Gruerio Funeral Home

Gruerio Funeral Home
(From their web site)

Women In Funeral Industry Stress Caring
By SHARON SCHLEGEL

Toni Gruerio compares her work to that of a painter, first
carefully planning, then adding each detail to the canvas
until a complete work has been finished. Toni Gruerio is
an undertaker.The goal of her creation is a perfect funeral.
Since her father's death in 1977, she has owned and operated
Gruerio Funeral Home in Trenton's Chambersburg area, which
he founded in 1929, a profession she sees more as a calling
than as a job. "You don't learn it: you either have the gift
or you don't," she says. Gruerio oversees every aspect of 100
funerals a year, from casket selection and embalming to
reconstructive cosmetic art, viewing and interment.
While she believes women may have an easier time dealing with
emotions than men, she doesn't think success in her business
is necessarily gender related. "What matters is that you are
a person with compassion and love for people, and that you're
not afraid to show it," she says. According to the National
Funeral Directors Association, an industry organization whose
current membership is only 5 percent female the change will
show in the next decade, when the 25 percent of today's
mortuary school classes which are female move out into the
business and make their mark, a percentage almost four times
greater than it was 20 years ago, an still growing.
At Mercer County Community College, coordinator Robert Smith
himself a mortician in Gloucester County, helped design in
1975 what remains the only curriculum in the state for
studying mortuary science. A THREE-YEAR PROGRAM, it includes
classes in chemistry, anatomy, cosmetic and restorive art,
embalming, public health, business management, and social
sciences, including opsychology, religious and ethnic customs
and a history of the field. Today, he says, women account for
35 percent of his 31 full-time and 50 part-time night school
students. He finds nothing surprising about a growing number
of women entering the field. "The biggest misconception is
that people assume its all about disposal of a human being.
It's really a people business." Smith stresses. "Dealing with
the living is the majority of our work and an ability to
communicate, and to recognize and deal with issues of grief
is essential. I stress the importance of sensitivity to such
things as an appropriate vocabulary, and an understanding of
differing religious customs." Smith sees the influx of women
into the business as typical of their inroads into every
profession these days. What is more newsworthy, he says, is
that when he started teaching, 70 percent of women entered
because it was a family business, owned or passed on by a
husband or father. Now, he points out, that statistic is
actually reversed and only 30 percent of his women students
have a family connection. Undertaking was the family business
while Toni Gruerio was growing up. When she eventually decided
to enter the field in the 1960's, she was the only female student
at the now-defunct Eckel's College of Mortuary Science in
Philadelphia, a huge change from her all-female classes at
Villa Victoria High School. "IT WAS TERRIBLE. I was teased in
class all the time, and outside, some people even looked at it
as abnormal." A divorcee, whose son Jude, 30, is now her right
hand in the business, Gruerio says some men she has dated had
difficulty understanding her job, which she says must come first.
"For me, it's a 24-hour, 7-day-week commitment," explains Gruerio.
EACH WOMAN, of course, brings something of herself to work. At
Gruerio's, where Toni Gruerio had to go into deep debt to rebuild,
after a disastrous fire shortly after she took over, she chose
to eschew the dreary image of what a funeral home should be when
she personally refurbished it. The mirrored walls, iridescent
silver wallpaper, dozens of bulb-lit entryway artificial flowers,
and imposing crystal chandelier, in her office reflect her personal
sense of style, as does the prominent rhinestone pin she had made
to order and often wears with the one word, "Gruerio" on it.