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Antonia Cummings finds faith at the heart of her ministry as a funeral director

Elizabeth A. Elliott | Catholic Herald Staff Writer

Antonia Cummings, funeral director at Enders and Shirley in Berryville and Stephens City, places a flag at a grave in Green Hill Cemetery in Berryville Oct. 9. COURTESY

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Late night calls to crime scenes; homes where hospice patients
have completed their journey; a job that goes beyond the regular 9 to 5 routine
that requires compassion for both the living and the dead.

While some might consider her career as a funeral director macabre,
Antonia Cummings sees it as a calling.

She’s done cremations, encouraging the families to bury them and
explained the dignity of that choice. She helps families plan and leads funerals.

“I’ve always been drawn to pray for the dead,” she said. “I feel
so few people are prayed for after they die because Catholics don’t know how
important it is or other Christians and atheists don’t believe they should pray
for the dead. I feel like an ambassador, so to speak, or the only person who
prays for that person after they died.”

Cummings acknowledges there are misconceptions about her chosen
career as a funeral director — it’s cold or creepy, or it’s a huge moneymaking
business. Not true.

“If I wasn’t religious, I would have a hard time looking at the
bodies in a dignified way without objectification,” she said.

A parishioner of St. Bridget of Ireland Church in Berryville,
Cummings graduated from Christendom College in Front Royal. It was while
attending funerals of two friends she’d known since she was 16 that she found
her calling. The week after graduating from Christendom, she began a degree in
funeral services from John Tyler Community College in Chester and graduated in
August 2017. She became a licensed director in November 2018. Now she works at
Enders and Shirley in Berryville and Stephens City.

Prayer enters into much of her work.

“The way I see it is I’m the last person who’s going to care for
that human body in its imperfect state before God touches it again and makes it
perfect at its end times,” she said. “It is cool I’m the last step the body has
before its final resurrection. It is an honor and an incredible way to walk
with this person in the last step.”

Cummings noted that her role as a funeral director ties into both
corporal and spiritual works of mercy.

“At my job I can do a corporal work of mercy every day,” she
said. “It is overwhelming in the sense that people seem to give me more
responsibilities to actually think about it every day, and it would be a waste
not to think about it every day.”

Though she didn’t realize it until college, Cummings has been
leaning toward this career for a long time. When she was little, she had
funeral processions for a dead frog in the driveway. And November was her
favorite month.

“I wanted to go to cemeteries to pray for the dead for the whole
month of November. I loved being there and thought they were beautiful places,”
she said. “I should have seen that was what I loved most. But I didn’t see that
doing the spiritual works of mercy and praying for the dead were preparing me
for the corporal work of mercy later in life.”

Her work has impacted her life in many ways.

“I don’t ever want to go to bed without apologizing, or end
anything on a bad note because you never know when you will see someone for the
last time and I don’t ever want to regret that last encounter,” she said. “If
anything, it’s made me value every good moment you have and realize life is a
gift and treasure for what you have in it.”

Working in a sad environment can be emotionally draining for
Cummings, but she said she never gets depressed. “This work has made me a
happier person because I appreciate life and it made me really rethink my
relationships with people, my interactions with them and what’s really worth
worrying about in life.”

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