CANDACE SIMPSON
DEATH AND CANDY SIMPSON
By Alva Viarruel
Express Business
September 19, 2001
Pages 12 and 13
At 22, Candace Simpson, granddaughter of the legendary Samuel David Simpson, is the country's youngest funeral director
There's the end of the road for all of us. And waiting there when death calls is the funeral director. Maybe even a pretty practitioner like 22-year-old Candace Leotha Simpson.
It's not exactly the sort of profession young people dream of, but from the age of seven, Candace knew that she wanted to become the third generation of the Simpson clan to manage the funeral home which was started by her illustrious grandfather, Samuel David Simpson, in 1945.
Samuel Simpson was immortalised in Sparrow's 1960 classic calypso, "Simpson".
Candace related how she grew up in the environment of coffins and cadavers in Couva.
She said: "I used to play hide and seek in the coffins in the funeral parlour with my neighbours and brothers from an early age. Being among the dead was no big thing with me," the shy Simpson said.
She credits her mother, Sheila, for providing timely explanations about death as being part of life and who was a great comforting and guiding force in her life.
Motivated by her desire to learn more about looking after the dead and their families, Simpson left home five years ago to pursue studies in embalming at La Guardia Community College in the United States.
Three years later, she matriculated to enter the American Academy of McAllister Institute of Mortuary Science on 56th Street in Manhattan, New York, one of the most recognised institutes in the US for morticians.
Simpson graduated summa cum laude at the top of her class last year, receiving the John McAllister Memorial award for outstanding scholarship, the Mu Sigma Alpha award presented by the National Association of Mortuary Science Colleges and the coveted Silvia J Failla Award presented by the Hudson County Funeral Directors' Association.
The honours have established her as the first and the youngest qualified funeral director / embalmer in the country.
She was born and raised at the Simpson's home on the Southern Main Road, McBean Village, Couva, where her mother also managed a branch of the famous Simpson's Funeral Home.
"Growing up in that house was fun. We played lots of games like hide and seek in the coffins and the occasional haunted house with our neighbours. We had a workshop next door where the coffins were made and took advantage of that to make scooters. Oh, and we started lots of fires playing with the wood shavings but it was fun," she said playfully.
Simpson said neither she nor any of her siblings was exposed to the bodies until the age of seven, when curiosity got the better of them and they disobeyed the rules about going into the mortuary.
"My brother Curtis and I were playing that day and decided to see what they do in there. Of course he fainted, but I was laughing and from that moment everyone knew who was not going to be the embalmer in the family," Simpson said.
Growing up was tough, though, as most of her school friends baulked at the thought that she lived in a funeral home.
"I was labeled as awkward and just seeing a casket would freak out my friends. They didn't really hang around me much because they didn't understand why we were the only ones operating a mortuary in a funeral home. So my brothers and I were close and our neighbours were our best friends."
She recalled that in the first week of school at the Gasparillo Composite School, her mother had been called to do a retrieval (pick up a body) in San Fernando and she didn't have a driver to take her, so she opted to drop her to school in a hearse.
"My teachers immediately made it clear to me in the auditorium during assembly that my mother should ever drop me to school in a hearse again. It became taboo in the school and all the children who had just begun to befriend me, those who would be my classmates for the next five years, immediately had a different view of me. They wouldn't eat my food and, for sure, none asked for a ride home. It wasn't until I was in about fourth form that my friends started to come home as they realised I was a regular person."
For Simpson, the final decision to become a mortician was really brought home to her by her mentor, Mabel Springer - the mortician at Simpson's - who called her into the mortuary one day after she returned home from school.
"I was 14 and she said to me 'come and learn because I would not always be around'. She was planning to retire by then so I started to help with the occasional washing and dressing of the corpses and applying cosmetics and some hairdressing when it was called for. I always like to do hair."
By 1995, Springer did retire and Simpson graduated from school.
"That was when I was exposed to my first case. A very reputable man from our neighbourhood had died and his family didn't want any 'outsider' to take care of his body so they asked me to se to it personally. I had to do it all by myself because my mother had gone away.
"Of course, I was scared to death because it was the first time that I was in the mortuary by myself. I remember feeling all the creepy-crawlies on my neck and my hands were shaking. I just wanted to run back outside but at the same time I started to talk myself through it, and decided this was a doctor-patient scenario. It was just that the patient couldn't talk back to me."
Simpson overcame the challenge and went on the following year to La Guardia and then to the McAllister Institute.
During her year of training there, she was taught not just how to do postmortems and embalming, but also psychology; to counsel relatives of the dead, chemistry to prepare embalming material, biology, microbiology, business management and funeral service management.
"It was an eye-opening experience going to Belle Vue hospital where I was exposed to the proper facilities for embalming and realised we're very far behind in Trinidad and Tobago. The mortuary atmosphere was very different from anything I had seen here before. We were in embalming groups of six and worked on unclaimed bodies but we still had to treat them as people."
She learned about reconstructive surgery, plastic surgery and hair restoration, all the tricks of the trade to "make the dead look good. In American society, they care about the dead looking good. Here, we focus on the dead looking the way we knew they looked when they were alive. Americans are very death denying and don't accept death very well at all. They would want a mole removed from your face even though everyone knows that you had it there all your life."
