Life and death are not two states with a clean line between them but one continuous thing, like sleet that is neither rain nor snow yet both at once. Any boundary we draw between living and dead turns out to be fragile and hard to pin down.
Daily, hands-on contact with corpses does not deaden a person to life; it makes them more alert to it. Someone who washes the dead starts noticing new life everywhere, such as insects heavy with eggs or fish swimming upstream to spawn, and sees one unbroken cycle.
In a society with strong taboos about death, the physical work of preparing bodies turns out to be manageable. The real burden is social: relatives disown the worker, a spouse recoils, and the community treats the work as polluting.
The honoured specialists who perform funeral ceremonies depend entirely on low-status workers who do the hands-on work with bodies. The prestige at the top is propped up by people the same system shuns.
Revulsion at death fades not by avoiding it but by handling it directly and repeatedly. The worker who starts out sweating and squeamish comes to find a quiet tranquillity in dying itself.