With proper care, value of life endures after death

Posted on Oct 08, 2009 by Dave Rasdal.

Rachel Powell, 93, of Keota, who received her nurse’s cap in the 1930s, is nearing retirement at Powell Funeral Homes. (Dave Rasdal/The Gazette)

From birth to death, Rachel Powell has spent a lifetime making people look their best as they come into this world and as they leave it.

As an Indiana nurse, she helped deliver about 400 babies.

As an Iowa funeral home assistant, she has fixed the hair, applied the makeup, trimmed the nails on hundreds of bodies, many of them friends, as people prepare to pay their last respects.

“I think there is an art to the work,” says Rachel, 93, sitting in the sun room of her Keota home. “People have depended on me so many years, it makes it hard for me to say I won’t be there any more.”

Sadly, with a pair of knee replacements and sore legs, Rachel’s body isn’t as spry as it used to be. But her mind is as sharp as when she became an RN in the 1930s. Her heart continues to grow.

“My work is for love,” Rachel says. “For the love of the people and to help.”

Surrounded by drawers full of rubber stamps for her hobby and with a “Merck Manual of Medical Information” sitting on a nearby ottoman, Rachel reflects on a life that began in Garden City, Mo., and brought her to Keota by way of western Kansas and Indiana.

The third of nine children, Rachel was born in 1916 and in eighth grade moved to the Kansas dust bowl when her father went to work on a ranch.

“We had these dust storms,” she says. “If you were caught in the dust storms unexpectedly, you could die. People suffocated in their cars.”

This value of life prompted Rachel to stay home with her mother for a year to help with younger siblings before moving in 1935 to be near a sister in Goshen, Ind., where Rachel become a nurse.

Lewis Powell Jr., whose father operated a funeral home in South English, was in college there to become a teacher. But after living and working in a funeral home to make ends meet, he changed his mind.

In the 1930s, doctors performed autopsies at the funeral home and medical students were invited to attend. Rachel and Lewis were both at a routine autopsy.

“It was a rude awakening,” she says. “I took it all in because it was a learning experience.”

They married in 1939 and moved to South English in 1946 when his parents relocated to Wellman to operate another funeral home.

“When we moved to South English there was no doctor,” Rachel says. “My nursing was missionary work.”

In other words, sick people came to her. And her nursing came in handy as the funeral home operated the town ambulance, even as they moved to Keota in 1955.

She and Lewis would have three children — Nancy, Jared and Paul, who goes by Doug — and continue business expansion that now includes funeral homes in Keota, Wellman, North English, Sigourney, Williamsburg and Kalona.

While Rachel did everything from helping retrieve bodies in the ambulance to greeting visitors and delivering flowers through knee-high snow, her beauty work as much as anything endeared her to family and friends.

With photographs and makeup brought in by the family, Rachel would set about trimming hair, applying lipstick, covering blemishes to look as natural as possible. She would put on the jewelry and finish the hands last.

“I’m sorry to say, I’m a perfectionist,” she says. “I would say when everything is done, with my eagle eye, and they’re ready in the chapel, I’ve spent at least three or four hours.”

But it is work that, for the survivors, endures for a lifetime.