Mundy 1 Catherine Mundy Ms.

Hinnant Proposal The Effects of Death on the Living After contemplating many different interesting subjects, I chose to write my ethnography on funeral home employees. This type of work requires the personnel to deal with the deceased as well as meet with their families. They are the people who work behind the curtain in order for dreaded days to run smoothly. Funeral home employees have always fascinated me because of their quite unusual profession. After picking my subject, I wanted to dig deeper into the lives of these people to find out the effects their profession has on their day-to-day lives. More specifically, I would like to see the effects (if any) of death on the living. In my mind, I concluded that being around diseased patients would inevitably lead to a weird lifestyle. Knowing that death is associated with heartbreak and tragedy, I have always seen the absence of life as an extremely emotional and delicate situation. From homicides to suicides, there are uncontainable amounts of grief in every type of death. In order to carry out my research, I intend to sit in the main office at Bass-Smith Funeral Home in Hickory, North Carolina. This location in the building will give me a first hand look at the conversations and actions of these death workers. I anticipate that my presence will give me an opportunity to see these employees daily obstacles and how they choose to overcome them. Because I am limited in my research, I would like to focus on the employees work environment and how they act toward their clients as opposed to their coworkers. Through my interviews and notes, my main goal is to find out if being around death constantly affects the way funeral home workers act within the walls of their establishment.