Alyssa Padron is not an average 20-year-old. She’s a mortician who’s day starts when someone’s day ends.

Padron, 20, graduated from Corona High School in 2016 and is now working as a mortician. From a young age, she wanted to become a mortician and has achieved that goal at a comparatively young age. Padron went to the University of California in San Francisco where she obtained an associates degree in Mortuary Science.

“I work at a funeral home in Los Angeles. I am the youngest mortician there,” Padron said. She added that passing her advanced placement science courses in high school helped her in the long run.

Her personality and style have always been what she calls “spooky.” She loves the color black and found her passion for dead bodies around the age of 15.

Padron still remembers her first encounter with a dead body and the feeling that she had.

“The first time I had seen a dead body wasn’t until I’d been in mortuary school for six months. Many emotions rushed my body but I knew for sure I felt prepared and strong.” She added that “the smell of a dead body is a special kind of horrible smell,” Padron said.

The first time she embalmed a corpse was of from a body of a six-year-old boy. “I began to massage the corpse with massage cream. While the others worked on putting cotton in the facial features I began to inject embalming fluid into an artery while blood was drained from the heart,”she describes the overall experience amazing. “This is my passion, this is exactly what I wanna do until I die,” Padron said.

Working there for one year now she has encountered many dead bodies. One of the most memorable corpses was of a young mother.

“One time I saw the corpse chest move like it took a deep breath later the door shut,” Pardon said.

“That night I didn’t sleep “ she added.

The second most memorable experience occurred for her just a month prior to this interview. She was preparing the dead body by shaving its arms and legs and applying makeup. Padron was applying makeup and to her disbelief the body started to moan. According to the young mortician it was traumatizing.

However, what happened was that the corpse had a lungful of air. The moving caused it to release, which then traveled through the throat making a gurgle sound.

Padron says she wouldn’t change her career for anything in the world. She continues to work her way up. As an end goal she aspires to become a funeral director and even open up her own mortuary.

Like the Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn classic, death defiantly becomes of her.