Lessons in grief and grace: How one Fayetteville woman centers compassion in death
A love for her son and the military brought Regina Logan to Fayetteville, but caring for the grieving has kept her here.
The licensed embalmer and funeral director works at Colvin Funeral Home on Murchison Road, where she jokes she's "Mitch Colvin's blessing."
“He always teases me about how much I’m into my son,” Logan said recently. “I said, ‘My son came here so that you could get me.’”
Colvin, who is also mayor of Fayetteville, connected with Logan, a licensed embalmer and funeral director, in 2018, three years after she moved to Fayetteville to follow her son, who had recently joined the Army. Logan was working at a Raleigh funeral home when an intern told Colvin he might want to snag the Philadelphia native. Colvin needed a funeral director, and although Logan, who'd been an embalmer in her two decades of funeral work, didn't consider herself an “office person,” she accepted the opportunity.
“I hadn’t worked up front like this, like managing a business, but I say if something’s for you, it’s for you, because everything kind of fell into place,” Logan said.
Life up north
Logan’s career in the funerary services industry began in 1998 when she went back to school to get her degree in mortuary science, she said. She already held a bachelor’s degree in clinical lab science, but said her job as a blood bank manager at a Philadelphia hospital had lost its appeal, despite offering a larger salary.
“They did autopsies a lot at the hospital back then,” Logan said. “My father passed away, and I didn't like the way he was prepared, and I felt like I could do a better job. The two combined was an easy way to get into mortuary science because I already had a lot of science courses.”
Though Logan worked in Philadelphia, she lived in New Jersey and chose to go to mortuary school in Trenton. Her previous coursework from her first degree allowed her to finish school more quickly than the average student, and she graduated with her degree in mortuary science in about 18 months, Logan said. The short commute to Philadelphia convinced her to get licensed in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Getting started in the industry was both easier and harder than the average person might expect, Logan said. There were a lot of women in her class at mortuary school but many people were skeptical of the idea of a female embalmer, even though Logan served as captain of the embalming team at her school, she explained.
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“A lot of women come in this and they don’t want to touch the dead bodies. They don’t want to deal with the bag. That’s something I really wanted to do,” she said. “It was very hard, and this was up north, for me to get someone to trust me enough to allow me to be in their morgue, to manage their morgue, to take care of their bodies, to make sure that I was comfortable with lifting and I didn’t have to be running around looking for somebody to lift, move and do all this.”
Ultimately, she said, a large funeral home in Philadelphia gave her a chance.
“He was so apprehensive in the beginning because I was a female,” Logan said. “It was pretty hard because of all the lifting and the moving and them not thinking that as a female, you’re able to pull that off. But I learned to utilize different things, different techniques ... as long as you have the proper equipment, you can do anything.”
Logan said she soon proved herself, eventually building enough trust with the funeral home owner that he stipulated in his will that she be the one to embalm him. She did just that in 2018 when her former mentor died.
“His family flew me back home to take care of him,” Logan said. “Very special.”
By the time she came to Colvin Funeral Home, she had embalmed more than 2,000 people, she said.
Life lessons
Working in the funeral industry has taught Logan many things, she said, but what she emphasizes most is the importance of preparation.
“We all should be prepared,” Logan said. “A lot of people say, ‘Things are unexpected,’ but death is never unexpected. It’s expected from the day we’re born.”
Part of Logan’s daily work at Colvin Funeral Home involves building files containing information on what clients want to happen when they die and how their loved ones should pay for their services. People can purchase “pre-needs,” insurance plans allowing them to prepay for their funeral arrangements, she explained.
“They can pay over a period of time — maybe three, five or 10 years, based on their age and what they pick out — and at the time of death, we just send the paperwork back to the insurance company and they send the money to us,” she said.
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Although planning for your death might seem morbid, it’s one of the best gifts people can leave behind for their loved ones, Logan said. Creating clear instructions for what to do and how to pay for it tends to ease the stress on families, she explained, rather than leaving them to argue about what the deceased would have wanted.
“Preparation is the key, because not being prepared leaves the people you’re leaving behind in such a vulnerable position,” she said. “It’s a gift because it lets you know that you cared enough to fill things out.”
'You have to be selfless'
Those who want to work at a funeral home simply to satisfy their curiosity about death aren’t the right fit for the industry, Logan said.
“This is not for everyone,” she said. “People think, ‘Oh, God, it would be cool to be a funeral director.’ I never wear my badge. You never know who I am. I don’t feel like I have to be seen.”
Empathy and patience are better traits to bring to the table, she said.
“If you’re sitting here and all of a sudden, this person breaks down, and you know your son has a game at 6 o’clock and you’re sitting here, what are you going to do?” she said. “People can pick that up, even if you’re not saying it.”
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A funeral director doesn’t hold a typical nine-to-five job, Logan said. She said she gets calls at any time of day and has to be prepared to answer.
“You can’t turn it off when you go home, especially because people die at all times of night,” she said. “You might not have a life. Saturday is national funeral day. You’re going to work on Saturday. Everybody wants to be buried on Saturday.”
The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic was a “constant peak,” she said. Logan estimated she met with more than 300 families during the first year of the pandemic, working six days a week without vacations. Some families would bury a loved one, then return the next week to bury another family member who had contracted COVID-19 from the deceased or at the funeral service, she said.
The demanding nature of the funeral industry requires a special kind of person, Logan said.
“You have to be selfless,” she said.
Digging deeper
More than two decades in the industry have highlighted specific cultural differences for Logan. She’s worked at funeral homes that largely cater to Black clients, like Colvin Funeral Home, and funeral homes geared more towards white clients, she said.
“Funeral homes are cultural, pretty much,” Logan said.
In Logan’s experience, white funeral homes have an average timeline of three days from death to burial, while Black funeral homes may take longer. Black families opt for more of a celebration of life rather than a somber service, and different religious customs come into play, she said.
“There’s grieving in both cultures,” Logan said. “I think in African-American culture, our funerals tend to be longer. And more of our older people are burying versus cremating.”
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Logan said, locally she tends to see an equal split between burial and cremation, though many people choose to cremate for financial reasons. Wth a high military population in Fayetteville, some might opt for cremation to better support that transient lifestyle.
“I don’t think too many people are going to visit cemeteries now,” she said. “This town is a town where people are in and out.”
A typical day for Logan involves a wide range of activities, from making appointments with families to applying for military honors for veterans' services, she said. She said she double-checks every detail the day before each burial to avoid embarrassing mishaps like an undug grave, which Logan said she saw occur in her time in Philadelphia.
“Because I’m so paranoid about stuff like that, the day before my funerals, I’m calling everybody,” she said.
While all of that coordination can be exhausting, the emotional burden of her work is particularly heavy, Logan said.
“There’s a lot of emotional support that happens sometimes in this conference room,” she said. “I’ve always said, ‘If you feel like crying, then you’re just going to have to cry,' plain and simple as that.’ That’s what I’ve given myself. If I feel like I got to cry, I got to cry.”
While being professional is important, funeral directors are still human, Logan said.
“You can’t not feel,” she said.
Logan wants people to know that a good funeral home should always be available to help, no matter the time or question.
“There’s no such thing as a bad time to call any of us in this business,” she said. “We’re never closed to the public.”
Being able to help people in that way is what has made Logan stick with the industry, in spite of its obstacles and challenges, she said.
“I know what I was put here to do,” she said. “You can’t make someone feel this if they don’t feel it, because again, it’s not a job — it’s a lifestyle.”
Public safety reporter Lexi Solomon can be reached at ABSolomon@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: Fayetteville funeral director offers 20 years of lessons in grief and grace
