When rubbing shoulders with death is your full-time gig

This story originally appeared on April 4, 2025 in URBANIA, an online magazine based in Quebec focused on pop culture and society.

I think about death often.

Lately, faced with a loved one’s illness, it’s been on my mind almost every day.

And yet I rarely speak of it. Because death has a way of tightening the throat of those it touches.

I felt it was time to confront the reflections I keep sidestepping by meeting with those who live alongside it every day: professionals in the funeral world. If their work shapes their relationship to death and mourning, it also reshapes how they see life.

Not your typical somber funeral director

I feel a knot in my stomach as I push open the heavy door of the Memoria funeral complex in Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie. These kinds of places—ones I’ve fortunately not had to visit too often—have always left me with a suffocating sense of discomfort.