In Good Hands At Funeral Homes

When I sat down to chat with Rachel Powell of Keota the other day, I was not only charmed by her nice, sweet manner, but inspired by her life work, from taking care of kids as a teen in Kansas to working as a registered nurse delivering 400 babies in Indiana to helping people plan funerals in Iowa. This woman, 93, has spent her life helping other people. (See today's Ramblin' column in The Gazette.)

Rachel was a registered nurse in Indiana when she met Lewis Powell, Jr., in the 1930s. They married in 1939 and moved to South English in 1946. When the family bought a funeral home in Keota in 1955, they moved there.

In those early days, Rachel's training as a nurse came in very handy. South English didn't have a doctor, so people would approach Rachel for medical advice. She would help them care for young children who were sick, too. And, to top that all off, since funeral homes operated the ambulance services in those days, Rachel would go on ambulance calls. While most ambulance services today have trained emergency medical technicians, having a nurse on an ambulance in those days was an anomaly.

A big part of Rachel's 63 years in the funeral home business has been preparing bodies of the deceased for viewing in the casket. Using photographs supplied by the families, Rachel did everything from trimming hair and fingernails to applying lipstick and makeup to cover up recent blemishes. There was no greater reward, she says, than to hear someone say "I haven't seen him/her look this good in years."

It wasn't always easy, though, as Rachel learned on the job. And now that she's 93, it hasn't been easy to bury friends. It's like her husband's father, Lewis Powell Sr., used to say as he lived to be 92: "Now I'm burying my friends."

"It's pretty tough right now," Rachel says. "At my age, pretty much everybody was a friend."

And those people could call Rachel a friend, too.

Now, because sore legs have limited her mobility, Rachel is afraid she'll have to retire. That breaks her heart.

"My work was for love," Rachel says. "For the love of the people."