59: Samantha Smith

Embalmer, Funeral Home

Samantha K. Smith works as an embalmer and a funeral director. Her average workload is around 40 to 60 hours a week, but the pandemic made her industry infinitely busier almost overnight. So many people died that it was difficult to keep up. At one point during the pandemic, she had 17 open files on her desk that she had to deal with at one time. In April of 2020, Samantha embalmed 80 decedents. The average funeral home in America usually does less than that in a full year. Usually her work is about fifty percent embalming and fifty percent working with families, but because of the sheer volume of work, she was in the prep room all the time. Her funeral home assisted over 700 families last year, which was 150 more than normal. Samantha believes that it is always important to be able to see the deceased presented with dignity, but it is especially important for people whose loved ones died of COVID because they could not be there with them while they were dying. It was so hard when the state told them that they could only have ten people in the room for a funeral. The decision of whether to get together to honor and mark the loss of the deceased at the risk of infecting others was such a difficult one for families to make. 

Samantha lives with her fiancée, who owns a retail store that had to shut down during COVID. That dichotomy caused a bit of a rift between them, him being out of work as she became busier than ever. Some weeks she was working twelve to fourteen hours a day, and he was having trouble understanding just how exhausted and busy she was. Samantha’s best friend was also a funeral director, but she decided to leave the profession. Burnout has been a huge problem in their industry during the pandemic.

Samantha feels that she has gained a lot of perspective on what is important. She was forced to find new ways to cope with the increased amount of stress which was only exacerbated by her mental illness. She had to make a much more concerted effort to care for herself mentally and physically, since she had no social outlets. Personally, Samantha knows six people who had COVID. Through work, she witnessed over 300 COVID deaths. She really hopes that, if there is another global health crisis on this scale, that people will act with common sense and not turn the wellbeing of others into a divisive political issue.