Sheri Booker was terrified when she first started working at the Wylie Funeral Home at the age of 15. She was still grieving the death of a beloved aunt, and took the job in the hopes of finding a sense of closure. After preparing her first client — a suicide victim with a gunshot wound to the head — something changed. As morbid as it may sound, she was hooked.
Booker spent nine years working as a mortician’s assistant in West Baltimore, in a neighborhood that was plagued by gangs and drugs. She says that life in the inner-city was a far cry from her relatively peaceful upbringing in northeast Baltimore.
“I was fascinated with this world and these people, and I wanted to know what went on in their community,” Booker says. “This was just like this other life that I felt like I was living.”
Working at the Wylie Funeral Home gave Booker an up-close view of the gang violence that ravaged the neighborhood. She says that the steady flow of young male victims always left her deeply unsettled.
“There were a lot of homicides,” she says. “Young men that I should have been dating, here they [were] lying in a casket in front of me.”
At times, Booker had trouble keeping her personal and professional life separate, like when she found out a young man she'd been dating was dealing drugs. After that, she says, she was haunted by the thought of finding him in a casket in her funeral home.
“Looking back I think that was tough,” Booker says. “Just looking back [and] thinking of all the things that I saw, and all of the people we had to bury.”