When people call Gruerio’s Funeral Home here and get Toni Gruerio on the phone, they sometimes ask for the funeral director.
“I am the funeral director,” says Gruerio.
“Then can I speak to the owner,” the caller persists.
“I am the owner,” she answers.
Some people, it seems, still have trouble with the idea of a female undertaker. But here is Gruerio, in a stylish charcoal gray suit with bold pinstripes, very much in charge of embalming, viewing, eulogizing and burying the dead.
“In a profession that has been very male-dominated, women are a growing trend,” said Andrea Waas, spokeswoman for the National Funeral Directors Association, an industry group of 18,500 members, 5 percent women.
The growth can be seen in the numbers of women graduating from the 40 accredited schools of mortuary science around the nation. In 1991, the latest year for which statistics are available, 26 percent of the 1,500 graduates were women. Fifteen years earlier, in 1976, only 8 percent of the graduates were women.
As their numbers increase, these women say, the profession will change because women will bring a different sense of style and a different sensitivity.
Women are going into the funeral business, experts say, because the opportunities are there and because barriers to their participation have fallen, as they have elsewhere.
A few attribute the trend to a better image of the funeral business as the Baby Boomer generation increasingly confronts its own mortality. But others argue that every generation has discovered death, and the business still has a bad image.
Most women who own funeral homes, like Gruerio, were born or married into the business. Daughters have taken over for their fathers; widows for their husbands.
The Trenton area has a concentration of women in the business, although no one seems able to explain why. Of the roughly 60 Trenton area funeral homes, about six are owned by women, double the national average.
Gruerio works with her 28-year-old son, Jude Curini, as well as her niece, Judy Destribats.
Across the Delaware River in Yardley, Pa., Anna Louise Sommer and Juliet C. Sommer own and operate the FitzGerald-Sommer Funeral Home. They are one of the few sister teams in the business.
Gruerio’s father, Joseph, established the Gruerio Funeral Home in 1929. Toni, his only child, went to mortuary school and worked alongside him for many years until his death in 1977.
Around the time of his death, the Gruerio Funeral Home burned to the ground and Toni had to decide whether to let the business die or start all over.
Gruerio rebuilt it. Today, she sits at her huge semicircular wooden desk under a vast crystal chandelier. Before her, where someone else might keep a plastic nameplate, is a granite monument stone engraved with her name.
There are mirrors everywhere. “People like to look at themselves at a funeral,” she said, looking into a mirror. “It’s reassuring for them to know they are still here.”
The viewing rooms are stark white and the walls iridescent. One slow day recently, an employee counted 700 light bulbs shining bright in the funeral home. Outside, the name Gruerio is lighted in neon.
As a youngster, she found her father’s funeral home “dreary, eerie and scary,” Gruerio recalled. “When I had a chance to re-do the home, I did it in a way that when children come in, they do not want to run out screaming like I did.”
Gruerio said she believes women are naturally better at being funeral directors than men are.
“We’re not ashamed or afraid of expressing our feelings,” she said. This sensitivity must be coupled with strength because “people only come to us in a crisis.”
“From the time the person makes the call until the very end, I have to give them the feeling that they can place all their burdens on me,” she said. “This is not a happy business. If I had a food store or owned a jewelry store, I’d have happy customers. People love to eat, they love jewelry, but they don’t love to die.”
She added: “But here you have a chance to help people, people who are going through a time in their life when they are completely helpless.”
With at least equal sensitivity, but a very different style, the Sommer sisters run their funeral home on the other side of the Delaware. Unlike Gruerio, both sisters went to college and embarked on other careers-Juliet in real estate and Anna Louise in publishing-before joining their bachelor uncle, John J. FitzGerald, in the funeral business.
When he died 10 years ago, the sisters, now in their early 40s, got their funeral directors’ license and took over.
Juliet Sommer does the initial interviews and much of the paperwork and finances. Anna Louise Sommer is in charge the day of the funeral and drives the hearse.
Their funeral home, a converted 1925 house built of brick and wood, reflects their style. There are stuffed chairs and chaises, flowered wallpaper and heavy curtains. The lights are kept low. At the entrance, an antique lectern with a dim light has a worn metal plaque that reads, “Please Register.”
Anna Louise Sommer said she tries to be helpful, but as unobtrusive as possible.
“I always thought that a good funeral director was someone you didn’t notice,” she said. The job is to help family members get through an ordeal, without reminding them constantly of what an ordeal it is. “People don’t want a gloomy presence over their shoulder,” she said.
She takes her cues from the family members who are arranging the funeral. If they want to talk, she talks. If they hang back, she does not interfere.
During the arrangements and the funeral, she gets little reaction, she said, “but afterwards, people will say, `It was so reassuring to see a female face.”‘
The Sommer sisters said they prefer not to talk about their work at parties.
The elder sister, Anna Louise Sommer, is married; Juliet Sommer is single.
Gruerio is divorced. “I was seeing this fellow several years ago but never told him what I did,” she recalled. “One night we went out to a movie and then afterward we took a drive. He drove to a cemetery.
“`What are we doing here?”‘ I asked him.
“`Oh, I thought you’d feel at home here,”‘ he told me.
“I told him, `If you don’t turn around and get us out of here this instant, you’re going to feel at home here.’
“That was the end of that guy,” she said with a mischievous smile.
