Fans of the early-2000s TV series Six Feet Under will remember the surreal commercial in episode one for Living Splendor embalming fluid ("Only real life is better"). That whole show was a look at the funeral industry through the eyes of a dysfunctional family running a funeral home. A lot of people who watched it though, will remember the embalming scenes because embalming is not often depicted on our screens and remains a little mysterious. And of course, there's the whole death angle – some people don’t like to talk about death.

On the Ray D’Arcy Show, Marion Power, who’s the Embalming Manager at Fanagan’s Funeral Homes and embalmer Emma Bainton talked about their unusual profession. Fanagan’s is a (not at all dysfunctional) family-run business established over 200 years ago ("That’s a lot of burying people," says Ray) and the embalming team consists entirely of women. So why did Marion and Emma decide to pursue a career in embalming? Marion tells Ray that her interest in the area came from her dad, who used to tell her stories of old women years ago who would put pennies on the eyes of the dead:

"I was intrigued by all these stories and that all the women would look after the deceased, it wasn’t men at all back in the day. So I had a little intrigue, I was very intrigued with that story."

Despite that intrigue, Marion went to work alongside her sister in a barber shop. Her sister got sick and passed away in 2009 and Marion credits that loss and the conversations she had with her sister before she died with motivating her to go into the funeral home industry:

"One of her biggest fears was, she felt a little bit vulnerable and daunting that the funeral industry was all male dominated. So she said to me, she looked at me and said, 'Why didn’t you train to be an embalmer?’"

Emma had two experiences of death in her childhood which she says led her to where she is today. She was 7 when her dad was killed in a car crash:

"Due to the nature of his death and my age, I wasn’t able to see him, or say goodbye. That was difficult."

Then when she was 12, Emma’s grandfather died from cancer and Fanagan’s took care of the funeral arrangements:

"I was able to go and see him – I chose to – and he just looked so peaceful and back to himself and all my family, including my grandmother and my aunties and all saying, ‘They did a great job. He looks amazing, he looks so well.’ And my 12-year-old head is, ‘Who? What did they do? Magic, like, magicians or whatever.’ That triggered my interest."

Compared to when her 7-year-old self wasn’t able to see her father laid out, Emma thinks her experience with her grandfather was far better in helping the grieving process – especially when a death is sudden and she puts it very well:

"The person is in your life one day and the next they’re just gone. Disappeared. You haven’t seen them. You don’t have that image to process in your head, the in between of them being here and not being here."

The Irish have a reputation for putting on a good funeral, Ray points out, but we’re not great at talking about death. The embalmer can help there, as part of the process is, as Emma pointed out, bridging the gap between the living person and the no longer living person. But how does embalming work? Marion takes Ray through the process:

"What we do as embalmers, what we do is delay decomposition so that the families get to say goodbye to their loved ones. And that’s what we do as embalmers."

Marion and Emma are surrounded by death on a daily basis and that makes questions of their own mortality unavoidable, Emma says:

"We’re faced with that on a daily basis, so you’re constantly thinking, you know, your own family, yourself, friends."

Life is short, Emma says, and as embalmers, her and Marion see that every day. As the tagline for the final season of Six Feet Under says, Everything Ends. Makes you think – and maybe even consider what you should be wearing the last time you might be seen in public.

You can hear Ray’s full conversation with Marion and Emma by clicking above.