Carrie Lee Starry was getting dressed for church on a Sunday morning. The phone rang. It was her sister. Their father had died.
Starry remembers, “I took off my pantyhose and put on my sweats.” Then she went to work.
She had reservations about preparing her own father’s body for reviewal and burial. So did her brother, Mike Lee. Both are licensed funeral directors.
Caught up in their grief, they set to work embalming David Lee. And as they did, Starry says, a peaceful feeling took them over. She was grateful for the unique way she was able to give back to her father. “I thought how cool it was that we could be there for him,” she says. “It was like we were home.”
They were at home—at the David Lee Funeral Home in Wayzata, the business that their father started and that they eventually took over from him, and the place where they’d lived in an upstairs apartment as children.
But Starry means something else, as well. She was at home in her work, comfortable dealing with what most people avoid talking about, much less making their life’s work: death.
Starry apologizes for
her casual appearance—jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, no makeup—as she leads a
visitor into the David Lee Funeral Home on an overcast winter afternoon. She’s
just come from helping her husband at the Sports Hut, a sporting goods store
that they own across Wayzata Boulevard from the funeral home. Starry sold her
share of the family’s funeral home to her brother, Mike, last year, and plans to
build her own in Maple Grove this year. Meanwhile, she’s busy with other
things—she’s been in Owatonna over the weekend with her younger son’s Bantam B
hockey team, which she coaches.
Funeral directors (the term Starry prefers) have lives, of course. It’s just that the image of the undertaker, the mortician, as the somber man in black endures, only recently countered by a couple of cable-TV series. Few people hear “funeral director” and think “mother of two teenage sons,” “youth hockey coach,” “petite, energetic woman,” “someone fun to talk with.”
Starry didn’t always see herself in this profession, either. She remembers that her family had two telephones in the kitchen when she was growing up. The business phone was bigger than the other one. When it rang, “we had to be quiet,” she says. A call meant that someone had died. “That’s when I started to realize what my dad did.”
