The January ICCFA Magazine was devoted in not a small way to the subject of education.  I finished reading most of the issue, and while I thought it best to keep my pen shut, I thought better of that cowardly approach and decided to dive into the education pool, so to speak.

I was also inspired to write my thoughts concerning this very interesting subject because of an email I received from another educator, of whom I hold in great respect, and deference, and he was NOT pleased with the tenor and content of some of the writing.  No surprise on that one, for any suggestion, let alone a criticism or worse, a call for mortuary education reformation, is most generally headed for hurt feelings, defensiveness, and outright rejection.  This seems a touchy subject.

In my years working in mortuary education I knew full well that the vast majority of educators work with diligence and devotion, and truthfully the inner educational system has in many ways improved itself from what it was when I was a mortuary science student.  Yes, progress has been made, and as with ALL academic change it is usually done at a snail’s pace and is much like pushing a wet noodle up a hill.  The reality of education's “slows” is customarily something that business-oriented personalities, people who want rapid change, don’t understand. They usually add insult to injury and do something worse: They don’t respect this reality concerning the world of education and hence most often totally underestimate the brick walls that they encounter when they suggest change.

What does one say which hasn’t been said over, and over, and over, and hashed, rehashed, and then rerehashed again and again over the years?  

In reading the different articles in the ICCFA magazine, I was not in the least inspired or excited, nor did my creative imagination spark.  No, not at all; in fact, I read nothing new.  It was mostly all predictable stuff.  Let’s see.  There of course was the politically correct approach article, then the call for dumping this and that and replacing this or that article with changes which seemed ominously attractive to the author of the article.  Then of course was the war cry article crying out for more practical hands on stuff--you know, how to turn on a crematory, how to raise a vessel, how to cater a funeral reception, how to, how to, how to.

For a hundred years or more, most everybody has agreed that the mortuary science curriculum is lopsided.  You know the drill – too much science, not enough business courses, too much bleeding heart grief psychology, too much embalming, in fact with this “too much” logic the end result is that every mortuary science curriculum in every mortuary college is lopsided, which is NOT true.  The glaring truth, which I did not read in any articles, is this:  mortuary education, in order to expand, needs more time.  Time is the essential 21^st century ingredient which mortuary education needs desperately and which the appointed critics of the system seem to ignore on a consistent basis.

Over the years, I have gotten into trouble on many fronts.  First I have never been the brightest or most insightful person, so I have made some personal and professional bonehead decisions.  There have been times I ought to have spoken, and remained silent, and to be sure there have been many, many times where I ought to have been silent, and then just opened my BIG mouth.  However, with all my foibles and inadequacies as a human being, two ideas concerning my beloved profession have held my interest for years  First is the idea of a universal requirement for a minimum of a bachelor's degree to enter any aspect of funeral service, and second is the idea of a universal license which is accepted in every state to function at any level in funeral service.  I can hear the laughter as I write this, and you who are laughing are absolutely right to do so. My idea, my dream, my hope, concerning these two ideas will go with me to my grave, unaccomplished.  I accept that sad reality, but for my own integrity (what I have left), I need to always get my commercial in somewhere.

I have mentioned that educational reform is slow, and that is not a criticism, it is just true.  Even Harvard University spends years in planning any change to any part of their curriculum, and for good reason.  The curriculum is the basic contract between the student and the academic institution, and once that is set in stone, for say a year, four-year, or a ten-year program, if the administration fiddles with the curriculum, presto, it is a breach of contract.  Because of this fact, I don’t see any quick reformation of mortuary education.  Also, I don’t see state boards reforming requirements for licensing any time soon.  I don’t see the curriculum changing quickly in order to fit any special interest demand from this group or that group.  I just don’t see this happening, but what I do see happening is the ability for our profession to embrace the idea of continuous improvement of the human being through education, not just for licensure or a set of job skills, but for living life.

I believe many people, including myself, have been and are just too hard in the criticisms of mortuary education.  I did not learn funeral service in mortuary college, and I did not learn ministry in seminary.  What I received upon both graduations was not a level of expertise (although you could not have told me that at the time) but instead I was awarded my learner’s permit.  I was given the right to enter a professional activity with the minimal knowledge of knowing “WHAT NOT TO DO.”  That was it, nothing more, nothing less.

