After creating this blog nearly a year ago in August of 2024, during the start of my second year at the University of Texas at Austin I quickly forgot it with the dust mites and cat fur accumulating in my small, borderline studio, two room apartment. Then on the most unlikely of coincides I remember with a start "HEY! Blogger exists!" While I was reading "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" from alternative death industry ruling monarch Caitlin Doughty, seeing her reference her own blog she kept during her early years in industry. Now, that doesn't sound like a bad idea does it?
Leaving this blog in it's sorry state couldn't do, no no not at all! Though, I have rudely neglected introducing myself. My name is Griffin Finnigan, I am a third year student at the University of Texas at Austin pursuing a bachelors degree in History. I am an aspiring mortician, undertaker, funeral director, and shepherd of the dead, though in the coming years I don't foresee much opportunity besides cremation and functioning as a body taxi. I fell in love with death a great many years ago, though my own childhood was fraught with fright at the concept of dropping dead at any moment. I flipped through all the different jobs I could do to keep me close to it: A forensic pathologist, working professionally dissecting the corpses of the mysteriously deceased? A hospice worker, tending to the previously alive as they become the newly dead? A death doula perhaps, serving the same function with a greater air of spirituality (and quite a bit of sage)? My path hasn't meticulously materialized out of thin air like a God given quest though, and I have decided to take the reins into my own hands and jump head first into the brush! Once I have finished my degree of course, always good to have a backup plan, even if it is as equally low paying as the primary.
Academia is a whole different beast, and while it is the best bet for your average twenty-something spat out by the University system to find a career with something as frivolous as History, Sociology, or god forbid Philosophy, to look at pursuing a traditional graduate degree in something more tangible, and more importantly teachable. But I cannot see myself proceeding here, my mind much too occupied with pondering the big questions (and rather small questions, has anyone wondered if ye old drunkard had good taste in ale?) to bother asking anyone else and grading their response as a professor. My fascination with death, its rituals, attitudes towards it, and the big "What next?" takes precedence over any poor undergraduate who could possibly want my approval as the one deciding if they're passing History 101. So for the good of everyone around me, it is best that I indulge myself and pursue what truly makes me tick.
I will be checking in every so often, updating y'all (dear God, there's the Texan) on my goings on and just how many job rejection letters I've received from the modern funeral home who doesn't quite trust a kooky weirdo who won't shut up about the benefits of open and honest death conversations in speaking to families in a dignified and sanitized way befitting to the preserved, plastered, stuffed, and made up corpse of the American way of death. I'll have to say goodbye for now, ciao, tschüss, sayonara!
