Kristi Davis: Caring Restorative Specialist

Since she was a teen at Lodi High School, when she raced off the softball field to change clothes and head to the funeral home, Kristi Davis has worked in the death care industry as a magician of sorts, a specialist in the restorative arts.

Her day job as an embalmer serves an essential need in the community as she carefully works to preserve and prepare the bodies of the deceased, whether for services including open casket viewings, funerals, burials and cremations. But these days, it’s after work hours when the former standout high school and college softball player reverses course to change clothes and head to the ballfield as a coach!

How was her interest in the funeral business piqued? The passing of her great grandmother when she was a teenager gave her pause. “I saw her in the hospital and then I saw her in the casket,” Kristi said. “I wondered, ‘Where did she go in between?’”

During a chance encounter with a professor who was teaching a class about job opportunities for women, Kristi learned the funeral business was one of a half dozen male-dominated professions in which women could succeed. “Kristi kept mentioning that it might be something she would be interested in and I said, ‘Well, you don’t even know if you could handle it. I don’t know if I could,’” Sandy Culbertson, Kristi’s mom, said.

Her curiosity prompted her mom to motivate her to get a job at a funeral home when she was a senior in high school. During her spring break, Sandy told Kristi to go for it. “It’s not something, when you look at your little one, that you would ever think that they would go into,” Sandy said. “But it’s part of her heart.”

Kristi visited all the funeral homes in Lodi and two weeks later, she got a call that there was a job for her. After softball practice, the shortstop player would throw on a dress and work visitations, answer phones or do laundry at Gierhart-Wells & Donahue Funeral Home in Lodi. During her stint there, she was asked if she would like to witness an embalming to see if it was something she might be interested in as a career. “It was very sad,” she said. “It was an elderly couple who were in a car accident on their way to go vote.”

What Kristi saw made her even more curious about the funeral profession. After a year at San Joaquin Delta College, she enrolled in Cypress College’s mortuary science program, one of only two public community college programs in California to offer funeral service education. She juggled classes, worked at Paramount Mortuary, and played on the Cypress Chargers softball team that came in second in state in 1993.

“That was a great time in my life,” she said. She was learning more about the funeral business, both through her coursework and at the mortuary, where she was tasked with going out in the middle of the night to retrieve the deceased. She became accustomed to seeing bodies in every state imaginable.

It would take a special combination of grit, muscle power and compassion along with the ability to read Thomas Guides, the old-school street maps drivers had to rely on before smart phone navigation, for the petite college student to meet the bereaved and lift their loved one’s body onto a cart and put in the hearse or van. “I would go out on removals with another student and we would always discuss who would be the talker,” she said of meeting the bereaved before taking their loved one away.

She has held every job possible in the industry, even serving as a deputy coroner. Throughout it all, her main mission has always been to preserve the body with care and prepare the body to an acceptable viewing state so that grieving families can pay their respects.

In 2005, the Lodi native opened Quality Mortuary Services LLC. As an independent, state-licensed embalmer, she works on a contract basis. For the past 26 years, she has been the embalmer at Park View Cemetery & Funeral Home in Manteca. “I can tell you she is amazing at her job. I have seen her work magic,” Dave Massey, owner and president of Park View, said, adding that she also manages and tracks all of the cases in the busy office.

Massey said Kristi is caring and tenacious. “There will be a decedent who we would assume just would not be viewable and she will say, let me see what I can do. Success to her is that a family can have a viewing,” he said of Kristi’s well-known talents in restorative arts. “Why is she so tenacious? Because she actually cares so much about being able to gift the family the chance to say goodbye in a way that will not shock them.”

Her job includes embalming the body with formaldehyde, stitching autopsied bodies back together and more. “I’ll come back prior to their visitation and do their hair and makeup, dress them and put them in their casket,” she said.

She’s so trusted in her profession that friends and family make sure she is the one to be the last to care for their loved ones. “She’s really an artist. When she looks at someone, she really sees all the features in their face,” Kristi’s mom said. “She’s quite the specialist and she’s quite known throughout California. She really puts her heart into it.”

What keeps her motivated and balanced in everyday life? “God, coffee and exercise,” she said. “I couldn’t do life without all three.” The job isn’t for the squeamish and she has even worked through three pregnancies. She is mother to two grown sons, Drake Davis, married Victoria, and Stryder Davis. Kristi’s job can be demanding but she finds work-life balance by coaching her 13-year-old daughter Adeline’s travel softball team, the Lodi Longhorns, spending time with her parents, riding horses and enjoying time on the Delta or the ski slopes. A family picture taken in July shows Kristi with all three of her children and daughter-in-law smiling broadly after the Lodi Longhorns won the first game they played as a team on the road in Elk Grove. “They were all there to support,” she said proudly. Her job can be physically rigorous, being on her feet all day and lifting bodies, so it’s important she stays fit as well.

According to DATA USA, just 33.1 percent of embalmers and funeral attendants in the U.S. were women in 2024. But while the 24/7 deathcare profession has traditionally been male dominated, as the Pacific professor once predicted to Kristi, that has certainly changed. In 2022, the graduating class of Cypress College’s mortuary science program was 100 percent female. And according to the American Board of Funeral Service Education 2025 data report, more than 70 percent of graduates from funeral service programs in the United States are women.

In 2011, Kristi became the first woman to receive the Dick Fallbeck Funeral Director of the Year Award from the California Funeral Directors Association. The trailblazer mentors the next generation by speaking to students to show them her techniques, which have earned her widespread respect.

“A lot of people wouldn’t guess the work I do,” she said. “Even my softball players think I’m a kindergarten teacher or a flight attendant.” On a first date, Kristi says she’s a restorative artist and leaves it at that. “It’s a challenge,” she said of describing her profession. “If I say embalmer, they say ‘Ick.’”

But she wouldn’t change it for the world. “I really love my job. I love putting bodies back together for the families so that they can see their loved ones one last time,” she said.