Filed
6:00 a.m. EDT
10.17.2025
St. Louis native Shamari Jackson started learning mortuary science after her boyfriend was fatally shot. Now she makes use of her work as a type of remedy.
Shamari Jackson, a mortician for a Black-owned funeral dwelling in St. Louis County, exterior the “Bear in mind Me” artwork exhibit at St. Louis Public Radio.
Shamari Jackson is a mortician for a Black-owned funeral dwelling in St. Louis County, Baucom’s Life Celebration and Cremation Providers. She got here to the job after gun violence took her boyfriend’s life, and in her work, she has cared for the our bodies of mates and classmates, in addition to strangers. Among the many individuals she’s labored with are three of the younger males from The Marshall Challenge’s “Bear in mind Me” collection: Mario Fox, Tyrin Williams and Courtney Williams.
In partnership with St. Louis Public Radio, “Bear in mind Me” is an ongoing memorial to the greater than 1,000 unsolved homicides in St. Louis over the past decade — an effort to recollect the victims as they have been in life, and meet households of their grief.
My job is what I might time period a “final responder”: Once you consider a primary responder, they work holidays, birthdays — when their job calls, they should go, and that’s how it’s on our aspect, too. We’re technically first responders, we’re simply the ultimate name. As a licensed funeral director and embalmer, I deal with individuals’s family members as soon as they move away. Every little thing from assembly with the household and planning the providers to coping with human stays: preservation, restoration, grooming, cosmetizing, dressing and casketing.
This job is just not what I got down to do. I used to be in faculty for forensics and criminology, and I believed I would change into a health care provider. However at 21, I misplaced my boyfriend, Preston Freeman. He went out with some mates and a taking pictures began, and he received hit within the crossfire — one bullet killed him.
It was devastating, and whereas I used to be grieving, my GPA fell and I misplaced my tutorial scholarship that spring. Within the fall, looking for my manner, I enrolled in St. Louis Neighborhood School, simply doing common research. I began speaking to a faculty counselor about forensics and what I wished to do, and he or she talked to me about mortuary science.
I received my first expertise shadowing at a funeral dwelling in North County. The primary time I watched an embalming course of, watching her deliver that man again to a lifelike [appearance] was insane to me. Realizing that I may do this helped me deal with what occurred to my boyfriend, and unresolved grief with my mother, who I misplaced after I was 12.
I didn’t get to grieve her dying. My grandmother raised me, [and] there wasn’t actually room to indicate emotion. Wanting sympathy was [seen] as an indication of weak spot. After which at my mother’s funeral, she didn’t look something like herself. I feel that is essentially the most devastating factor when any person’s already in a spot of grief and turmoil: You stroll as much as lastly see any person that you just miss, and also you don’t acknowledge them. I used to be traumatized and erasing that picture, attempting to exchange it with what I knew, was actually laborious.
One of many first lessons I took was a grief administration course, and at the moment, I used to be nonetheless actually caught in my grief with my boyfriend. I wasn’t prepared to just accept that he was gone, so I used to be performing and residing like he was nonetheless right here, speaking about him — and to him — daily. However I used to be in school in the future and the professor mentioned, “On the time of dying, your job is finished. The connection has ceased.” It was like a lightweight dinged in my head, and it allowed me to course of that I had been in denial, and that was maintaining me from transferring on.
Getting an training in dying was virtually like free remedy, if that is sensible, as a result of I used to be studying assist individuals in my precise scenario. And the wonder was that, by studying assist them, I used to be capable of assist myself. So what I do now’s attempt to educate individuals after I’m assembly with them, allow them to know that it’s OK to really feel your emotions, and to be comfy in that, despite the fact that it is uncomfortable. Once you perceive what it’s that you are going by means of, it would not make it simpler, but it surely makes it just a little extra bearable.
A part of my job is to recreate the phantasm that this particular person is alive, so my factor is to make them appear like they’re sleeping. I prefer to say that I’m the final particular person to make them smile, as a result of most individuals that I contact have just a little smirk, like they’re resting. If it’s a dying that’s not pure, like somebody who was shot, [the medical examiner] usually autopsies the physique, and that’s an entire completely different ballgame. They get minimize with a Y-shaped incision and mainly taken aside, so I’ve to place you again collectively once more. I’ve to piece bones again collectively, reconstruct noses and jaws. And I’m all in regards to the particulars, right down to the freckle. So if they’d piercings or tattoos, I put all of them again, attempt to get them as shut as attainable to who they have been.
Loads of the households that I’ve helped nonetheless sustain with me and invite me to issues. In the event that they’re doing memorial tributes or balloon releases, they’ll attain out and ask if I’ve any concepts or recommendation. I’ve labored at a bunch of the distinguished funeral properties, so I dealt with Mario, Tyrin and Courtney. Mario I bear in mind: I used to be a freshly licensed embalmer, and I did all the pieces [from] begin to end with him. I used to be nervous, since you by no means understand how any person’s going to really feel till they see your work, however his mother mentioned he regarded like he was asleep.
Shamari Jackson holds a card that includes the portrait of Mario Fox on the “Bear in mind Me” exhibit, which options portraits of six of the greater than 1,000 unsolved homicides in St. Louis over the past decade. Jackson, a mortician, labored on Fox after his dying.
I attempt to be current for memorials and ship issues on birthdays and milestones — the one-year, three-year, five-year anniversary. For Tyrin, I bear in mind I went to an annual basketball sport [in his honor] a pair years in the past. For Mario, I received his sister a pendant along with her and his faces engraved on it. It’s the little issues that maintain their reminiscence alive, to have the ability to discuss them, chortle and joke about stuff that they did. It simply creates that house to maintain them current.
I feel our era is turning into numb to dying and to trauma, as a result of we expertise it loads. Folks act prefer it’s not nothing that ought to hassle them, but it surely actually does. So I pray with the households and simply attempt to be what I can in these moments, particularly if it is invited. I give attention to letting them know what I’ve realized. And the loopy factor about grief is it’s like rain: Typically you may odor when the rain is coming, and generally it simply comes outta nowhere.
It doesn’t simply cease on the funeral — working with those that intimately, you create relationships. Once you deal with individuals with kindness and respect them the place they’re, they do not overlook that. So I actually simply deal with individuals as if it have been me sitting on the opposite aspect of the seat.
