A Rochdale mum who quit her fashion degree to pursue embalming has said she sees preparing the dead as ‘an honour’.
Rachel Carline, 32, even worked on her own grandfather’s body following his death - an experience she said felt ‘natural’ after caring for him in life.
Drawn to the profession from childhood, she landed an administrative role at a Co-op funeral home in Rochdale after falling ill in her final year of university, but quickly realised that it was embalming that really fascinated her.
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“Even as a kid I was fascinated with things other people would consider morbid,” she said.
When Rachel told her mum she thought working in the funeral industry would be a good job, her mum called it ‘ghoulish’, and her dad was worried about the kind of things she’d see. But Rachel described the job as “a real privilege”.
Now an expert in her field, she feels it is a privilege to be able to prepare a body to be viewed by loved ones after death, saying: "While it’s difficult and emotional, I also feel honoured to be in this position.
"Me feeling this way actually drives me to make sure I do everything within my power to support families through a very difficult time.”
While Rachel knows that many people consider her overwhelming desire to work in the funeral industry from such a young age to be somehow peculiar, she is extremely proud of her work and the service it gives to the public.
A profound early inspiration for her career in embalming - where a body is preserved to slow down natural deterioration and to make the deceased appear restful in preparation for loved ones seeing them in an open casket or the chapel of rest - came when she viewed her grandmother's body as a little girl.
She said: “We’d been really close. My grandma, Edna, was quite a big influence on me. But when I saw her when she had died, her colour was really, really, really unnatural and there was a smell. The odour really stuck with me.
“It wasn’t a good experience. But, when I look back now, I understand why she looked the way she did.”
While Rachel was "glad" her parents took her to the viewing, which helped her to understand death, the experience had a profound effect. And, although Rachel initially went to university to study fashion, she deferred her place and started approaching funeral homes for work.
She said: “I just felt this pull. I sent letters out, CVs, phoned up. Then I just started turning up. There was a Co-op funeral home in Rochdale and I wouldn’t leave them alone.
“Eventually, a position opened up in admin. I didn’t really care what it was so long as it was a foot in the door.”
Abandoning her degree, Rachel started her role, aged 20. She said: “I liked going in early and watching them doing the embalming. They’d even let me help with little things, things within my remit.”
In December 2012, Rachel began studying to be an embalmer, and she qualified in 2015, landing a role with Co-op Funeralcare Lancashire. By 2018, she was the Chairperson for the North-West division at the British Institute of Embalmers.
Now she has embalmed thousands of people, including her grandfather, and several friends.
Embalming up to three or four bodies a day, taking two hours on average to ensure the deceased looks their best, she also restores and reconstructs the faces of people who may have been in accidents or dead for some time.
To do so, Rachel asks the deceased’s family for photos showing their loved one from various angles, so she can recreate the way they preferred to look in life.
She said: “Sometimes I’ll get a photo that’s 30 years old. I’m a good embalmer but I can’t knock 30 years off! Many people think embalming is just doing hair and make-up, or preserving the body, but it’s so much more. It’s anatomy, maths and chemistry.
“To work out the amounts of fluids you need, such as formaldehyde, water and dyes, you have to know how much the body weighs, how long it's been since the person died, how long until the funeral, plus many other factors.
"But we always see them as a whole person, not an equation.”
Rachel cared for her grandad Dave Phillips, 76, when he was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in March 2015, before he passed away in the September, and considers embalming his body one of her most poignant jobs.
She recalled: “When grandad was ill, he deteriorated, lost a lot of weight and was very frail. I looked after him and spent a lot of time with him in his final weeks.
“I had been heavily involved in looking after him when he was ill at home, so why wouldn’t I do it when he passed away? It felt like the most natural thing to do for me to continue to care for him after he’d died.
“I was devastated when he died. But I also felt that I had extra time with him that nobody else was going to get. It was such an honour to know I was going to do the last thing anyone was going to do for him."
“Whilst I was doing the procedure I was fine. The technical, procedural part of embalming, which is visceral by nature, is what I do day in and day out,” she added.
“Once he was embalmed and looked like my grandad again, that’s when I found it quite emotional. When I was washing his hair, I got some shampoo in his eye and apologised to him.
“I shaved his face, trimmed his fingernails. Those last elements of care, although difficult, I think benefited me in my grief.”
Rachel finds the strength to work in difficult and emotionally demanding situations -and she has also felt a deep emotional reaction when she is embalming people of the same age group, saying: “It really made me face my mortality. Now I never leave a conversation on an argument. The job has changed me in that way.”
Rachel also shares information, educates and informs people on embalming by hosting a podcast, The Eternal Debate, with fellow embalmer Andrew Floyd.
She said: “Some people in the profession still have the attitude that having feelings stop you from doing your job properly. It’s the opposite for me. The day it doesn’t affect me, or I don’t care who I’m embalming, is the day I stop.”
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