strange insecurity about himself. He was also super paranoid and kind of a square, at times. I didn't think he could hang. Even my dad told him, if you want to hang out with Kayla, you have to have a passport- which pushed him to get one straight away. He told me that he had a desire to go traveling, after meeting me. On our first date, he asked me what my exes were like. He was actually one of my first (not very first, but early dating life!) boyfriends. He was disappointed that I didn't have any psycho European lovers (of course, this has changed).

Despite having more relationship experience and dealing daily with the weightiest parts of life and death, he carried this inferiority complex. I don’t know where it came from- maybe it was him being the youngest in a pretty dysfunctional family. I liked how nice his family was, but I could see that they weren't always like that. They were really kind to me and I appreciated it, but I think that they were holding back a bit because they were dealing with a lot of things.

He also would tell me that I'm more intelligent that him. (although, not to be completely arrogant, but I reluctantly agree with him). I was, perhaps, a bit too naive to think that someone who was in the same class as me would have the same level of understanding of certain things. I think he was the same level of sweetness as me, but not really the same level of smartness. Often, I wrote a lot of the outlines of his term papers when he was too exhausted from working. I didn't do the whole thing or submit it for him, that would be insane and I didn't have a lot of time either. Aside from my unbalanced moral compass dealing with academic integrity, I honestly didn't want him to fall behind (Looking back, I thought it was hilarious that he dated the TA of his class, but he barely passed the lab...).

Maybe his insecurity was something deeper, something he couldn’t articulate. Either way, it made him oddly competitive, immature, and, toward the end, emotionally closed off. It's funny because he was really emotional, overly so, at the beginning. He was more sensitive than me actually.

I look back now and think about how much that his insecurity shaped our dynamic. It’s strange to love someone who is quietly measuring themselves against you, who can’t quite let themselves believe they’re enough. For a while, I felt bad about it. I tried to boost his confidence, to downplay my own accomplishments, to pick up the slack when he was tired. But eventually, it wasn’t enough.

When he cheated, it wasn’t just the betrayal that hurt- it was the fact that he hid it for so long. He let me go on believing we were on the same page, even as he made choices that ensured we weren’t. By the time he admitted it, we were already spiraling. He’d grown colder, less affectionate, and I was trying so hard to end things without everything catching fire.

It’s weird how time gives you clarity though. Morgue Boy's infidelity, his insecurity, even his distance at the end - they all make sense to me now. I think he needed someone who fit better into the life he was building, someone on his level. Maybe that’s why he’s with his coworker now (or was, the last I heard). In a way, I hope they’re happy together. She might be more suitable for him in ways I never could be.

Despite everything, I don’t regret our relationship. It taught me a lot about care and closure, about how people can be both deeply thoughtful and deeply flawed at the same time. Other than the gory stories, he taught me a lot about better weightlifting techniques, the nutritional benefits of kefir milk, embalming methods, League of Legends too. These are things I wouldn't necessarily care that much about (except for being precise and understanding lifting form during gym routines, those are very important), but it's cool to know?

I don’t think he was an evil person- just a complicated person, trying to navigate life and death and love all at once. I believe that I’ve made my peace with him, finally. I used to be super bitter about it, but I remember that sometimes relationships don’t have to last (to be good). I sometimes think about the past, not in a longing way, but in that curious, detached way you wonder about people who drifted out of your life. I hope he’s still gentle in his work. I hope he’s kinder to himself. And I hope, for his sake, he finally feels like he’s enough and happier in his new relationship.

I had an ex-boyfriend justify cheating (he had cheated on his ex gf before for some reason), who said to me:

"if the two people match each other better, isn't it better in the long run that he cheated and went with the other girl?"

I'm not exactly sure how to answer that question fully, but all I can say is - I think cheating is just inconvenient for all parties involved. Maybe not an incredibly evil, preposterous thing, maybe not a "beneficial in the long run" good thing, but it's incredibly inconvenient.

As for me? I’m still not that fascinated by death. But I do think about how people handle endings- the quiet dignity, the messy truth, the little acts of care that make the unbearable just a little more bearable. And in that sense, this relationship taught me a lot.

~ a celebration of life,

<3 K

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