If any profession looks to just education or quick education reform as a catch-all to solve problems, then surely that profession and those who hold such expectations are in for a fall.  Education has limits.  Education cannot do everything, and education is limited in preparing most people for the stark and inevitable realities of working and living life.

I might suggest (not seriously of course) that people who really and truly want to change the educational system, step right up to the plate get their graduate degrees and become instructors and professors themselves.  That they prepare their own lesson plans, compose examinations, monitor student honesty, look at the students and have the fleeting thought “my oh my, are we in trouble.”  Even education in adult training, seminars, in-house workshops and the like, most times is fragile, simply because adults can easily nod affirmation after affirmation to the boss, and then when they leave revert back to old habits.  It is just the way of adult education.

The University of Funeral Service is NOT in any mortuary college or found in a sales seminar; it is found on the floor of the mortuary, it is found on the grounds of the cemetery or the homes of a prospective client.  To be sure, education seminars, videos, tapes, can help, support and affirm, but there is something larger in scope that needs our attention.

What then can we say about education, not simple robotic practical education (which seems so much in vogue today), but instead a deeper, more lasting and permanent philosophy of education?  This idea of education for living life, of education for the simple sake of education.  This then is the idea of continuous education for the individual as compared to the standard continuing education for a profession.

There is a sentence from Samuel Johnson that points to a persistently important subject in all professional education and one I have found of particular interest in my personal work in education. The good Dr. Johnson said:  “Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.”

Over my years in this lovely profession, I have heard many sweeping comments, and read many sweeping words concerning education.  Many students' war cry is, “Why do we have to know this stuff?”  I always suspected they learned this from jaded and cynical funeral directors they might have encountered.  Many funeral directors' and cemeterians' war cry is, “What are you teaching those kids these days?” or “When I was a student we didn’t put up with that stuff.”  I suspect every generation of every student and mentor bemoans the state of their experience in any educational endeavor.  It seems that the discontent of students and mentors, whether it is mortuary college, cemetery university, medical school, law school or welding technical college, is much the same.  Students can’t wait to get out, and professors can’t wait to see them leave.

I believe in the worth of education simply for the sake of education.  I truly believe that most mortuary educators work diligently in a system which just paralyzes them because of lack of time.  I believe that the curriculum reflects a history of change, but a slow history of change, which annoys the speed demons addicted to rapid fire change to no end.

However, with all this said, does the ideal of “education simply for the sake of education” have worth?  Is this not truly a worthy ideal?  I believe it is.

For decades, much time, energy and money has been spent on debating the question as to whether funeral service (and today, cemetery work) ranks as a profession or a trade.  Opinions abound. Many agree this work is indeed a profession, but many take the converse attitude that this work is in reality a trade, a business.  I believe both sides of the debate are missing the core issue concerning education.

I used to think that education was an end in and of itself.  I used to think that if the colleges did not teach me everything I was confronted with in life, then it was the college’s fault.  I used to think that while I felt I was entering a profession, I also felt keenly that there were practical skills that I needed to possess, and when I was confronted after graduation with the glaring reality that I did not possess ALL the technical, business, professional and practical skills which clearly were essential, I once again blamed the college.  Blaming colleges for any deficiency is a terribly easy thing to do, particularly for people who do not teach.

Over time, for me at least, I learned that I could not expect any seminar, any curriculum, any outline, any manual, any script, any textbook, any lecture, any discussion group to fill in ALL the career blanks I encountered.  I had to fill in the blanks myself.  I had to adopt a lifelong attitude of continuous education, continuous curiosity, and continuous improvement.  I could not expect mandatory continuing education to do it, nor could I expect a magic bullet fired at me in a seminar to do it all the time.  I had to do it, and let me give you an example.

