From Roll Radio, this is Double Take.

I'm Les Sillers.

When I was kind of in my late 30s, I went back to work after having been a stay at home

mom.

Laurel Marr is a Christian woman in her mid 40s.

She's about five foot four with brown hair and bright green eyes.

And I went to work in a church.

Calvary Episcopal Church in New York City, New York.

The job was parish administrator.

And one of the questions they asked me in my interview was, how do you feel about, you

know, cremated remains on your desk and I was like, what?

And sure enough, there were oftentimes that I did have an urn of cremated remains on

my desk because we had a funeral that afternoon.

Having human ashes on your desk might seem a bit creepy, but Laurel was okay with it.

I grew up in a family with a father who was a physician and death was, you know, a

pretty normal discussion at my home.

I saw my grandparents, you know, and they were dead.

And so it was always just, you know, a normal thing for me.

Over the next few years, Laurel often helped the director of Calvary Episcopal with

funeral planning.

She worked with the families of the deceased and she went to visit sick parishioners.

She had a good bedside manner for that kind of work.

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