Calvary Funeral Home owner Sam Garcia, was recently recognized by the New Mexico Funeral Services Association with the 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award.
It takes a certain kind of person to spend the better part of their life in a profession that deals with death and grief every day. Maybe that is why Calvary Funeral Home owner Samuel Garcia was recently recognized by his peers with a lifetime achievement award.
Garcia, 62, was recently awarded the New Mexico Funeral Services Association's 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award. A significant achievement and one the association felt Garcia has earned due to his commitment to the smaller communities of Southeast New Mexico.
"As a board, we try to look at their body of work as a funeral director and their time and dedication," said Sterling Leishman, president of the NMFSA board and funeral director with French Mortuary in Albuquerque. "We really felt like Sam has shown how important the community is to him and taken care of those folks down that way. That is the primary reason we selected him." Garcia has owned and operated his Hobbs and Eunice funeral homes for the past 15 years.
"It is an honor to feel that the other funeral directors have honored me with this award, that they feel I have made a lot of accomplishments and contributions to this field," he said.
Garcia could have chosen to work in a larger community, but fell in love with the area.
"If money is what I was wanting I would have gone to a bigger place," he said. "I feel in love with the people. I never lived in a small community other than Carlsbad. The community here all knows each other. It is a really tight community. I felt like there was a need down here and that's why I came here."
Garcia has owned his own business for 15 years, but long before that he was working in the funeral services industry and retired from 25 years as a New Mexico State Police officer, a job that was complemented by and complements his funeral service duties.
"They complement each other definitely," he said. "Many times in law enforcement you have to bring news to families that their loved ones were involved in accidents."
Garcia was only 7 or 8 years old when he first became drawn to the funeral director business and by age 17 he was working for a funeral home, cleaning cars and maintaining the yard. He eventually went on to learn all aspects of the job.
"My first encounter with a dead body was a small child," he said. "They had put quarters on the child's eyes. I always wondered why they had put quarters on the eyes. That got me curious about the funeral business."
What kept Garcia coming back to the funeral service business was the impact he found he could have on a grieving family.
"The ultimate compliment that I can get is that the families we serve come back and tell us how much they liked the service," he said. "I feel like I have helped in the process of healing the families in their time of need."
The job certainly isn't for everyone. Garcia has a hard time keeping good secretaries. The strain of working with grieving families is often more than many can deal with and, in one case, he lost a secretary who encountered what she believed to be the ghost of a deceased woman in the funeral home.
Garcia hasn't seen a ghost himself, but he has an understanding of death many don't --he died.
A few years ago a respiratory failure sent Garcia to the emergency room. He was flown to a Lubbock hospital and stopped breathing as he was rushed into the ER. He was clinically dead for more than three minutes. He woke up 19 days later in the hospital.
Garcia didn't see any lights or have an out-of-body experience, but he walked away with a stronger conviction about death.
"I have never been afraid to die, and I know, from my experience, death has to be beautiful, even though we are always afraid of the unknown," he said. "I honestly believe we go into a new earth where everyone is at peace. I truly believe there is a house for me on the other side, and for everyone."
Courtesy of Hobbs News-Sun
LEVY HILL
NEWS-SUN