Interestingly, Simpson said, most Indo-Trinidadians do not care about the aesthetics of the dead, but Afro-Trinidadians want their dead to look the best they can.
"Embalming is about giving the dead person a lifelike appearance. I am enjoying my job because I go from being the person people hate when you take their loved ones from their home, to the person they love the most three days later when you make their burden so much lighter."
She illustrated the point with a funeral she handled recently for a friend whose mother had died.
"He cursed me while we were making the arrangements. His relatives had to fly in and two days later the funeral was held. His aunt saw her sister before we put her in the casket and she said her sister is not dead because she did not look dead. That's when he had the courage to look at her for the first time and then he hugged me and thanked me because he didn't know she would have looked so good. Since then we've become closer friends. I understand that it's a sort of phase people go through, part of the grieving process. So I don't get angry or anything. I just try to be as patient and understanding as possible."
Simpson said she has made it a point to return to the home of the deceased to check on their family for post-funeral counseling.
"A lot of people just need to know that someone cares after they've lost a loved one. The funeral ministry is part of my life so I go into the communities to make sure they're OK. After care is important."
Now that she's back home, Simpson has literally been handed the business her mother managed for many years while her mother has gone into semi-retirement.
Her calm demeanour and strong spiritual grounding inherited from her mother, has made the difference for Simpson.
Carrying on the Simpson legacy is a strong desire of the young Simpson who has shown great maturity for her age. She admits though, that being in the funeral business has hurt her personal life.
"As a funeral director I'm on call 24/7. So I have to make a choice of staying home or taking the company vehicle or a hearse wherever I go because I always have to be ready or be in touch when anyone calls. There's nothing like planning ahead. My life revolves around a set routine. If I'm going out on a weekend someone else has to be here. So we have a roster and I really have no time for relationships.
"It's very rare to find someone who accepts that the person they share a relationship with is in the funeral business. It becomes strenuous with regular friendships. People don't understand you can be that busy and can't take a day off. That you work with corpses is a big turn-off because first of all, men don't associate being an embalmer with being a woman. Their perception of you immediately changes when they know, so my social life is really church and home.
"I intend to have an establishment where people feel comfortable about facing death for what it is. Our society needs to know what they should expect from me and any other funeral service provider. They have certain rights, grants to be obtained from Government to assist in burying their loved ones and even if they can't afford it, there are levels of service your funeral home must provide," Simpson said.
Arranging a funeral can cost as little as $1,272 (the Government grant) to as much as $18,000, but the average cost is $5,000.
"At the lower end of the scale you're entitled to a decent burial. At the upper end, you get extravagant floral arrangements, a limousine to chauffeur the grieving family, multiple TV and news announcements, tents for guests at the home, cemetery, the church, mourners cars, programmes, a high gloss mahogany, oak or teak casket, that sort of thing. The works."
More than half the costs go to outside sources, including paying for the arrangement of cremations, the grave diggers and the cemetery plot.
Simpson said she wants to change the perception which people have of the role of a funeral director.
"A funeral director is not just an undertaker who basically does the retrieval and may sit in on an arrangement conference, nor is he just an embalmer who only works in the mortuary. The funeral director is that as well as a counselor, the business person who undertakes all the transactions for the family, as well as arranging the grave site and everything. He / She is also a lay minister who may become the minister to say the final rites if no minister is available. You could also become a pall bearer when there is not enough family members to carry the casket and most importantly, directs the funeral.
"So I will tell you where to stand, who sits where and how to position the coffin. The body is always brought into the church feet first and you need to know if the person is a Muslim, then you bury them with the coffin facing east. You must always be open to give suggestions to families to personalise a funeral. It must not just be routine. Every family has personal needs so you must be willing to take suggestions and give suggestions no matter how weird the suggestion might be.
Simpson said she intends to transform the business of directing funerals to a level of service which people deserve, rather than what they can afford.
"I have to look beyond the monetary value to the sentimental value. We interact with people at the point where this is the last image they have of a loved one and they deserve the best. William Gladstone said 'show me the way people care for their dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness the growth of that society'. Our cemeteries are in a mess and we need to clean them up."
She anticipates the cost of funerals would escalate over the next five years by as much as three percent, as the fringe costs escalate.
The cost of a cemetery spot can go from $10 in some parts of North Trinidad to $825 in the south where one funeral agency has the monopoly over the cemetery spots. It costs $1,500 to entomb a coffin.
The cost of supplies and woodworkmanship is also going up.
"You have to pay for good craftsmanship and skilled woodworkers are becoming scarce and being replaced by machinery which could never give you an elegant finish but costs more."
She predicts that the traditional family-oriented funeral home is becoming a thing of the past, since to deliver what people need, requires hiring efficient and proficient staff to get the job done right.
"People tend to look down on our profession and it was only when I went to New York for my training that I realised the true importance of a funeral director and that made me proud. It's something that needs to be done right so that the grieving family feels that sense of relief, of happiness that their loved one left here in quiet glory."