Pauline Greene is a one-person show, working hard to make sure the person or family she met with has their wishes completed during a difficult time.

Riding through her hometown of Kaplan, Pauline Greene, founder of Greene Funeral Home, recounted her struggles of owning and directing her own funeral home.

Greene worked at University of Lafayette Louisiana until 2018. During that time, she worked on the side as a limousine driver for a limousine and crematory company.

The company was owned and operated by a local conglomeration of funeral homes. She often drove limousines for funerals and weddings. Through that experience, she became familiar with funeral services.

Over time, she learned the ins-and-outs of the industry. She later worked as the assistant manager of the crematorium. When COVID hit, a funeral director told her about the building she operates the funeral home out of was available.

Once she finally had the opportunity to start her funeral home, Greene couldn’t serve as the funeral director and was required to hire a funeral director for a long time while she attended school to earn her Funeral Director Certification.

She took online classes at Dallas Institute, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and South Louisiana Community College. By her final semester, she was enrolled at all three schools simultaneously to “speed up the process.”

“It was, to say the least, very challenging, to come from not even having my license,” Greene said.

Greene faced a number of other setbacks in her journey to becoming her own funeral home director.

First, the industry is generational.

Many of the popular local funeral homes have been run by the same families for generations. Not only did Greene come from outside the funeral home business, but she also had no family ties.

The funeral industry is also a male-dominated one. She searched for female peers, but it was a fruitless endeavor. According to Greene, nobody she spoke to, including a casket salesman, knew of another woman-started funeral home.

“I even asked a casket salesman, and they know everybody, if he knew of a woman that had started a funeral home business. He said no, they’ve inherited them, but never started them from scratch. So I really started from behind,” Greene said.

Another hurdle that she only recently became aware of was the building’s reputation. Since opening, she’s received a number of comments about how the funeral home exceeded their expectations.

At the age of 60, Greene said she never really planned to start a funeral home.

“I never planned to do this. First I was retired, and then COVID came around, so I got laid off. So I asked myself, ‘What do you want to do with yourself?’ I wanted a worthwhile endeavor that I could build, that my daughter might want,” Greene said.

Greene knows what really matters when it comes to seeing someone put to rest, which is creating a simple, thoughtful process that puts the living at ease.

“I still feel for the families. When making arrangements, with grief comes confusion, and people aren’t supposed to know how to do this, that’s my job. It’s to give them all of the options that I possibly can,” Greene said. “I put myself in their place. I imagine, what if that were my daughter. So when they walk out of this door, I want clients to take a sigh of relief and say, ‘I got this’, and that peace is underrated.”

Greene described an older lady nearing the end of her life, who came in to discuss her options after death. She wanted to be cremated, but not scattered. As they talked more and more, and Greene grew to understand the lady, she learned about a graveyard on a piece of family property, and Greene made a recommendation that truly touched her heart.

“I said, ‘Why don’t you have your brother put your cremains in a natural wooden box at the roots of the tree, and as the tree grows, you provide shade for the people that come to visit their families?’ She said, ‘You get me, you understand,’” Greene said.

She also allows the funeral to be thoughtfully arranged with items relevant to the deceased. Were they a cowboy? Bring in their saddle and spurs. Were they a biker? Bring in their Harley. To Greene, these little touches elevate the experience for those still living who can remember the truest version of the deceased.

“It’s about celebrating what that person’s life was. It’s not just about goodbye, but it’s a healing process and a celebration of who they were and what their place in the universe was,” Greene said.

Greene doesn’t just focus on providing the best experience, she also takes pride in the prices of her services. Greene said these services sometimes come at her personal cost as her low prices forced her to continue investing personal funds into the business.

“I want them to know, when they leave here, that they can still pay their bills and feed their children. They are already grieving emotionally, they shouldn’t have to struggle financially as much, and I pay the price. I struggle financially here. My prices are so low I’m having to put money back into my own business,” Greene said.

Greene said she can’t help but feel a connection with the dead waiting in her embalming room because that person still matters to someone. But at the same time, she can remove herself from her work at the end of the day so she can “heal” from the experience.

“I’m blessed to be able to leave it here, so I can recover, so I can continue,” Greene said.

Greene is so invested into the lives of her clients that one became her best friend. While putting her father to rest, Casey David learned that he was recorded as being an organ donor, but never wanted to be. So she panicked, and called Greene crying.

“Miss Pauline’s like, take it easy I’m going to take care of it, just calm down. I was crying because I never lost anybody like that, and I didn’t know what to do, much less not that he was an organ donor. Well, Miss Pauline made sure to get my daddy. It was 9 o’clock at night and that lady went to pick him up. She went out of her way for me and for him.” David said.

Through the process of laying her father to rest, David and Greene grew close, especially through Greene’s empathy and willingness to go above and beyond for her family.

“For 23 years, I’ve been married, and for 23 years, every time my husband would go offshore, that man (her father) would be sitting with me, so me and his grandkids weren’t alone. It’s been kind of a devastation losing him, but the easiest part of it was dealing with Pauline. When I tell you I was so devastated, there were no words I could ever speak,” David said.

When renovating the building, Greene wanted the building to feel welcoming so that it’s a place for families to host a celebration of life, not a place to wallow in loss.

“I didn’t want this place to feel macabre or morbid. You want people to pump the breaks when they hit the door and take it easy. This is a venue to celebrate the life of someone who has passed. I want to treat them like people, treat them as family, treat them like friends, treat them like people in need, not like a customer,” Greene concluded.