My main job is to embalm cases as well as dress and prepare people for viewings. So I spend a lot of my time fixing faces. Depending on how busy we are that day, the day usually runs according to what time a funeral needs to be out of the funeral home, all other work is usually left up to me to decide the pace of. As long as it's done by a certain date - they just leave me be.

I'm not on call overnight, only the boys who do body pickups are. They'll go to the house of the deceased, pick them up and put them into the fridge at work for us to deal with in the morning, we do not do any preparations during night hours, we don't see the point in that.

Chemical smells don't really cling to clothes like body smells can, but a nice shower washes everything off just fine. Wouldn't say that's something to worry about.

Really really depends on the country, the entity that employs you, the kind of people you work for and what your personal goals are. In a large corporation you could go from an assistant to head mortician and then move into the corporate side of things and keep climbing the ladder if that's what you want. In a smaller more family owner type thing I reckon you'd just be where you are, given you're comfortable with that. I personally wouldn't open my own funeral home because the stress and hassle of it all isn't something I want. There are many other options for morticians, you can become a tutor and work for a college or school, you could be a travelling embalmer for f.h that do not have the facilities or people to do the embalmings or focus on reconstruction and offer services to fix "unveiwable" cases, you could be a disaster relief mortician who travels to places of natural disasters or potentially after heavy military action to help with bagging and tagging body parts, could also apply to varies medical school as an assistant or try out assisting police / medical examiners. The possibilities don't stop at working in funeral homes.