Happy undertaking brings rich rewards

Death comes at anytime and those in the funeral industry have to be ready. Around the clock they deal with families faced with immeasurable, and often unexpected, heartbreak. Carly Udy finds out how those in the industry cope with day-to-day mortality.

This is the point my heart speeds up and Kylie Sprague's voice is replaced by "thump, thump, thump, thump".
The door to the viewing room is quietly pulled back and in we go.
It's silent inside and the cool air pricks at my bare legs.
The energy in this room is negative.
The room is small and narrow like the inside of a large bus. At the opposite end is a open, mahogany coffin, which has been wheeled on an angle. A thin cover, which looks like a mosquito net, is laid over-top.
We walk up to the coffin. I take a silent breath, and we both peer inside.
I see a slender elderly woman, hair pulled back, a flower pinned to her lapel, hands at her waist.
She looks peaceful but my heart is still racing.
I don't tell Kylie, funeral director and embalmer at Elliotts Funeral Services, this is my first time seeing a body.
And later that night I struggle to sleep. Not because I'm scared by what I've seen, but because this has made me think more about death than I perhaps wanted to.
While an inevitable fate for all of us, I haven't until now, dared think too much about what might happen to someone when they die.
So what does happen?
The body is picked up from the place of death or the hospital mortuary and a doctor will confirm the death.
Authority is then sought from the family for embalming, a process of preserving, sanitising and presenting the deceased.
Embalming can take anywhere from two to 12 hours depending on the condition of the body.
Here at Elliotts, the mortuary is adjoined to a holding room, known as a "trim room" and the garage where stationwagons with tinted rear windows are kept. Coffins of all sizes are stacked on the garage shelves.
The radio is playing the Black Eyed Peas' Pump it Louder, and embalmer Josh Gray, who is in his 20s, is attaching gleaming gold handles to a brown coffin which catches his youthful reflection.
There's two other people in the trim room with him. They're both elderly and they're both dead. One is in a coffin. The other under a white sheet and is awaiting clothes to be dropped off so he can be dressed for his funeral.
I momentarily wonder what they would think about this song but it suddenly switches to Stan Walker's Little Black Box.
Gray is the the fourth generation in his family to enter the funeral business. His father formally owned the business Gray's Funeral Services in Rotorua.
He's been at Elliotts six weeks and has just had his first go at cosmitising (placing specialised make-up on the deceased).
The job is one that's probably "going to look better under different light," he assures me.
Next to the trim room, which is essentially a holding room for the dead, is the mortuary.
Outside the room is a pair of white gumboots, bubble-gum pink gumboots, and navy blue gumboots bedecked in white hearts.
Inside it's a sterile environment - I see a stainless-steel mortuary bed, a cupboard full of colourful bottled chemicals, a hoist for the heavier folk who come here, and a floor that can be washed down - this is necessary when there's a lot of blood.
Embalming works by pumping formaldehyde through the body in a process called arterial embalming. In return the blood is removed from the venous system.
The solution sanitises the body, making it safe to handle, and preserves tissue so the body can be viewed for the funeral period. About 98 per cent of bodies nowadays are embalmed, but some religions do expressly forbid preservation of the body.
"It's not a legal requirement but, if it's not done, the body must be buried within a day or two," Kylie, 36, says.
Elegantly attired in a forest green silk shirt and black suit, she's perfectly preened and striking.
The smell of the chemicals in the mortuary is replaced by a whiff of her perfume as she walks around the mortuary bed.
Her fingers are adorned in gold rings and her dark hair and make-up, flawless. She looks more like a model today than someone who has to don masks, gloves, overalls and specialist ventilation systems.
She dresses like this when embalming because every case is treated as an infectious case.
CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which has links to mad cow disease) is not embalmed because it's so infectious.
"We use surgical instruments, like forceps, aneurism hooks, scalpels, surgical suture needles and hemostats. Everything has to be sterilised, including the mortuary and ourselves ... because a lot of diseases like Hepatitis B and C remain infectious after death."
Tuberculosis (TB) is an airborne infectious disease and if a body is moved, they can expel it from their lungs.
Aside from preserving bodies, Sprague also spends hours restoring disfigured faces.
In the case of accidents and sudden deaths, the coroner will almost invariably order a post-mortem examination to establish the exact cause of death. But such intimate investigations of the human body wreak their own havoc.
"Restorative work is a real privilege," Kylie says. "I know that I'm good at that and I want the person to look good for the family."
She rebuilds bone and pieces together torn skin, sometimes taking up to two days to complete the job.
Restoring disfigured faces with wax is her forte.
