“I guess it would be like hitting concrete going 100 miles per hour,” said Shonna Smith, head mortician at Poway-Bernardo Mortuary. “Every bone in your body that is able to break would break.”

During a recent telephone conversation, the star of A&E reality series “Family Plots” expounded on the effects of jumping off a suspension bridge.

The second season of the show began airing Sunday on A&E. It follows the comings and goings of staff at the Poway-based funeral home – from banal bereavement to embalming room blowouts.

Over the course of her 19-year career, Smith has chemically preserved close to 100 people who ended their lives leaping into the watery abyss – including four who hurled themselves from the Coronado Bridge over the past two years.

Smith said her first jumper – a 35-year-old woman with two BMWs, two children and a wealthy, pro-sports player husband – still haunts her. Relatives were never able to isolate the source of the woman’s despair, she said.

“One night she gets in her car, drives to the Golden Gate Bridge and jumps,” recalled Smith, a 36-year-old Temecula resident who honed her mortuary science skills in the Bay Area.

Smith was 18 when she got the call – the first of numerous Golden Gate jumpers she would work on before relocating to San Diego County.

Close to 1,300 people have taken their lives by leaping into San Francisco Bay since the bridge opened in 1937, making it the site of the most such fatalities in the country. The Coronado Bridge is number two.

After a lengthy reconstruction process, Smith’s first jumper was ready for viewing.

“She looked, surprisingly, pretty intact,” Smith said. “Usually there’s no way you’d be able to embalm them in a way that you could view them.”

As with any reality series, between coffin sales, grief counseling and last-minute cadaver makeovers, “Family Plots” is laced with its share of cussing, fulminating and feuding. Also featured on the show are Smith’s two sisters, Emily Vigney and Melissa Wissmiller; father Chuck Wissmiller; owner Rick Sadler; and funeral directors John Greeney and David Moravee.

In the second season, the Wissmiller sisters attempt to hook their 63-year-old father up with a dubious selection of female fans; a couple says their vows at the mortuary; and a psychic searches for potential spirits.

On a recent visit to Poway-Bernardo Mortuary, office manager Emily Vigney fielded a call from Betty, a fan and frequent caller.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I’ll tell you what, I’ve just made leaps, bounds and strides in the last six months,” Vigney told the caller, who wanted to console Vigney about her divorce (revealed at the end of last season).

Vigney motioned to a cardboard box of letters and faxes under her desk.

“I’ve got this box, times 10, of fan mail at my house,” she said. “We have had people that have taken their vacations strictly to come here and see us from Alaska, from Utah, from Georgia, from Hawaii.

“These fans came in and they’re like, ‘Oh, we came all the way from’ – I don’t know where it was. They said, ‘We love your show. By the way, are you on it?’”

The Wissmiller family hails from Michigan, where Chuck, a former boxer, owned training gyms. When he’s not removing bodies from residences, the mercurial patriarch still teaches southpaw.

After the caskets are closed, the sisters find succor in a night out.

The second season finds them partying at Buca di Beppo in downtown San Diego.

“I wasn’t dissin’ Dad too bad on the street corner, was I?” Vigney asked. “There was a group of 12 guys from all across the country that were in sales meetings. They were buying us bottles and bottles of wine. Everyone took home two bottles, because they kept on buying it.”

During down time the wine- and jazz-loving Wissmillers take in concerts at Thornton Winery in Temecula.

Melissa Wissmiller said she likes to hang at the W and at Sidebar on Saturday nights.

“I go downtown pretty much every weekend … to promote the show,” Wissmiller said. “I think word of mouth is very important in San Diego.

“When I was in Tijuana, I walked in this club and Pitbull was walking off the stage. I was cruising through and all these young women were stopping me…. They’re like, ‘Melissa, Melissa, we see you on Telemundo.’

“People think the demographics of the show are a lot older, but I have more young people at all the nightclubs stop me than older people…. I get recognized more by younger black people, Latin people and Asian people.”

When death takes its toll, Smith said she tunes her embalming room radio to KSDS 88.3 FM, a jazz station based out of San Diego City College.

“The one thing that irritated me when they were filming was every time they’d come in my room, they had to turn off my radio,” Smith said. “Apparently it conflicted with them taping what I’m saying. It would just send me through the roof. I’d be really edgy and irritable.”

Though life has its edgy moments, Smith said suicide is never the answer.

“How bad can your problems be that you can’t get alcohol treatment? Drug treatment? Get a divorce?” Smith said.

When the sister of her first suicidal jumper arrived at the mortuary, looking surprisingly like the body Smith had just fussed over with combs and a cosmetic kit, the fledgling funeral director was not prepared for the grave scenario.

“She pulls up in a Rolls-Royce with her driver – she was this tall, beautiful brunette,” Smith recalled. “I walked her into the chapel and it’s just her and I.”

At the sight of her sister in the coffin, the woman grabbed Smith by the arm and “collapsed in grief.”

“She was screaming, begging me, ‘Why? Why?’ There was nothing I could do except try to be compassionate….

“It still bothers me on occasion.”