She sees dead people

It's rare to find a funeral director who's a woman.

And even rarer to find a funeral director who's a woman...and a nun.

But here's a story about one in Kansas:

For Benedictine Sister Christine Kean, becoming a funeral director was more the outcome of a lifelong fascination than the realization of a lifelong dream. Sister Chris, the new manager of the Consalus Funeral Home in Clinton, has felt comfortable around both the living and the dead since she was a child in Concordia, Kan.

"Since childhood, I have had encounters with families who ran funeral homes," she said.

Sister Chris was born in Burlington, Colo., but shortly after her birth, "my family became nomads, moving to several different towns in Colorado and Kansas."

The family lived in Concordia, for about two years and, during that time, her parents became close friends with the couple who managed the Chaput-Bouy Funeral Home and served as the town's ambulance drivers. Because they were always on call as the ambulance drivers, the Chaputs usually couldn't leave their house, so the Keans had to visit them.

Chris, the youngest child in her family, quickly became friends with the younger son of the funeral directors. The two children would play around the mortuary and in the casket room, until his father found out. "His father put a stop to that rather quickly once he found out," she said with a grin.

She ceased playing in the mortuary, but her interest in the death process and funerals continued. As a girl, she sang in the parish school choir. "Of course we sang at every funeral held in the parish," she said, "whether we knew the person or not. I attended more funerals than you could shake a stick at, and most of the people I didn't even know."

Later, in high school, Chris became friends with a classmate whose parents were in the mortuary business. The classmate shared Chris's fascination with funerals and, "We even talked about studying mortuary science together," she said. But she was more interested in the "social give and take" of liberal arts than in science and, since she was considering teaching, it made sense to "put mortuary science on the back burner for a long time," she said.

She taught for eight years following graduation, the last five at Mount St. Scholastica Academy in Atchison, Kan. In 1981, she joined older sister Mary Margaret in the Benedictine community at Mount St. Scholastica.

Shortly after making her profession, Sister Chris began serving in administrative capacities at the monastery, including overseeing maintenance of the monastery and the buildings of nearby Benedictine College. She also worked in social service ministries at St. Joseph's Co-Cathedral, helping to establish the Open Door Food Kitchen under the guidance of then-pastor Father Jerry Waris.

Her life was full, but as the years passed, something kept nagging Sister Chris. One evening several years ago, a conversation with several of the sisters turned into a kind of trivia contest: "What would you do if you could do it all over again?"

"Well, almost before I thought, I said I would go to mortuary school," Sister Chris said, "and of course the reaction was 'what?!'"

Some days later Benedictine Sister Mary Rardin, a medical doctor, approached Sister Chris and asked if she was serious about attending mortuary school.

"She encouraged me to do it if that's what I really wanted," Sister Chris said. "I thought about it a lot, and finally took it to prayer.

"I was reading St. Mark's account of the resurrection and the words seemed to jump off the page: 'When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary, the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him.' It hit me that those three women were the first ones to witness the resurrection because they were going to minister to Jesus in death as they did in life. Now it's called embalming. I just couldn't get it out of my head.

She closed her eyes for a moment before continuing. "Consoling the sorrowing and burying the dead are directions in the Rule of St. Benedict, the way of life we as Benedictines follow," Sister Chris said. "And, I knew that the best gift I had been given in my lifetime was the gift of compassion, along with the ability to listen. I realized I should use that gift; I didn't have the right to ignore it. So I went to Sister Mary Agnes Patterson, who was the prioress at the time. She looked at me and asked, 'Where would you go to study?' There was a program offered at Kansas City Kansas Community College, so I wouldn't have to travel very far. With my community's blessing I took the first steps toward this ministry."

Read more about how she launched this ministry, and what it means to her.

Photo: by Marty Denzer/Catholic Key