When I was in mortuary college, we had a professor named Maurice Lurensky who taught chemistry, and he was tough.  He scared me to death just by his presence.  He was intimidating, he was a bully, he used threats, he berated us daily, and he basically in my mind was a non-human.  However, and here is the point, I LEARNED CHEMISTRY.  I LEARNED ORGANIC, INORGANIC, BIO, AND EMBALMING CHEMISTRY, AND I GOT A 96% IN CHEMISTRY ON THE NATIONAL BOARD WHEN EXAMINED.

However, even with this success, I still did not get it, and I still fought the basic concept of education for the sake of education.   I thought “nobody uses chemistry when they embalm.”  I had watched hundreds of embalmers appear to me to just pour chemicals in the machine, and off they went.  I had truly missed the point about life education.

I learned chemistry, and the truth is I don’t think a day has gone by that I don’t link up some experience in living life to chemistry (even in embalming), and I am able to do this because I learned chemistry, regardless of the immediate application to the practical embalming issue.

The idea of the simple power of lifelong education for the sake of education can be as simple as this.  Several months ago I was visiting my parents in Iowa, and one evening we were watching the The Learning Channel, and the program was on the biology of life.  DNA stuff, the building blocks of what makes each of us tick.  The narrator was pumping out basic chemistry information in almost every sentence he spoke, and I could follow everything he was talking about, but my 90-year-old father could not.  My father was lost throughout the entire program, and readily admitted that he didn’t have “an idea in hell” (a direct quote) what the narrator was talking about.  However I knew precisely what was being discussed.

Now my father is not slow, not stupid. In fact, he is very sharp and very intelligent, but he never learned chemistry in his life and would not know a symbol from the atomic chart from a pipe organ.  This is an example of the power of learning and education just for the sake of learning and education.  

In the end, the power of this idea has little to do with curriculum reformation, practical robotic skill development, or getting a license, it has everything to do with the expansion of our brains, and that in the end is a terribly individual motivation. Some people get it, some people don’t.

Should we stop the debates, and protectionism of territories, and get together and expand and improve our formal professional and practical education?  Sure.  Will that happen?  Sure, someday, sometime.  But not tomorrow, not in a month – but possibly just possibly, if we stick to it and cooperate and find our unity in our diversity, maybe it will happen in a significant permanent way within a decade, maybe.  That is the way of educational reform – it is never as fast as the self-appointed reformers wish for, never – but overtime it does happen.

Based then on this simple ideal of the value of education for the sake of education, the answers to some of our pressing, seemingly insurmountable challenges can possibly be found.  Here are a few issues that come to mind:

• Too many mortuary schools?  Yes – however select the best, not the closest.
• Too much science in mortuary schools?  Possibly – but then any science is good; learn it for your enhancement of living life.
• License and certify cemeterians?  Why not?  The rest of the professional world seems to get licensed and certified.
• A minimum of a bachelor’s degree for entry?  It is a good idea, has merit. (It will never happen, but then, I can dream.)
• Apprenticeships?  Choose the mentor very carefully.

Finally, let me close with this thought.  The simple fact of life today is that if we ignore the ideal of education for the sake of education, and simply focus on the illusion of immediate gratification from a script, training seminar, or workshop (as valuable as these can be), if we ignore the philosophy of education for the sake of education, then this and any other profession or job will stagnate in the stale pool of the paralysis of creativity, and when that happens, then the world, our clients, the consumers and our communities who right now are deeply involved in lifelong learning quickly and unfortunately will permanently pass us by.  I would suggest that as a group of people interested in working in the arena of death, we abandon territories, egos, personal biases, and personal agendas and educate simply for the sake of improving minds.

I learned this idea concerning education from a chap named Socrates.--TVB

• The FTC reported an overall compliance rate with the Funeral Rule at about 85 percent.
  
• State regulators reported having specific regulations for funeral homes at 95 percent; 88 percent for cemeteries, up from 77 percent in 2003.
  
• A majority of state regulators felt there is no need for additional federal regulations. For example, 12 state regulators felt more federal regulation of funeral homes is needed, compared to 15 who disagreed and 13 who had no opinion. Regarding cemeteries, 12 also felt more federal regulation is needed, but 25 disagreed and 5 had no opinion.
  
