Funeral Director, Who Felt Death Was Her ‘Calling’ at 16, Breaks Down Biggest Misconceptions About Her Job (Exclusive)

• Following the traumatic death of her neighbor when she was 16, Melissa Schmidt felt she had ‘a calling’ to be in the business of death. 
• After high school, she enrolled in mortuary school where she learned everything from cosmetics to working in a funeral home. 
• Now 34, Schmidt talks with PEOPLE about the day-to-day activities of her unusual job and breaks down the biggest misconceptions surrounding it.

When Melissa Schmidt was a child, the very idea of death paralyzed her with fear. Even just thinking about dying would make her vision tunnel and her body freeze. She remembers the terror and anxiety even now, though it’s been long since she experienced such a reaction to that very subject.

She encountered death in a deeply personal, traumatic way at age 16. She and some friends joined together to mourn their neighbor, who was hit by a train. Though painful to attend, his funeral also had a mystifying effect on the teenager. In grief, she was struck by an undeniable calling: Schmidt wanted to be in the business of death.

The now-34-year-old tells PEOPLE that she’s heard similar stories from other funeral directors like herself, many of whom describe their interest in the industry as “a calling.” It’s not so straightforward, of course; like with any other career decision, Schmidt wasn’t just following a pull away from the living world.

“You’re picking a lifestyle, you’re picking your future and the job just entailed so much of everything I’ve always felt were my really good strengths or things that I admired or wanted to get involved in,” says Long Island resident Schmidt, who first worked in funeral homes as a mortuary cosmetologist.

Thanks to a beauty program intertwined with standard academics, she was able to graduate high school with a cosmetology license in addition to her diploma. But while her peers started work in salons and spas, Schmidt immediately enrolled in two years of mortuary school.

“Everyone thought I was crazy when I was like, ‘I’m not going to be a hairdresser. I’m going to mortuary school,'” she says. “That was my plan.”

Schmidt’s mortuary education had broader focuses in addition to the cosmetic aspects. Per New York state regulations, she also needed to master the scientific and administrative aspects of working in a funeral home. She practiced embalming techniques on cadavers at Bellevue Hospital in New York City and studied the operations of overseeing what happens after life ends.

“There’s a lot of things you need to know about law and grief. It’s a very rounded career when you think about everything involved in it, from paperwork to makeup to dressing,” she explains. “It’s very textbook in the beginning … You take anatomy courses and funeral home merchandising because essentially you’re running a business simultaneously.”

After passing her national board exams, she entered a one-year residency. It was a very hands-on experience, she says, between duties like directing funerals and conducting body removals. With her extensive training in makeup application, she took to the cosmetic side quickly, easily learning and picking up new skills.

However, there isn’t a singular technique that works in every case. All bodies need to be treated differently, depending on their condition when they arrive at the funeral home and the embalming procedure that takes place beforehand.

“I always assess first and kind of see what I’m working with. Reconstruction is a whole different type of playing field, as I say, compared to your more standard cases, which would be your older folks who passed away naturally and things like that. But you can still run into issues, things do happen,” Schmidt tells PEOPLE. “It’s not the same as doing makeup on a living person. I always say it is so wildly different.”

She remembered attending funerals when she was younger and noticing how much makeup was on the body, and she couldn’t understand why that was the case. Now she has her answers.

“The cosmetics are definitely thicker because you’re working on [damaged] skin that doesn’t have that natural blood flow. Bruising can be much more difficult to cover up than it is on the living,” she shares. When she approaches the decedents, she keeps in mind that they’re going to be “on display.”

“It’s almost like they’re looking at your artwork in a sense. They’re staring,” Schmidt elaborates. “It’s not the same as if I met you in person. You wouldn’t be probably grilling my makeup.”

Part of the job is catering to families’ requests for certain makeup looks that reflect how the person looked in life. When they want something a little less ordinary, Schmidt will typically ask that they bring in photos of the decedents so she can replicate their appearances properly.

She points to examples like requests for bright blue eyeshadows, artful eyeliners and bold lip colors.

“That’s not something I do as normally, but I do enjoy it when I do because I feel like it’s who they were,” says the funeral director. “Everyone recognized her if she had on the hot pink lipstick, so [I’ll] do that.”

Over a decade into her career, Schmidt’s services now expand beyond makeup. She conducts “all aspects of funeral services,” handling everything from the point when a person dies through the actual mourning ceremony.

When a family calls, she’s typically on the other end of the phone taking down information, then she’ll come to remove the body from the hospital or home. Schmidt follows with the “embalming, dressing and casketing, cosmetic work, meeting with the families and then actually being present during the funeral,” she summarizes.

There are a number of misconceptions about her specific job, even beyond the common — but very false, Schmidt insists — theories about how “nails grow after you die or bodies sit up” during embalming. She’s quick to debunk the “horrible” notion that funeral directors make high salaries by “taking advantage of the grieving.” That’s far from the case, she maintains. In fact, the pay really isn’t that great.

“It definitely will vary from location and where things are more expensive,” she explains. “You can go online and see salaries range from all different ratios, but I always say police officers, teachers, they’re going to make more money than a funeral director.”

Many also incorrectly assume the person who picks up the body is different from the person who meets with the family, and there’s someone else who handles further preparation.

This may be the case in busier funeral homes, but at her place of work, the employees deal with each part of the process. “A lot of times even families I serve might think I’m a secretary when they meet me in the office. They don’t realize that I was the one behind the scenes the whole time,” says Schmidt.

“It’s just one of those things that people just don’t talk about,” she adds. “They don’t get really involved in funeral planning and things like that, so a lot of people just don’t know any better and they just hear it through grapevines.”

