An ex-flight attendant says the skills she used when calming down passengers helps in her new job as a funeral planner

• A funeral planner told the NYT she uses the skills she got from her previous flight attendant job.
• She said she had to calm stressed passengers but now she deals with people with bigger problems.
• She now feels more satisfied in the new job but at one point, her hair fell out due to stress.

A former flight attendant for Cathay Dragon said the skills she used to deal with upset air passengers have transferred to her new role as a funeral planner, according to The New York Times.

Connie Wong worked for Cathay Dragon, the regional arm of Cathay Pacific, for six years until she was made unemployed in 2020 after COVID-19 forced the airline to cut jobs and shut down, The Times reported.

Wong told The Times that she applied last summer to become a life celebrant — someone who creates personalized funeral ceremonies — at a Hong Kong nonprofit organization called Forget Thee Not. The funerals she organizes are designed to be affordable for poor families, Wong added.

Working as a flight attendant has given Wong useful skills for working as a funeral planner, Wong told The Times. As part of her airline job, she would be required to relax passengers who were experiencing flight delays, she said in the interview. Wong has transferred those skills to her funeral planning role, where she meets people who are going through much worse situations, she told The Times.

Although she misses flying, she is more satisfied in her job as a funeral planner because she can help grieving families with their loss of a loved one, she said.

Still, Wong has endured difficult times in the job, she said in the interview. She became so stressed out by the funeral job that her hair started falling out and she struggled to eat and sleep. She decided in November to go on sick leave until April, she added.

When Wong returned to the job, Hong Kong was in its fifth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and officials warned about the lack of resources, including hospitals and medication, leading to more deaths. 

She arranged livestreams and narrations of the funerals she planned for those attendees who couldn't be present because they had COVID-19, Wong told The Times. 

The Times interviewed another person, Mandi Cheung, who also switched from working in the aviation sector during the pandemic. Cheung quit his job in March as a security guard at an aircraft engineering company to become a cleaner at a COVID-19 quarantine center, he told The Times.