• With one exception, a majority of state regulators also felt there is no need for additional state regulation. The exception is in the area of preneed plans: 20 felt more regulation is needed, 9 disagreed and 11 had no opinion.
  

The complete text of the 100+ page report can be viewed on the ICCFA website at www.iccfa.com/files/GAOReport_011812.pdf.

All my adult life, in fact even as a little kid, I knew funerals, ceremonies, rites, rituals, were terribly important.  As a child I did not understand one thing concerning the meaning behind rituals and ceremonies, but it did not make any difference at all, because I could feel the impact of the “happening,” and children do indeed love happenings.

Today, however, I have tried to lay down childish things, and have spent many years trying to pin down the meaning, the impact, the nuances, the panache, and psychology of what happens to people when they gather in a common cause such as a funeral.

Just over a week ago my wife and I held a Holiday Memorial Service for the entire community.  We had a large crowd.  A few of the staff were cynical, a few supportive, but then that’s life – is it not?

However, when the ritual of the Holiday Memorial Service took off, even the most cynical staff members (who had previously felt mighty put upon for being asked to work the service) were themselves moved by the magic, the metaphor, and the raw data of the ceremony.

As the ritual began, it was not the planning or the execution of the event which held the meaning – it was the behavior and response of the human beings who attended which held the meaning of the ritual, which is true of all rituals.

The impact of this type of ceremony is that even the slowest, dullest, and intellectually challenged person understood what was going on.  I believe this is one of the cardinal beauties of all rituals.  The simplest is the best.

I remember three gentlemen arriving, and they were, in my opinion, a rough bunch.  They were unshaven, all three had dental problems, their cloths were worn, they were socially awkward, and they seem ill at ease, until the ritual began.  Then they were all at high attention, they had tears streaming down their faces, and the looks on the faces told the universal truth that grief is grief, and pain is pain across the globe.

In fact the events of this one evening once again reaffirmed in my mind and soul the terribly important meaning of rituals and ceremonies; in fact I am of the thinking that communities can not actually survive with good mental health without rituals and ceremonies.

It seems to me the bedrock foundation of our grand, great and noble profession.

Anyway that is one old undertaker’s opinion.  TVB

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Author's note: This is the second in a series of reviews of recently published business and marketing books. I am not rating each book as good or bad; rather, I am offering an overview of the book's topic and then pulling out one lesson or principle to discuss more in-depth.

The New Rules of Marketing & PR (Second Edition) by David Meerman Scott turns everything I learned in my college PR classes on its head. Twenty-some-odd years ago, we focused on controlled, one-way corporate communications. With today's 24-hour news cycle and the prevalence of social media, that model no longer exists.

In many ways, we no longer own our companies' messages. We certainly no longer control them. Control has been transferred to the media (including both traditional media and new outlets such as blogs and Twitter feeds) and to the consumer. The result? Today's marketing and public relations is all about performance, about giving the customer a positive experience that they can blog, tweet or post on their Facebook page.

The Buyer Persona

One area Scott discusses that has particular relevance to cemeteries and funeral homes is the importance of creating and addressing different "buyer personas" through your online marketing.

Is your Web site a one-size-fits-all brochure? Most are, but according to Scott, this is a missed opportunity. You have different target audiences, and your Web site should make it easy for each of those audiences to find the information they need.

You have both preneed prospects and at-need families visiting your site. You have older customers researching options for themselves and younger people trying to help their parents or grandparents. You have customers who want full-body burial and those who want cremation. You have genealogists, people whose loved ones are buried at your cemetery, mortuary students conducting research, local media and so forth. Each of these groups, these personas, are looking for different information. Or in some cases, they may be looking for much the same information but they need to be provided it in a different way, with different language and a different focus. These groups also research their interests in different ways; for example, they search online using different key words.

The key to making sure each of these personas finds you and has a positive experience with you is to tailor different portions of your website (and your extended web presence) based on each of their needs, desires and tendencies. As with all new marketing, it is not about you, it is about your customer.

