Shamari Jackson is a mortician for a Black-owned funeral home in St. Louis County, Baucom’s Life Celebration and Cremation Services. She came to the job after gun violence took her boyfriend’s life, and in her work, she has cared for the bodies of friends and classmates, as well as strangers. Among the people she’s worked with are three of the young men from The Marshall Project’s “Remember Me” series: Mario Fox, Tyrin Williams and Courtney Williams.
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My job is what I would term a “last responder”: When you think of a first responder, they work holidays, birthdays — when their job calls, they have to go, and that’s how it is on our side, too. We are technically first responders, we’re just the final call. As a licensed funeral director and embalmer, I handle people’s loved ones once they pass away. Everything from meeting with the family and planning the services to dealing with human remains: preservation, restoration, grooming, cosmetizing, dressing and casketing.
In partnership with the Marshall Project, “Remember Me” is an ongoing memorial to the more than 1,000 unsolved homicides in St. Louis over the last decade — an effort to remember the victims as they were in life, and meet families in their grief.
This job is not what I set out to do. I was in college for forensics and criminology, and I thought I might become a doctor. But at 21, I lost my boyfriend, Preston Freeman. He went out with some friends and a shooting started, and he got hit in the crossfire — one bullet killed him.
It was devastating, and while I was grieving, my GPA fell and I lost my academic scholarship that spring. In the fall, trying to find my way, I enrolled in St. Louis Community College, just doing general studies. I started talking to a school counselor about forensics and what I wanted to do, and she talked to me about mortuary science.
I got my first experience shadowing at a funeral home in North County. The first time I watched an embalming process, watching her bring that man back to a lifelike [appearance] was insane to me. Knowing that I could do that helped me cope with what happened to my boyfriend, and unresolved grief with my mom, who I lost when I was 12.
I didn’t get to grieve her death. My grandmother raised me, [and] there wasn’t really room to show emotion. Wanting sympathy was [seen] as a sign of weakness. And then at my mom’s funeral, she did not look anything like herself. I think that's the most devastating thing when somebody’s already in a place of grief and turmoil: You walk up to finally see somebody that you miss, and you don’t recognize them. I was traumatized and erasing that image, trying to replace it with what I knew, was really hard.
One of the first classes I took was a grief management course, and at that time, I was still really stuck in my grief with my boyfriend. I wasn’t ready to accept that he was gone, so I was acting and living like he was still here, talking about him — and to him — every day. But I was in class one day and the professor said, “At the time of death, your job is done. The relationship has ceased.” It was like a light dinged in my head, and it allowed me to process that I had been in denial, and that was keeping me from moving on.
Getting an education in death was almost like free therapy, if that makes sense, because I was learning how to help people in my exact situation. And the beauty was that, by learning how to help them, I was able to help myself. So what I do now is try to educate people when I’m meeting with them, let them know that it’s OK to feel your feelings, and to be comfortable in that, even though it's uncomfortable. When you understand what it is that you're going through, it doesn't make it easier, but it makes it a little more bearable.
Part of my job is to recreate the illusion that this person is alive, so my thing is to make them look like they’re sleeping. I like to say that I’m the last person to make them smile, because most people that I touch have a little smirk, like they’re resting. If it’s a death that’s not natural, like someone who was shot, [the medical examiner] normally autopsies the body, and that’s a whole different ballgame. They get cut with a Y-shaped incision and basically taken apart, so I have to put you back together again. I have to piece bones back together, reconstruct noses and jaws. And I’m all about the details, down to the freckle. So if they had piercings or tattoos, I put them all back, try to get them as close as possible to who they were.
A lot of the families that I’ve helped still keep up with me and invite me to things. If they’re doing memorial tributes or balloon releases, they’ll reach out and ask if I have any ideas or advice. I’ve worked at a bunch of the prominent funeral homes, so I handled Mario, Tyrin and Courtney. Mario I remember: I was a freshly licensed embalmer, and I did everything [from] start to finish with him. I was nervous, because you never know how somebody’s going to feel until they see your work, but his mom said he looked like he was asleep.
I try to be present for memorials and send things on birthdays and milestones — the one-year, three-year, five-year anniversary. For Tyrin, I remember I went to an annual basketball game [in his honor] a couple years ago. For Mario, I got his sister a pendant with her and his faces engraved on it. It’s the little things that keep their memory alive, to be able to talk about them, laugh and joke about stuff that they did. It just creates that space to keep them present.
I think our generation is becoming numb to death and to trauma, because we experience it a lot. People act like it's not nothing that should bother them, but it really does. So I pray with the families and just try to be what I can in those moments, especially if it's invited. I focus on letting them know what I’ve learned. And the crazy thing about grief is it’s like rain: Sometimes you can smell when the rain is coming, and sometimes it just comes outta nowhere.
It doesn’t just stop at the funeral — working with people that intimately, you create relationships. When you treat people with kindness and respect them where they are, they don't forget that. So I really just treat people as if it were me sitting on the other side of the seat.
