Jenny Gómez Matute thought her children were blasting the song “Dos botellas de mezcal” to remember their late father, Julián Teletor Primero, who died trying to help his family escape a Glen Burnie house fire.

But the music was coming from outside the front door.

There she found Keely Aranibar, the funeral director whom she had asked to keep her husband’s ashes while she found a new place to live, holding flowers that matched the last bouquet her husband bought her.

“It’s like she lived the pain with me,” Matute said. “If there’s any family going through the same pain that I am, she is the best to help you through this incredibly difficult process.”

Born in Bolivia and raised in Virginia, Aranibar lives in Glen Burnie. She founded a multicultural funeral home, Funeraria Americana, in March 2025.

After years in corporate jobs, Aranibar’s move into funeral services for Spanish-speaking families began by chance.

When her aunt in D.C. oversaw the funeral and repatriation for a friend whose family lived outside the U.S., Aranibar saw the gaps in services that few were equipped to handle.

She began attending classes for a mortuary license from the only Maryland college that offers it: the Community College of Baltimore County. Through apprenticeships at Baltimore-area funeral homes, Aranibar was often the only Spanish speaker available to assist families. Just as her mother once did, the English-speaking funeral directors relied on her to translate.

She knows that for many Spanish-speaking families, “death is a taboo subject. If we speak about it, it’s as if we are bringing it about.”

So she became the person to call for Spanish-language death services in Maryland and Virginia.

Practically every other day, Aranibar can be found on Interstate 95 or the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, driving a long black Chrysler van specially outfitted to carry caskets.

On a chilly November day, Aranibar traveled to a D.C. apartment to meet with a man whose brother had just died shortly after turning 48. A construction worker, the deceased lived in the U.S. for 26 years and recently began his own woodworking business. He was found collapsed on the living room rug.

Together they sat at a small table, their faces lit by an iPad as they hashed out the details of the funeral, including the color and style of the casket. “Blanco,” the man said without much hesitation.

For what his brother would wear for the service, the man unhooked a suit hanging from a bike rack mounted to the wall and gently pulled off the plastic draped over it. Aranibar asked him how his brother wore his facial hair, motioning various lengths from her chin.

Back and forth with Aranibar in Spanish, the man recalled how his brother liked to make pepián, a traditional Guatemalan meat stew. From their conversation about his brother’s life, Aranibar built an obituary.

While funeral directors often successfully serve Spanish-speaking clients through translators, “there’s always the concern that something is lost in translation,” said Dan Simon, president of the Maryland State Funeral Directors Association.

Aranibar understands the cultural weight of details, from ensuring that legal names are correct on repatriation documents to honoring overnight vigils in homes or churches. For services, she said she sources floral arrangements and pastries from local Hispanic-owned businesses.

Aranibar’s clients appreciate her impact across borders.

“She took care of absolutely everything,” said Roxana de Segovia, a nurse in El Salvador whose mother, a 42-year Washington-area resident, had a dying wish to be buried in her home country.

Many families struggle to make such logistics work within a complicated bureaucracy, de Segovia said, but Aranibar’s assistance allowed her to focus on the grieving process.

“It was so hard,” de Segovia said of the day her mother was buried.

Aranibar recently assisted the family of Arlit Martinez-Carrada, a Salisbury mother who lived on the Eastern Shore for decades. ICE agents pulled her over and took her into custody on Jan. 3, separating her from her husband, Rigo Mendoza-Lopez, and their four children — including their 15-year-old son, Kevin Martinez, who was battling cancer.

Within a day of Martinez-Carrada’s arrest, Kevin was rushed to the emergency room. He died the next morning. Martinez-Carrada was still in ICE custody when she was told of her son’s death.

As the family worked to navigate both grief and the immigration system, Aranibar helped guide funeral arrangements amid the uncertainty surrounding Martinez-Carrada’s detention — a role that reflects the intersection of death care and immigration enforcement that many of her clients face.

A legal team and community members fought to have Martinez-Carrada released on bond in time for the funeral on Jan. 31.

At the funeral, Aranibar stood to the side as Martinez-Carrada whispered to her dead son. A tracking monitor clung to Martinez’s ankle as she stood in front of her son’s casket. Attendance in the church pews was sparse, something you wouldn’t expect for a popular 15-year-old.

“They’re afraid of ICE,” Aranibar said.

Two to three times a month, Natasha Contreras will get a call from a Spanish-speaking family asking how to arrange a funeral service.

Out of all the logistics involved, death care’s costs can be a tremendous burden, said Contreras, the executive director of the Waymakers Foundation, a Virginia-based Latino immigrant and refugee outreach group. After 18 years of working with the community, she knows that some families have no choice but cremation, a lower expense, over repatriation, even though it goes against their beliefs.

Aranibar hopes Funeraria Americana, soon to be based in Waldorf, will fill this linguistic and cultural gap — not just for Spanish-speaking immigrants, but also for people from Vietnam, China, India, Korea and other growing immigrant communities, through hiring multilingual staff.

From Glen Burnie, Aranibar will make the more than two-hour drive to meet with a family in Richmond, Virginia, and help minimize financial strain.

In the long run, “I want to go to high schools and educate kids about what I do for a living,” Aranibar said. “Maybe you’ve never thought of funeral directing, but if you speak a second language, there is a real need for people like you.”

On the road for hours at a time, she often plays a decedent’s favorite songs, a way of bringing herself closer to the person she will only ever know in death.

Former Banner intern Nori Leybengrub is now a reporter with The Virginian-Pilot.