Several months ago I made a speaking trip to Northampton Community College in Pennsylvania to give the annual Pearson Lectures.  I always have enjoyed my trips to the “Keystone” or “Quaker” State, and as always I was treated with much courtesy and hospitality.

I am guessing that the lectures went alright.  My host John Lunsford, who is a true gentleman, and the head of the mortuary science department at the college, said the evaluations looked good.  Of course there were a few good people who took task with some of my thoughts, but then that is the risk and the reality of giving public presentations – you can’t be all things to all people.

However as enjoyable as my work with Northampton Community College was, and as gracious as my hosts were, one of the true impacts on my life and career happened just out of the blue when I was introduced to a couple by the name of Trish and Tom Quinn.  The Quinns are funeral professionals in the Philadelphia area, and what I encountered both in listening and learning from them has had a great influence on my view of funeral service and the noble worthy ideal of our continued quest to improve our abilities and skills in helping bereaved human beings.  Helping people always seemed so worthy to me.

The substance of my interaction and subsequent friendship with the Quinns has revolved around one primary subject, the extremely sensitive and vulnerable topic of the death of a child, and the subsequent funeral activities or lack of them.

I cannot remember a time in my career when children have not died.  Certainly, and this is a great blessing, the death of a child is nothing today like it was at the turn of the century, or throughout history for that matter, but even though the numbers of children deaths are less than ever before, the impact of such a death is more pronounced than ever before simply because CHILDREN ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO DIE ANYMORE.

There was a time, actually not that long ago, when the death of a child was not unusual.  Throughout history children have been particularly susceptible to the neverending work of the Grim Reaper.  I remember looking at an old funeral record book one time and being struck by the fact that for the month of August 1893 this undertaker had conducted 38 funerals, and 13 of them had been for children under the age of twelve.  It was sobering reading, I can tell you that!

Thank God things have improved concerning child mortality statistics in this country, but yet, as every funeral professional can attest, children still do die, and this cruel reality is the particular ministry and mission on which the Quinns have focused their attention.

Customarily such connection between a funeral professional and the subject of the death of a child is a psychological one.  You know, the seminars which have been presented for years on the subjects of “How to Tell a Child” or “What Do Children Do” or “What Happens When A Parent Dies” or the neverending topic “Should A Child Go To A Funeral.”  All these subjects have great worth, but the Quinns have focused on something else.  Their focus is on the basic economic structure, or lack thereof, of a child’s funeral expenses, and to that end they have created what I consider one of the most innovative, worthy and creative organizations I have ever heard of in our great profession, FINAL FAREWELL. http://finalfarewell.org/

Let’s freeze this frame a moment and as usual I would like to dive into some funeral history.  When I started out in funeral service, the rock solid policy of the funeral home I was connected with was that if the deceased was a child (the criteria was if the body was too small to go into an adult-sized casket), there was no charge made to the family – even if they could pay. 

I knew several other funeral homes in the area in which I worked that had the same policy.  My employer’s attitude was one of benevolence, kindness, generosity and mercy.  The truth was that most often when a child died, the parents or others most closely affected were people without means.  Most of the people we served when a child had died could not afford prenatal care, they might not have been married, some were shunned by their own families. When the child’s death was not due to illness, we seemed to always be dealing with accidental death or, sadly, homicides.

It was clear that a child’s death placed the funeral home and our staff in a psychological position that many times tackled the very fiber of our service ability.  To that end my employer made the decision that since the atmosphere of a child’s death was so charged with complications and sensitivities and trauma and drama, he was not going to add to these poor people’s problems with a funeral bill.  He would just absorb the expenses and move on.  Certainly today this approach might well annoy or cause some readers to react negatively, but I am just sharing history and not in the least suggesting how a funeral home owner today ought to approach a similar situation.  This is just history, nothing else, and as we all know we can’t change history.

It seems evident to me that the death of a child still causes much anguish. It also seems evident that some people who have experienced the death of a child still experience poor prenatal care, might not be married, might well be shunned by their families, and children are still killed accidentally or intentionally.  The Grim Reaper is still very busy.

