Mortuary science takes pains to derive gratitude from family grief.

"OK, so you get a call from Our Lady of Grace Nursing Home. Mary Smith has died. She's 82 years old. Normal height. She's like 5 foot 5, or something. Normal weight. She weighs about 140. Nothing remarkable."

Nothing, that is, except that I'm sitting in a classroom surrounded by people taking notes about a fictitious dead woman, as part of a Mortuary Science class exercise. Halloween may be only one day of the year, but every day is Day of the Dead on this third floor wing of Ivy Tech. (Well, Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, at least.)

But there really is nothing remarkable about Mary Smith being embalmed. The United States is one of the few countries to routinely embalm bodies, a practice that dates to the Civil War, when deceased combatants needed to be transported long distances to their homes. Since then, it's become a science, as Brian Miller, program chair at Ivy Tech, explains.

"Here's the deal: warm normal body case. She died at 11 o'clock a.m. It is now 1 o'clock p.m. You have the body back at the funeral home. Today's Wednesday. Visitation will be Friday. Funeral Saturday."

This is what students in Miller's classes are going to be presented with by the time they finish their two-year course and the one-year internship that follows, after all the exams and licensing procedures. By then they'll be familiar with terms like "formaldehyde neutralization" and "post-mortem purge," and they will be similarly comfortable with the physical embodiment of those terms.

These students -- girls in hoodies and sweatpants, guys in K-Swiss kicks and carpenter jeans -- will don protective clothing, make incisions and craft sutures. They will massage bodies with soap and water so that various "coagulates" can move toward "drainage points." And those gruesome, crime-scene-like photos in the textbook will be real.

"Burial will be at Raven Ridge Cemetery. I came up with that. They're affiliated with the Sleep Tight Casket Company. That's a good one, right?"

It seems impossible, but Miller puts the fun in funeral. Next to the Grim Reaper doll on his office shelf, sits a plaque for "Instructor of the Year." His office has a "Dead End" doormat at the entrance.But Miller is not irreverent. In fact, he has the tact and diplomacy you'd expect of a mortuary science instructor who's embalmed more than 8,000 bodies.

"What are you guys gonna do with this? Get with your groups. Let's work together a little bit.

"I want to know everything from the time you achieve permission to what you're going to do prior to burial, including what kind of fluids you're going to use. Strong, medium, mild, low, high, fast-acting, slow-acting. Injection sites. And tell me why you chose them."

People choose to become funeral directors for a variety of reasons. Some enroll out of morbid curiosity, while others see "undertaker" as an inflation-proof career path, but the real reason people should becomes morticians, according to Miller, is personal. It's about knowing that you can bury somebody's loved one and be thanked for doing so.

Miller made the decision to be a funeral director when he was 7, when his grandfather died. He saw how things were taken care of with dignity.

"Explain every action that you're taking. Justify every step, and write it down. If you have questions, I'd be happy to help out."

Being happy to help. That's what the funeral business is about for Miller. You can think of morticians as being doctors for the dead, if you must. But the way he sees it, they perform services for families. They try to get their lives back to a normal state, and they do that through ritual, through funeral processes, through making the bodies look presentable, as gruesome and unimaginable and unsavory and unfathomable as that may seem. In a way, Miller said it's kind of like riding a Harley. If you understand, you don't have to ask. And if you have to ask, you're never going to understand.

Wanna get your hands dirty?

If you're interested in mortuary science and would like to know more, contact Ivy Tech program chair Brian Miller at (317) 921-4325