At the age of 36, Chaisity Shay Paddio-Owens has realized her lifelong dream: she became a funeral director and opened her own funeral home.

Born in Jennings, she has been fascinated by death since she was a child. Today, she sees caring for the deceased and facilitating their final farewells as her calling.

“I was about 8 years old when I started becoming interested in the death of animals and the things that happen after they die,” Paddio-Owens said. “There was a murder in Jennings and I remember asking my grandmother who takes care of the deceased and she told me it was the undertaker.

“So I was 8 or 9 and I went around telling my family, ‘I’m going to be a funeral director,'” she said.

Until she graduated from funeral school, no one took her seriously.

“I didn’t want to do anything else,” she said of her love and passion for working with the dead. “It’s been a part of me since I was a child. It’s a gift that was instilled in me. You don’t just wake up wanting to be a funeral director.”

Today, she is the first African-American undertaker and owner of a funeral home in Jeff Davis Parish.

She has a skull tattoo with the word “undertaker” on her upper arm to honor her late father, whose first body she embalmed. The tattoo also served as motivation for her to finish funeral school.

“My father was the first person I embalmed and I presided over his funeral and buried him,” she said. “It was the least I could do for him. Throughout my mortician training he had prostate cancer so I came home every weekend to check on him and it got tough.”

During one of these visits, Paddio-Owens asked her father if he would embalm him.

“His words were, ‘If you think you can do this for me, it would be an honor,’ so I had to do it,” she said.

Since then, she has honored countless aunts, cousins ​​and family friends by preparing their remains for burial.

When her brother died, she was the one who braided his hair.

“I was 12 years old and had just learned how to braid hair. I went to a funeral home here in Jennings and braided his hair,” she said. “From that day on, I knew what school I was going to go to and I knew that was what I wanted to do.”

After graduating from high school in 2006, Paddio-Owens attended the Commonwealth Institute of Funeral Services in Houston, Texas, where she studied to become a mortician. She returned home a year later to look for a job in the funeral industry.

“It took me about six months to find a job in my field,” she says, pointing out that many funeral homes at the time were not open to the idea of ​​hiring a female undertaker or someone who was not family.

She began her career at Combre Funeral Home in Lake Charles, where she spent eight years learning strength of will, embalming, funeral director, dealing with grieving families and recovering bodies.

“That’s where it all started,” she said. “Marcus Combre was my mentor there.”

The skills she learned there only motivated her more, she said. She went on to work at Hixson Funeral Home in Lake Charles, where she was the first African-American funeral director.

“I learned so much in the three and a half months I was there,” she said.

She managed another local funeral home for two and a half years before moving to Ford and Joseph Funeral Home in Opelousas. She left after six months because she was getting married and pregnant.

“It was just too much and I ended up staying home for two and a half years with my son, working on my business plan and driving cement trucks,” she said.

“At first, I just wanted to build a funeral home,” she continued. “I had bought a lot to build a funeral home in downtown Jennings, but it would have cost me way too much money to build.”

In April, she opened her own business, the Mortuary Center of Southwest Louisiana, in a former church on four acres just two miles north of Jennings.

“I bought the building in 2022, but it took another six or seven months to raise the necessary funding,” she said. “I had no investors or grants. For me and my husband, it was just hard work, prayer and dedication.”

There she works as an embalmer, undertaker and insurance agent. She recently started her own printing company to produce programs and other memorial texts for church services.

Their future goals are to educate young men and
Women for careers in
Funeral home and opening a funeral home in the Lake Charles area. She also wants to open a homeless shelter to feed, shower and care for the homeless.

Paddio-Owens said her goal has always been to make the funeral home more welcoming and to make funerals more diverse and affordable while providing comfort to grieving families. The funeral home offers customized services, including celebrations of life and butterfly releases.

“I’m proud of my diversity because here in this area we’re still segregated,” she said. “We still have our own cemeteries, a railroad line separates whites from blacks, and whites go to a white funeral home and blacks go to a black funeral home. I want to change that history. It doesn’t matter what color you are. I’ve worked in all funeral homes, black and white. I hold services for all races and religions and treat everyone with the same respect.”

Paddio-Owens said she is tired of families having to spend money they don’t have, and many of which aren’t insured, on their loved ones’ funerals.

“So when someone says, ‘I have $2,200, what can you do?’ I don’t let them go,” she said. “I work with them to find something they can do within their budget. They have nothing, but they have their loved ones. They need to bury them and I’m able to find something for them. That makes me complete when I can help a family.”

It is important that funerals reflect the life and personality of the deceased, she said.

Paddio-Owens said the hardest part of the job is being an African-American female mortician in a traditionally male-dominated field where women are labeled as too emotional and told to do paperwork behind a desk, not in the embalming room.

“But I don’t think so,” she said. “You have to have a thick skin. If you don’t have a thick skin, you can’t make it in this industry.”