The approach my old employer took of not charging for a child’s funeral did have positive results for his career, and his business. His generous spirit translated into family loyalty, and while he did not charge for the child’s funeral, he did not give away funerals to the child’s grandparents, aunts and uncles or their parents.  In fact, this great funeral director's generous spirit truly came back to him a thousand times, and what is more, he slept well at night.

Of course that was more than 40 years ago, and I am not naïve; things have changed.  The basic profit structure of a funeral has changed in a big way,  the economy has changed in a big way. Today the notion of giving anything away needs careful consideration, careful procedures and most of all careful attention to fiscal responsibility.  Things have changed.

This is where the Quinns and their creative work in starting up the philanthropic foundation called FINAL FAREWELL comes in.

It has been a long time since I have seen a philanthropic effort in our profession that I personally believe has as much worth to it as does the Quinns' FINAL FAREWELL ministry.

The basic idea behind Final Farewell is simple:  the foundation is a financial resource, a pool of funds used to assist families with funeral expenses when a child dies.  In other words, based on each individual situation, case by case, the vision and now the work of Final Farewell is to help pay for funeral expenses on behalf of a bereaved family. The funds go directly to the serving funeral home, so that a type of win/win situation is created – if one can possibly even use the word “win” in reference to a child’s death.  Worded another way, when contacted, the Quinns and their Final Farewell Foundation will work in tandem with both the bereaved family and the serving funeral home to arrive at a figure which the foundation will contribute to defray the funeral expenses that occur when a child dies.

There are no complicated formulas, no complicated forms, no lengthy application processes, no bureaucracy and no one is turned down.  The amount of money given is always predicated upon how much money is in the foundation's account, and the particular situation involved.

The Quinns also have been diligent in creating a non-profit recognized enterprise overseen by a Board of Directors, all of who are highly respected leaders from funeral service and other professions.

The amounts of money that are extended to a funeral home is based presently on the amounts of money that are sitting in the Foundation coffers, and the truth is the Foundations bank accounts is not piled high with cash, in fact the cash presently goes up and down depending on how many generous souls the Quinn’s can contact and attract and what the daily needs are concerning helping bereaved people when a child dies.   Bluntly speaking the Foundation needs money, they need contributions, and they need it from us, and they need it now.

The Quinns have just begun their noble work, and I believe they are doing pioneering work, but also I believe they have their hearts precisely in the right place.  They do not look at this work as a business; I believe the Quinns look at this work as their mission in life, a ministry to the least of these, and in the end a true corporal act of mercy.

They need help.  They need contributions.  The need relationships out in the funeral service profession.  They need a solid base so that the funds extended to the worthy people who experience a death of a child can be in time made entirely from the interest which will be in financial investment accounts intended to last long after the Quinns are gone and other people take over the program. 

The other side of the wisdom of Final Farewell is that it will help contribute to the financial security of funeral homes.  Final Farewell might not be able to take care of all the financial obligations of a child’s funeral, but they are helping. I know they want to help more.

I would ask any reader that before you make a decision to invest your time and/or monetary contributions, you first explore Final Farewell on your own by looking at their Website.  Also you can easily contact the Quinns by calling this phone number:  1-800-238-8440.  I believe you will be happy you made the contact to get involved.

This is NOT a sales pitch, but it is a worthy call to action.  I believe Final Farewell is a worthy ideal, and it is managed by two worthy and dedicated human beings:  Trish and Tom Quinn.  I believe their work deserved our attention and support.

Anyway that’s one old undertaker’s opinion. TVB

Anyone know status of bill? Understand the Arlington oversight bill passed and wonder if the Bereavement Act got attached.

By the way, this is my first "blog" so forgive me if I am in the wrong section, etc. Where do you go to see interaction between members? I miss the old format that I became accustomed to.

Don Wilson

dwilson@evergreenburialpark.com

The great, late, speaker of the House of Representatives, “Tip” O’Neil from Massachusetts, once made this insightful remark, he said, “All politics is ultimately local.”  I agreed with him when he said it, and I still agree with him today.

With that said allow me to humbly paraphrase the great “Tip.”  According to TVB “All funeral service is ultimately local.”