Compared to her childhood regard for the idea of dying, Schmidt’s perspective had completely flipped. When she thinks of her own eventual death, she feels no fear at all.

“That saying — ‘Confronting your fears is what gets you past them’ — it’s very true. You can only be strong when you’re weak kind of thing,” she explains. “You’re facing your fears head-on and you build up that strength to look at it. I’m totally comfortable with it now.”

And she does think about it a lot too: Schmidt says her friends claim she’s “always talking about dying and death.” It’s not just that she’s so focused on her job; she’s also come to realize the inextricable tie between life and its end.

“A lot of times, in conversation or just talking with friends and giving advice, I open up about death because it tells us so much about life,” she reflects.

Ironically, Schmidt’s time away from work is best characterized as extremely lively. She’s always on the go, whether visiting friends and family, seeing concerts or partaking in hobbies like adult gymnastics and beach volleyball.

“When I’m not at work I want to live. I try not to live for the weekend or live for that day off because every day that passes is just like it could be the last time,” she says. “It reminds me to keep living.”

Last summer, she even competed in the Miss New York pageant, an interest she says she always thought about pursuing. One night, she found herself reading about the competition online, and before she knew it, she’d submitted an application.

“I told myself I could be somebody who had the opportunity to do it and didn’t, or I could be someone who had the opportunity and did it. And I wanted to be the person who did it,” she recalls. “I pushed myself past boundaries I didn’t think I could do. I gained so much from it.”

Schmidt’s social media presence exists somewhere in between her zest for life and her calling towards death. She started posting online during the pandemic. New York was hit hard by COVID-19; people were dying at tragically high rates, but she kept having to turn families away from her place of work due to restrictions.

That’s when the true societal significance of funerals dawned on Schmidt — and it hit her hard.

She started connecting with other funeral directors; they felt the same way, but her friends and family couldn’t really understand the scope of that particular devastation. She imagined those who don’t deal in the business of death, meaning most of the world, didn’t realize it either.

Schmidt was compelled to educate people on the subject of funerals — what they mean and why they are so important — and she found a platform on TikTok. She wanted to provide a resource for people like her, especially women, who feel that same calling. She started posting under the username FuneralBabe.

“I saw on TikTok [how] people were really connecting with one another. I was like, ‘I think I could add to this and make it something,'” she remembers. If nothing else, she hoped her videos would encourage people “to have the conversation at home about death and dying” during a time when rampant illness was leaving so many bereaved.

“I really was like, ‘This is a place I can be so authentic and really talk,'” Schmidt tells PEOPLE of TikTok. “No one knew who I was, and that didn’t last too long.”

Today, FuneralBabe boasts over 949,900 followers. She thinks her popularity comes from the fact that few people create content dealing with all that she addresses. “It is one of those taboo topics that you’re not going to find much on, and there’s just not a lot of perspective,” she observes.

Her viewers frequently voice their appreciation in the comments, and many continue to reach out and share how they’ve found comfort in her videos.

“I get messages from people saying that their father was passing and I helped them so much with the funeral arrangement processes, or with their grief they really have found a new way or different perspective,” says Schmidt. “It’s just incredible that you can get online and talk about some very difficult conversations, even in just a funny manner, and people [are] able to get so much out of it. I think it’s beautiful.”

Though her TikToks can be cheeky and fun, they’re also genuinely reflective of her work. She’s personable with sparing authenticity. Schmidt doesn’t shy away from the trials and tribulations of being a funeral director. To do so wouldn’t just undermine her reasons for getting online — it would also be a wholly inaccurate representation of her demanding life.

On top of managing business operations, meeting with families and preparing bodies, Schmidt attends funerals at churches and cemeteries, officiating services and saying prayers. She can attest to the fact that it is as exhausting as it sounds, especially when a funeral director is just starting out.

On one hand, there’s the physical challenge of the work. The hours are long, and between handling corpses and preparing them for casketing, it’s far from a desk job. It can be traumatic at times, Schmidt admits, but the key is to keep pushing forward. Life, as one continues to live it, goes on.

The emotional demand is obvious, and it’s particularly hard to carry that when you’re spending time with those who don’t witness the ins and outs of death every day. While her family and friends are fully supportive of her career, Schmidt says she often feels misunderstood.

“Sometimes even just the way you look at the world and life, people just might not understand exactly,” she says.

In her industry, one is exposed to the heaviest weight of reality in a fast-paced, unrelenting way. Quickly, she says, you can lose your naivety about the world.

But with practice and further exposure, the more you accept the truth that “no one’s getting out of here alive,” says Schmidt. “You’ve seen so much, and you see all these patterns repeatedly. You kind of just learn how to cope better.”

She adds, “It’s processing your own emotions. It’s trying to figure out your new way of living. For myself, I’ve always said it’s more of a really deep understanding. Instead of breaking down crying, per se, you just have this deep understanding of life and death.”

For a self-proclaimed “people person” like Schmidt, there are plenty of aspects of funeral directing that aren’t so difficult to bear. She gets to talk to individuals about their late loved ones, hear about how those people lived, get to know them for who they were and learn how they’ll be remembered.

“There’s so much reward in it,” she remarks. When she goes home after work, she’s filled with a sense of gratitude and fulfillment. “It’s like you did something big. You’re helping somebody. You’re getting them through something tough.”

On a personal level, the benefit comes from all that you can take with you after carrying out the end of someone else’s life: “The lessons that you learn and just how much you learn to appreciate and be humble,” says Schmidt. To her, “That’s a very big individual pro,” enough to outweigh any possible downsides.