A day in the life: Eugene funeral director Bethany Wozniak

Editor’s note: Today, we launch a monthly feature from local author and former University of Oregon journalism professor Lauren Kessler, looking at a day in the life of a person in our community.

Bethany Wozniak is on hold with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. It’s been almost 45 minutes. She’s trying to arrange a military funeral for the grandfather of one of the families she’s working with.

She doesn’t look like what people might expect a funeral director to look like — no dark suit, no hushed solemnity.

She’s a youthful 41, quietly confident, a listener who knows when to speak, a director who knows when to step back and when to take the lead. In an industry sodden with sorrow, there’s an ease to her, a lightness in how she moves through the day, even now, on hold, juggling lunch and logistics and an over-the-top to-do list.

Not long ago, she would have been an outlier. In 1970, only about 5% of mortuary science graduates were women. Now, they are the majority.

She’s still on hold.

A military funeral is not the 21-gun salute of the movies. It’s a quieter ritual: two uniformed officers, the playing of taps, the careful folding of a flag and its presentation to the family. Wozniak has arranged many of these. She’s been a funeral director for more than 15 years — first in Springfield, and for the past five years in Eugene.

She sits at a corner desk in the cramped office at Sunset Hills Funeral Home that she shares with four co-workers. While she waits, she nibbles at her brought-from-home lunch — hummus and vegetables, an apple — and studies the stack of files next to her computer.

Each one represents a family trying to make decisions in the first raw days after a death: burial or cremation, a viewing, a casket, a shroud, an urn, a gathering in the chapel or elsewhere, a graveside service, flowers, music, timing, organization.

She must also attend to all the details, the layers of legality: death certificates and notifications and documents, so many documents.

From the outside, her job may seem depressing. She is so close to death and grief, the places most of us do not want to visit. Or even talk about. To Wozniak, it is her sweet spot. 

“I have a favorite quote,” she says, off the phone now, walking on a path toward the crematorium to check on a worker doing maintenance. “If you don’t value death, you don’t value life.”

It’s a late-spring day. The grounds of the funeral home are lovely, a verdant south Eugene hillside, manicured like a golf course. 

“We’ve clinicized the end of life, she says, shaking her head. “We push it away. So we’ve lost some of the meaningful rituals that surround death. I get to honor those rituals. I am passionate about that.” She is silent for a moment. “I feel like I’m doing something meaningful. Oh. And I get hugs. Genuine hugs.”

She walks back to her office to meet with a family, make calls, handle incoming calls, and start on the to-do list she hasn’t tackled yet. Her day — this day, most days — is one pivot after another.

A call comes through from a new widow who has no one to talk to. Wozniak listens to the woman’s story. When a call comes in, she needs to get details to know how to proceed. But these conversations are not transactional. Funeral homes are businesses, but the “business” of death and burial or cremation, the “business” of visitation and viewing and ceremony is deeply personal.

“I try to meet people where they are,” Wozniak says. “I listen to what they say and how they say it, to tone of voice. I hear what they don’t say also.”

She meets with a family in the chapel, a light, airy and insistently nondenominational space that has hosted funerals, ceremonies and celebrations for any and all — or no — religions, from a vibrant New Orleans jazz affair to a Buddhist ceremony with candles and specialty foods, to a secular event with the space decorated as an elfin forest.

One family she met with had a loved one who pre-planned everything down to the music to be played at the funeral. But she also counsels families who are blindsided by the death, whose shock and grief leave them so numb that any decision about how to proceed is a struggle. And then there are the families who have a hard time agreeing on anything. She pivots. She, as she says, “reads the room.” 

She didn’t learn that skill in her two years studying mortuary science at Mt. Hood Community College. There, she took classes in chemistry, anatomy and physiology, and pathology, accompanied by coursework in embalming, restorative arts, funeral service law, funeral service sociology — with math and business computing thrown into the mix.

She served a two-term internship at a Portland funeral home. She passed both state and national exams. For licensed funeral directors in Oregon, the average hourly wage is $33.50.

Her listening skills and compassion come from elsewhere: maybe from her quiet childhood in the South Dakota Black Hills and Sheridan, Wyoming; maybe from her years as a Portland bartender. Maybe because, like all of us, at some time in our lives, she has been touched by tragedy.

Wozniak heads back to her office for paperwork. She looks through the file folders on her desk.

She looks up at the whiteboard on the wall, with its hand-drawn grid that lists names and simple details that belie complicated stories. There are columns for “urn type” and “personal property” (a lock of hair, a pendant), and “Notes” (waiting for Navy urn).

Another call comes in.

Not today, but with some frequency, Wozniak’s job will take her up close and personal with bodies. She is a trained and certified embalmer, a two- to four-hour process that involves cleaning, disinfecting, setting facial features, and replacing bodily fluids with specialized chemicals.

Embalming used to be the standard for all funerals, but with the growth of cremation and green and natural burials, it has fallen out of favor. More likely, Wozniak will simply “prepare” the body by dressing it in clothes brought by the family, fixing hair, applying makeup if appropriate, and carefully arranging the person in the casket.

She moves between these tasks the way she has all day — phone calls and paperwork, families and rituals, the living and the dead — pivoting, adjusting, reading the room until the work becomes quieter, more solitary.

“This is the family’s last view,” she says. “I would like it to be the best it can be. It’s my final act of service for them.”