In times such as these, when everything seems to be changing, and change has been the constant companion of funeral service for a mighty long time, in times such as these I find it helpful to sit back and remind myself of a couple of glaring and in the end comforting truths about our great and beloved profession.  Here are a couple of truths, as I see them anyway:
•    The average funeral home in this country is not large, it is not owned by large companies, and it is located in relatively small communities.  I believe that small communities still are more numerous than large metropolitan areas.
•    The success in funeral service is still relationship-based.  In other words, the relationships which are created through pre-need, at-need and after care translate into future security and success for funeral homes – regardless of who owns them.
•    Nothing happens until a relationship is created.

This is not Pollyanna stuff, nor is my list of funeral home strengths a feel good expression of pleasantries and platitudes, because even in view of these three mighty important strengths, things have changed.  The buying habits of people have clearly changed, and if we as a profession continue to be addicted to using outdated financial models that worked very well in 1968, and persist in using these outdated and obsolete models in 2010 – well it doesn’t take a scientist to conclude what will happen.

There are many more sages and wise people in the funeral profession than I who can address the changing habits of the public, and what these continuing changes mean to our success.  I will leave that analysis to people who are much more insightful and skilled than I am.

My list of funeral home strengths might be indeed short, but the length of the list ought not be confused with the truth that these strengths (and there are many more that I have certainly missed) are in reality a powerhouse of influence, a powerhouse of mission, a powerhouse of stability, a powerhouse of compassion, care, and comfort.

Local funeral homes are, I believe, potential and real powerhouses.  In fact given that the death rate is 100% and the resulting misery that this glaring mortality fact creates in every community, the local funeral home truly emerges as a powerhouse of influence, or anyway a potential powerhouse of influence.  The difference as to whether a funeral home is a powerhouse or not is always predicated on the attitude and what is in a funeral directors heart.

Henry Blust

I grew up in Southwestern Iowa.  It was somewhat of an isolated existence.  Omaha was 35 miles away and that gave us some contact with another way of life, but the truth was that in the 1950s my little town was a wonderful place, but it was also in a type of time warp, which looking back was NOT a bad thing.

Key to our little town’s mental health as a community was the presence and involvement our two beloved and eccentric undertakers – the Blust Brothers (Henry the older, and Norbert, nicknamed Nob, the younger).  The Blust Brothers were absolutely a living truth concerning the reality that in the end all funeral service is local.  In fact the Blust Brothers were what I call today funeral directors powerhouses, and here is the beauty of the Blust Brothers: they didn’t even know it, which was part of their charm and success.  These two men just loved being undertakers.

Today I marvel at the beautiful opulent magnificent funeral homes that are built.  They seem to be getting nicer and more opulent each year.  I knew as a young undertaker that in most towns the funeral home was indeed the most beautiful building in town.  In the big cities this was not always the case.  However in small town Iowa this aesthetic reality was a social more.  Funeral homes in small towns were almost universally located in the most impressive homes in the community, and the Blust Brothers facility was no different.  Outside the building was simply stunning, but this was not the case inside.

Not one piece of furniture matched in the Blust Bros. Funeral Home.  Nothing matched.  Pictures were hung either too high or too low.  The furniture had cigarette burns in the fabric, because one of the Blust brothers was a chain smoker, and carpet was really tired (which was interesting given the fact that the Blust Brothers also operated the town’s only furniture store, which sold carpet), the rooms were dingy and dark, the wallpaper ancient, the curtains were drab and heavy, and there was a water stained colored portrait of Jesus hung over the area where they placed the casket.

