Unlike many teenagers who spend their summers working at a local fast-food chain, Joe Sharps spent his summers digging graves. That’s how it began.

     “My dad didn’t like my friends and wanted to keep me out of trouble,” he says. Sharps started working for a mortuary in Coos Bay at the age of 15.

      “My dad had a friend who was a mortician. He needed some extra help that summer and asked if I would be okay around dead bodies. I said sure and now I’ve been in the funeral industry for 15 years.”

Sharps decided to become an apprentice at Coos Bay Chapel learning how to embalm bodies and plan funerals. “It seemed like a respectable business, and I already knew it.” Now at 30, Sharps, in his brown suit and tie, steps out and greets a grieving family.

      “Everyday is different,” says Sharps. “You never know what to expect.”

       On 8 a.m. on a Friday morning, the crew assembles and the morning’s jobs are assigned. Theresa needs to pick up a body in Springfield. John has to track down someone’s ashes. Heidi’s answering phone calls from grieving families. Joe will be discussing burial options with the recently deceased’s relatives at 9:30 a.m. So begins another work day at Musgrove Family Mortuary.

        Having left the industry three times, Sharps is a man who feels compelled to help strangers on the worst day of their lives. Sharps says most people are ignorant of the inner-workings of a funeral home. Even a basic knowledge of death is considered frightening or morbid. To Sharps, death is nothing more than a natural part of life, and he has seen a lot of disturbing things. “You either know you can take it or not,” Sharps says.

       Sharps describes his worst day on the job. Several summers ago, a man died in his recliner in a high-rise apartment building. He had been decaying for sometime. When Sharps and his assistant arrived at the scene, the air was filled with a strong pungent odor.

       “Streams of flies were coming out the window,” says Sharps. Police refused to enter the building, handing the camera to Sharps and his assistant for the official police report. Sharps only had one respirator and gave it to his aide. “When there is that bad of smell, it’s like walking into a wall,” Sharps says.

      “You couldn’t tell if he was black or white,” Sharps says. “He was green.” As they tried to slowly separate the man from the recliner, his body began to exhibit signs of serious decay. Sharps threw a sheet over him. “He exploded… he popped.”  

      In his 15 years in the funeral industry, that was the only time Sharps has ever thrown up. “I thought: smell equals taste and I lost it,” says Sharps.  

      Even with its sometimes disgusting nature, Sharps loves his job. “Taking a family completely shattered by grief, giving them a little bit of hope,” Sharps says, “making things simpler if not easier.” According to Sharps, the job of a mortician does not end day or night. Always on call, if someone dies, the mortuary staff snaps back into action to help the grieving family cope.

      Morticians do a variety of work everyday. They pick bodies up from hospitals, private homes, and even car accidents. Then, they embalm or cremate the bodies. If a body is embalmed, they wash it, dress it, and then add make-up. After the preparation, the body is displayed respectfully inside a casket. If the body is cremated, it is burned and then placed inside a box or urn. Funeral directors also plan and execute wakes, funerals, and receptions.

      “I enjoy the creativity and the art that goes along with embalming,” says Sharps.   

“I hope to own my own mortuary business someday.”

      “I’d like to be embalmed so I could be on the other side of the table,” Sharps says of his own funeral. But, in the end it doesn’t matter what he wants. It’s what his family wants.

       He relates a story concerning a German woman who died in her late 80s. She had requested to be embalmed for her open casket funeral, but also that she be left naked. Her dying wish was to be buried naked, just as she came into the world. Her family fought the mortuary when they suggested that they place a modest covering over her private parts for the public viewing. In the funeral industry, the family can change the deceased’s requests. Unfortunately for the mortuary, even with the slight covering, many of the woman’s friends complained, thinking that they did not properly dress the body.

      Sharps thinks that eventually families will be able to do whatever they want with the bodies of their deceased loved ones. “It used to be a visitation, a funeral, a burial,” says Sharps. Now people can be embalmed for a viewing before cremation. He says that a lot of religious and non-religious communities are trying to figure out what they want, but outside of body preparation, that doesn’t necessarily include mortuaries.

      Sharps argues that eventually people will want to do everything on their own and that mortuaries will only be needed to attend to the body by state health regulations. Funerals, rites and wakes will be dealt with by families on a more individual basis.

      Almost every day people contact the mortuary with questions regarding pet cremation. “I see more people with that horribly deep, dark, bubbly death cry,” says Sharps, referring to bereaved pet-owners. “There is a real value in helping people with their pets, because they’re their own family who has never fought with them,” says Sharps.

       To the outside world, Sharps is sensitive to grieving families. To co-workers, he is a fun-loving, hard-working director. Behind closed doors, Sharps maintains a healthy distance between work and play. He loves the outdoors: fishing, scuba-diving and running. His family owns a cabin on the Umpqua River and, on the weekends, when he is not on call, he retreats from the world at-large.

       Even though he has an eccentric job, Sharps feels like he’s just an ordinary guy. “My co-workers would probably call me normal.” At the end of the day, Sharps wants to get away from the dramatic responses his job receives. “I tell people I sell insurance, cause nobody wants to hear about insurance,” says Sharps. “I don’t want to talk about it—I just want to disappear.”

      Everybody at the mortuary agrees. The funeral industry is just like any other job.

     “It’s not like we’re obsessed with death,” says Heidi, the secretary.

     “You don’t get in the funeral business for money, unless you’re the owner,” says Glenn, another mortician at Musgroves. “You help people on the worst day of their lives.”

     The mortuary is filled with stories, some sad, but sweet, and others, dark and sinister. But each story is helped through its final step at Musgroves by someone who is genuinely there to help.