When he passed away on Valentine’s Day 2004, Smith again took the wheel from her father. She is manager and head funeral director at Anderson Funeral Home, which her mother, Edna, owns. “Of course, I was around the business all of my life, and I started working there in April 1978,” Smith said. “When I started, I was strictly in the office. I didn’t want anything to do with the back room, didn’t want anything to do with the conference room where we sit and make plans with our families.

“But after I’d been here several years, I saw what a difference my father made in the families’ lives — during the toughest times of their lives.” Intent upon running the family business one day, Smith attended classes at the University of South Carolina Beaufort and earned her funeral director’s license in 1989. As with her earlier schooling, she sometimes stood apart from her classmates. For instance, she often went straight from her work at the funeral home to an anatomy class, where she took a seat wearing a black suit and was surrounded by aspiring nurses in white uniforms.

“The professor would kid me and tell me I was his black sheep,” Smith said. “I guess you kind of get used to that sort of thing in this profession.” Indeed, Smith has been around the business as long as she can remember. Carl Anderson and Harold Greene opened Anderson & Greene Funeral Home on Prince Street in 1959, when Smith was just eight months old. When his partner decided to join the ministry in the late 1960s, Anderson bought him out and shortened the business’ name. He purchased land along Robert Smalls Parkway when it was still a two-lane road, far from Beaufort’s city limits, and opened Forest Lawn Cemetery there in 1973. The next year, he personally designed the new funeral home that he had built on the same site. The building and the business have been there since.

Anderson gave up the ambulance business when Beaufort County EMS began providing service in the mid-1970s — but not before emergency calls had left an indelible mark on Smith. “I used to go on ambulance runs with Dad quite a bit,” she said. Once, Anderson was driving his daughter to school when he received word a man working outside a home on North Street had fallen off a scaffold. With no time to drop off Smith, her father sped to the scene. They arrived to find the man writhing in pain from a compound leg fracture.

“Oh, how that man screamed,” Smith said. “I’ll never forget that. Dad’s philosophy was ‘load and go.’ We weren’t doctors, so we needed to get them to the hospital as quickly as possible. He put that man in the ambulance, and we took off going 93 mph through the intersection at Ribaut Road.” The funeral home was very much a family affair — Smith’s mother and younger brother also worked there at various times. However, the business sometimes entailed separation, particularly when the Anderson children were young. Their father worked long hours and often answered calls on weekends, Christmases and birthdays. Smith remembers just one family vacation during her childhood — a trip to Miami to see Flipper.

That upbringing prepared Smith for the profession’s demands — as when she took her funeral director courses while continuing to work full-time and raise a pre-schooler. Then, after Smith and her husband began managing the business upon Anderson’s death, they remained on call for seven, solid years.

Smith’s exposure to the funeral business also informed her outlook on life. “It made me realize how short life can be,” she said. “So then you live it as if today is your last day because you’re not promised tomorrow. You’re not promised the next 10 minutes. I learned this at a young age.” Smith said she loves her work, a sentiment she says people sometimes don’t understand.

“People wonder how you do this every day — sadness, grief, death, dying. … I tell people that if I stood by that graveside or stood by that crematory back there and thought that was the end, I couldn’t do what I do. It’s my faith. It’s very strong. It has to be,” said Smith, who grew up attending the Baptist Church of Beaufort.

Faith and lessons learned from her father are time-tested, Smith said. Nonetheless, the business has changed dramatically from the days when Carl Anderson first learned the ropes while apprenticing at Morrall’s — another Beaufort funeral home … and ambulance service … and furniture store. “The reason there were three businesses is because back then, none of those operations standing on their own would make it,” Smith said.

That’s no longer the case. Beaufort County’s population has grown more than four-fold since 1960. Customer preferences have changed, as well. For instance, cremations were almost unheard of in the South when Carl Anderson started his business but have grown in demand so much that the home added its crematory in December 2012. “Even with all of the changes and all of the growth, eight out of 10 families that walk through that door, I know them,” Smith said. “That makes this work very personal.”