Dead Lucrative

Written for Fuel Inc. magazine, July 2009.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dead Lucrative
You’ll see dead people – lots of ‘em. Who knew it paid though?

I know, I know - hanging out with the folks and their friends is already bad enough, so why on Earth would you want to hang out with cadavers for a job? But that’s the point. If we were all squeamish then we’d have no paramedics, tattoo artists, midwives, and certainly no funeral directors. In the words of Monty Python, you need to “Always look on the bright side of life”.

Well…death, that is.

The good news is that if you can keep your breakfast waffles down, stay at college for 2-4 years, and resist the urge to say, “Why so serious?” to those in the waiting room of the funeral home you work in, then this is a job that can easily be done. The better news is that the average starting salary in Canada for a funeral director is more than $40,000, rising by approximately $1,000 before tax for every year you stick at it. Perhaps the best news is that they’ll always, always be new business. The Darwin Awards suggest that there’s plenty of people falling off motorcycles, launching fireworks out of their butt crack, or trying to juggle flaming sticks of dynamite just to get onto TV. You’ll never have to wait long for your next customer. It might even be Johnny Knoxville.