"Shotgun victims that have been able to be viewed, that's a huge achievement to me. My dad was killed in an accident and we couldn't view him."
Funeral homes can never deny a family from seeing a body but they can advise against it. Those in late stages of decomposition can be gruesome.
"They bloat, go green and purge. A lot have maggots and it's a terrible smell."
It's a tough job working with the dead and Kylie does so with the radio on.
"For me I love them and I talk to them. Sometimes I sort of get a picture in my head of what they may have been like."
My eyebrows are raising higher and higher.
"What do you say to them?," I ask.
"I'll say 'I'm going to roll you over now and put your top on'. Or 'You just stay there and behave while I go to lunch'.
"If I'm here alone with dead bodies I never feel I am alone. I just love them.
"The dead person doesn't have a choice. We basically become, not the voice for them, but they can't say once they've died 'I want someone to treat me nice and I don't want to be left out in the garage'. So we are responsible for them. They don't have a choice of who embalms them or who takes them from the mortuary."
Having worked at Elliotts Funeral Services for 15 years, few scenes or bodies make Kylie cringe.
"Trains, they're a bit yucky ... shot gun victims ... But once you've seen it, it doesn't bother you after awhile. We have a very good psychologist."
But in saying that, Kylie has never used the psychologist. Instead choosing to deal with what she sees in her own way.
Working so intimately with bodies, does allow the mind to wander.
Kylie, in a confessional voice, says to me: "I do often wonder when you go out to police calls ... this is the last place they ever saw and what were they thinking? And were they scared? Did they know it was going to happen? Did they go 'oh s**t' when the car was coming towards them? It intrigues me for a day or so."
But no matter how horrific their circumstances, she is never scared.
"I've got an aunty that won't even be in a room with with a dead person. People should be more afraid of the living - they can do you more damage.
"It's the whole thing of if you turn your back they're going to go "Raaaaa", she says curling her hands like claws.
And no that's never happened to Kylie.
Once someone is dead they're dead. After the doctor has confirmed it, an embalmer will run up to three basic tests after that.
After being embalmed, a body is washed and dressed and special make-up is applied to return colour to the face.
Finally, the body is dressed and laid out in a coffin. Families can choose to dress the body themselves.
On the topic of coffins, Kylie dispels a couple of time-worn myths: "We don't break arms and legs to make people fit into their coffins and no, people don't sit up during cremation."
Cremation or burial, follows the funeral. All holes are dug with a digger by the sexton. Pyes Pa Cemetery is the only public cemetery in Tauranga still with space, and all holes are dug at double depth meaning someone else can be buried on top.
Demistifying death is important, Kylie tells me.
Her own daughters India, 10, Molly, 7, and Ebony, 6, are comfortable around the dead and will "go and say hi" when Kylie is at work.
I'm amazed at how she does her job and Kylie herself is at a loss to explain it when I ask what makes her different from the average person?
"I couldn't be a nurse and I couldn't work in a rest home or be a surgeon when they're cutting people ... I can't answer that," she says. "I'm not sure. It's always been an obvious choice to me."
As a little girl, she would walk around the cemetery, wondering what had happened to all those people before they were buried.
And show-and-tell sure didn't include Barbies or hula-hoops.
"When I was at primary school I found a dead seagull on the side of the road and took it home and laid it out," she says fanning her hands like wings.
"I put gladwrap over it and took it for show and tell at Matua Primary School. The teacher thought it was so weird," she says with a chuckle.
Kylie has her own beliefs about the human spirit and what happens to it after a person dies.
"I believe a lot in life after death and spirits and I think that helps me. I don't believe once you're dead, you're dead and I don't think I could do this job if I didn't believe."
The Australian psychic Deb Webber once picked Kylie out in the audience at her show at Baycourt.
"She picked me out in front of the whole audience and said 'I can see a whole lot of coffins around you ...' It is strange she picked that out of all the people there ... so yeah, I do believe."
Kylie is the only female in Tauranga to hold the dual role of embalmer and funeral director.
Something that draws me to Kylie is that she is incredibly likeable. She's softly spoken, genuine, and sentimental.
"Something that bugs me," she tells me. "A tragic death that happened last year, people would struggle to remember it but for a family it's like it was yesterday. When I die will people forget about me? People do move on which I find quite sad."
Child deaths are for her, and for most funeral directors, the hardest.
"A police call at 2am may require you to take a baby from its mother. The mother is not letting it go and you feel like a monster.
"I drive away and think 'please help this family'. I look after a baby as if it were my own.
"Twice now she has had mothers screaming during burials.
"Screaming for their baby back ... just utter despair. I just go home and I'm not religious but I think 'thank you God so much, I've been spared'."