They usually just do apprenticeships, I tried getting a job doing that in Hawaii, but never got a interview. 16.00 a hour starting off. You just dress them, drain them, sew their lips so their jaw doesn’t drop during the wake, and dab makeup on.
I would be willing in your position to just take off and accept a training position anywhere in the country, preferably in a warm spot (hard to do funerals in permafrost land).
If you decide to go it alone, you’ll need to buy a decent house, hire a grass service to chemically green everything and have a very nice plaster job done on the place, with a viewing room, and side room with cheeses in it do people can cry. You’ll need a mortuary limo too, and bunches of little flags for each car.
Also, police will get to know you very well, you can’t fuck the dead bodies cause sometimes a second autopsy will be ordered after you bury them, and you can’t tell kids about nihilism if they ask if grandma is in heaven… you gotta really feign respect for than and answer generically metaphysically, enough to dodge entrenchment in a belief they might oppose.
Oh… and you gotta be able to roast them in a crematorium… buying a oven. I hear it’s really hard to turn the bones to ashes, gotta run them through a few times if they we’re a milk drinker… calcium, strong bones and all.
You’ll do alot if transportation out of the loading dock of hospitals in the muddle of the night… hospitals aren’t big on heurses showing up during visiting hours out front… so you will get calls to go three hundred miles out to pick up a stiff, wander about hospitals looking for security, told to go around back to the loading dicks by the trash compactors, put the stiff in, drive back after dawn, toss the body in a crematorium, and let them roast as you doze off… every time you hear a car crash outside on the night of a big game, you’ll get pissed cause you know you’ll have all this work to do.
In very rural areas, your heurse doubles as a ambulance, you’ll be required to taxi pregnant women to the hospital far away (with payment of course). They can ruin your apolstry… it upsets the pall bearers to see blood stains underneath the casket area.
I’m serious… no fucking the corpse, no matter how fresh and hot she looks. You can’t just microwave them to make them feel warm either, or set them on a washer machine so it feels like they are moving, you get caught doing that once, your career is over… it’s hard to sell yourself professionally after that one.