Meet Eileen C.

Mortuary Science Alumna

For 40 years, Mortuary Science alumna Eileen Clinton has enjoyed a wide-ranging career built around a simple but profound idea – we all face grief at some point in our lives and we can all come out the other side of that grief, changed but still whole.

As one of the first female graduates of the college’s Mortuary Science program back in the mid-1970s, Eileen was a bit of a trailblazer. She recalls the day she returned home from HVCC and announced to her father and mother – the proprietors of Troy’s John H. Clinton Funeral Home – that she hoped to enroll in the newly-established Mortuary Science program, and, eventually, join the family business.

“They were elated, but also a little confused by my career choice,” she said. “I was the youngest of five and one of three girls in the family. My oldest brother was already a funeral director.”

“Dave Fitzsimmons was the department chair at the time. I came to Hudson Valley in my jeans and my work boots and after about a month, Mr. Fitzsimmons said, ‘No more of this, I want all my students to dress professionally,’ and of course as a 19-year-old, I wasn’t too pleased, but that was the beginning of realizing that when you go out, you’re representing where you work and the profession.”

Having grown up as the daughter of a funeral director, Eileen had a sense of the career she was getting herself into, but the work was not only emotionally taxing but often quite physical. When someone dies on the third floor of a building, she said, it’s the funeral director’s job to remove that body with dignity.

“I had to prove myself as a woman, even to my brother, that I can do this. You had to earn your way,” she said.

Despite the on-call, 24-hours-a-day nature of funeral service, what drew Eileen most to the profession was the simple act of providing service and solace to grieving families, many of whom were friends or acquaintances from their funeral home’s Troy neighborhood.

In an era when the funeral service profession was gradually seeing more women enter the field, Eileen decided to continue her education in the hope of finding new ways to serve the family business’ clientele. That education – first a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Siena College and a master’s from Russell Sage in health education – would eventually lead Eileen down several new career paths.

“At that time in the funeral industry, ‘aftercare programs’ were slowly becoming more popular,” she said. “That was an unknown when I was a student, but you eventually heard about funeral homes following up with families and providing them with support after the funeral service. That really excited me and I knew that if I wanted to pursue this, I needed to continue my education.”

After completing her master’s degree and while still working at the funeral home, Eileen began volunteering and eventually working part-time at Saint Peter’s Hospice during the early 1990s. She loved hospice work and the chance to support families who had suffered a loss and were grieving. When her supervisor decided to retire, she asked Eileen to fill her position as the hospice’s full-time coordinator of bereavement services.

“That was a big decision, because I knew I would have to leave the funeral home. I ended up working at hospice for about eight years, and I really loved the work,” she said. “I was still around to help out at the funeral home, if needed, but my career path had shifted.”

As she delved deeper into this new vocation, Eileen saw even more opportunities and pathways to serve the bereaved. Eventually, a call from an old friend sent her career path in yet another direction.

“I got a call from my dear friend and mentor, Sister Jean Roche, who was the chaplain at hospice. Sister Jean said Maria College wanted to create a bereavement certificate program and she wanted to know if I would be interested in helping to develop and teach the courses. Of course, I said ‘yes.’”

Maria College’s Bereavement Studies program ran for more than two decades and helped train hundreds of professionals. The 15-credit program was aimed at anyone looking to serve those going through the process of grief. “We had a complete mix of students – social workers, nurses, funeral directors, people from the ministry, even a couple veterinarians along the way,” she said.

While helping others through grief and loss were the touchstones of Eileen’s career, she was certainly not immune to the emotional struggles of loss in her own life. Her husband, whom she had married at age 21, died of cancer at 54. She took a break from her career to be a full-time caregiver during her mother’s final months, and when all seemed to be looking up in her own life, she received a devastating diagnosis of leukemia, which came just months before Covid-19 shut down the world and greatly impacted health care.

Chemotherapy, immunotherapy, stem cell transplants and months of recovery from 2020 through 2022 led Eileen to reflect on her own life and her personal struggles with loss. Writing and poetry had been comforts to help her through the loss of her husband, and as she gathered together a few decades worth of writing she began to see the seeds of a new project.

“I never planned on these [poems] going anywhere, but when I put them all in one document, they told a kind of story,” Eileen said. “What they needed was a back story so that when my children read them, they’d have an idea of what I was going through when I wrote them. I got working on that, and eventually said, “This is a book!”

“What a Wonderful World: Reflections on Love, Loss and Hope,” available at local bookstores and on Amazon, is more than just a compilation of poems. Eileen drew on her years of experience - from hospice to funeral service and teaching, from the loss of her husband to growing up in a funeral home family - to create a book that is both personal and practical.

“This is a culmination of my life experience,” she said. “I’m weaving in my personal losses and trying to address how we cope with these losses and choose to not just survive but thrive.”

Since the book’s publication in early 2023, Eileen has sought out opportunities to speak and lecture on the topics of love, loss and hope, and she’s using her book as a guide to the discussion.

In early December 2024, she came full circle in a way - back at Hudson Valley Community College as a featured speaker in the Voices: Library Lecture Series.

“My educational and professional journey began at HVCC. The lessons I learned at the college provided an excellent foundation for my career choices and overall success in life,” she said. “Gratitude is the best way to sum up my feelings.”