LEWISBURG- With an office located in Fairlea between Cherry Lane Auto and Fairlea Deluxe Cleaners is Propps Monument and Mortuary Transport.
Owners Ray and Marie Propps began their business about nine years ago but have been in their current office location for almost one year and have had success in staying busy up to this point. They carry a lot of insurance, are fully licensed, and have all the supplies stocked and ready that they need on any given day.
They offer transport services and also sell monuments such as headstones and urns.
Ray worked at an old funeral home and started out just mowing the grass and performing maintenance around the area and was hired because his grandmother was there. Eventually he was asked to help embalm a body and he did, and once he got into it, he decided he loved it.
“It didn’t pay that well, so I had to move on,” Ray said.
Several years later, I was over there, as a matter of fact for my grandmother’s service and they asked me if I wanted to come back, and I said sure. And I was there for almost another three years,” he added.
Fast forward to now and Ray has plenty of experience in helping out people in their darkest times. He will go to someone’s house and get a deceased individual, or to the hospice house, or the hospital, and basically wherever he needs to go. He has been to pick up bodies in New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Georgia, and obviously, West Virginia.
He gets help from the medical examiner’s and keeps his van full of gas so that he does not have to stop during his transport. If something happens, Marie and Ray’s daughter also will come and help him finish a transport or just sit in the van so that the body is never left alone for any amount of time.
Ray understands it takes a special type of person to do this type of work, whether it’s a transporter, a funeral director, an embalmer, or someone working in a crematorium.
“People don’t like dealing with death and that’s understandable, it’s not for everybody,” Ray said.
“Sometimes someone will call and say we have a body and they’re at home. So. I’ll get the address and go pick them up and then wherever the funeral home is, usually I’ll just take them straight to the funeral homes. I have a good working relationship with all of the funeral directors.”
According to Ray, he gets interest from people wanting to get into the line of work and one thing he will tell them at the very beginning beside getting a full background check, is “what happens in the van, stays in the van.
“No matter the situation we find ourselves in, none of us can decide where we are going to be born and none of us can decide when we are going to die,” Ray stated.
“That (deceased) person had a mom or a dad, a son or a daughter, a husband or a wife, a brother or sister that cared very deeply for them. And our job is not judge, but our job is to comfort and to care for them as if they were one of our own. Whatever you do, do it like the family is standing right there watching you” he continued.
As mentioned above, the second business is the monument sales as Ray showed off a lot of urns and headstones that he has for sale or has sold in the past (pictured below).
Propps Monuments and Mortuary Transport do things the right way and hope to continue to grow both of their business for the foreseeable future.
