Morticians and funeral directors are stereotyped as workers “who profit from the dead”, according to William E. Thompson. Such negative assumptions about those who work within the process of embalming the dead and conducting funeral ceremonies collocates these individuals in very uncomfortable positions, from which they continuously try to hide or change their meaning. In order to understand those who overcome the negative aspects of working with those in grief and handling the dead, Thompson conducted primary research and extensively interviewed sixteen individuals who work in that area. The two major stigmas found in Thompson’s investigation are: the stigma of handling the dead and profiting from those in grief. The first one that Thompson…show more content… It's sincerely a tough categorization to be faced with as one may question if such opinion is true, as it is a fact that most funeral directors obtain the majority of their profit from selling “caskets” and vaults. Thompson writes that, “The Federal Trade Commission requires that funeral directors provide their customers with itemized lists of all charges.” Such requirement puts these professionals in an advantage to clearly delineate to their prospective customers what they are being charged for, and from there they may decide if they want to make a deal with them. However, funeral directors' and morticians' plan of action to redefine this denomination is to call themselves “grief therapists” and “bereavement counselors”. Thompson points out that “their primary duties are associated with making funeral arrangements, directing the services, and consoling the family in their time of need.” (Page 7) Professionals in this area prefer to be known as solely funeral directors rather than morticians, and be known as those who provide services for the melancholic living beings than only for the…show more content… Although I enjoyed getting compliments from my teachers, I had quite a bit of embarrassment when my fellow classmates saw my grades. I knew that as soon as they saw my one hundred in math, they would start to talk about how smart I was. Somehow, although they didn’t bully me or make harsh comments, I felt as if I was never really part of the entire group. In fifth grade I started to discover that I was primarily known as the nerd of the class and that I did not like such classification; I began to specifically look for the classmates who were the “funny” or the “popular” ones and became friends with them in order to reduce a little bit of that stigma. Unfortunately, other classmates told me that they had observed many of those “friends” copying my tests or as they said, “using me” to pass the class or avoid doing a lot of work in group projects. This feedback made me think a lot, but I eventually decided to continue as their friends for the rest of the year and ignore the information I had been