Then on top of all this were the eccentric Blust Brothers themselves.  Their father, a chap named Ferdinand Blust, had opened the funeral home in 1871, two years after the town was founded, and his two sons Henry and Norbert took over the business at the turn of the century.  Henry Blust was licensed in 1900 and his brother Norbert was licensed in 1908.  They were still doing funerals in 1955.  The Blust brothers were not perfect, they were not polished, they were not sophisticated, they were not cool, they were not socially adept, but they were local and very visible, and what is most important is the fact, and a fact it is, we liked them.  For all their warts and faults the community liked these two eccentric brothers.  They were both popular.  They built relationships.  They participated in the life of our community, and we liked them

Their eccentricities were legend.  For instance no dead person entrusted to the Blust Brothers care would or could be laid out wearing eyeglasses.  The dead person’s eyeglasses were placed carefully in the dead person’s hands.  Nob Blust was firm on his no eyeglass funeral conviction when he would declare, “Dead people can’t see!” Thus ended the lesson, Nob hath spoken, and no one in town ever argued with Nob’s eyeglass theory and logic.  Everybody in town agreed, dead people can’t see, Nob is right.

The other difficulty, looking back, with the Blust brothers was the fact that both of them were almost stone deaf and they stubbornly refused to get hearing aids.  So, friends, just let your imaginations go concerning how smoothly one of the Blust brothers' funerals went.  The brothers' made mistakes constantly simply because they could not hear and hence communications usually fell apart and became shambles.  But that little human frailty didn’t make much difference to us folks in town. We liked them, and hence we found it easy to forgive and forget the Blust brothers' snafus on funerals.  No matter what, the Blust brothers both had good hearts.  They liked us, and we liked them.

I remember very well one funeral where Henry was in front of the living room where the funeral was set up, and he had run out of memorial folders.  Nob was in the back of the living room and Henry shouted from the front in the presence of everybody, “Nob I’ve run out of cards.”  Nob replied, “I’ll take care of it.”  In about a minute Nob marched forward carrying a folding chair for his brother.  Henry got annoyed—he did not need a folding chair, he needed memorial folders—and dressed his brother down in front of everybody.  Of course Nob could not hear one word that his brother was saying to him and off he went, attending to other funeral duties.   That kind of stuff happened all the time on a Blust Brothers funeral.  But I also well remember when this minor funeral infraction happened that my grandmother leaned over to me and said, “Todd, Nob means well.”   Remember friends, we liked the Blust brothers.

In the age of high technology, high tech communication, high tech impersonal people, high tech greed, high tech fast lane living, high tech, high tech and then more high tech, is the thought that all funeral service is in the end local an old-fashioned, antiquated, terribly boorish concept?  I believe that some good people will say that the good ole days of relationship building, the good ole days that all funeral service is ultimately local, and the good ole days that being well liked is essentially important are truly and indeed over with – they are days gone by, they are ancient history and never to be seen again.  They might have a point, and of course the Blust brothers have been dead for many years, but interestingly the funeral professionals who are the legacy of the Blust brothers are also highly visible in the community, and people like them.  I wonder who they learned that idea about life and service from?

As I write these words, I feel a tug in my mind that I am so out of step with what is going on.  However, I am equally tugged by the memory of what I learned made the Blust brothers so well liked in our little town. We liked them NOT because the Blust brothers sat around in the coffee lounge waiting for the phone to ring.  Those two old deaf eccentric men were out in the community, they participated in the life of the community, they were there with a mission in life to help people, they earned every dime they made, and they possessed good hearts.  They paid the price for their success because they gave of themselves relationally to our little town.   Something to think about, is it not?

Oh, the last thought on the beloved Blust brothers – they operated not only the furniture store, but the ambulance service as well.  Now there is a scary thought about which I will have more to say about in a future post.

All funeral service is local – what do you think?  Anyway that is one old undertaker’s opinion. TVB

Last week I made a trip to Northampton Community College to give a couple of presentations to the area funeral directors.  The day was sponsored by the Mortuary Science Department at Northampton which is led and administered by the very able and capable headmaster John Lunsford.  I was very impressed by the events of the day, but for this particular writing I want to share extremely redeeming experience that I had during my sojourn to the great Keystone State.

Having spent a considerable amount of my career teaching I have formed changing opinions of students.  My opinions, over the years, have almost always been predicated on the maturity level, or lack thereof, of classes.  When I started out teaching in the early 1980s I found most of the classes were composed of students who had a level of maturity, and also who had a mission as to precisely what they were getting involved with in a career in funeral service.

As I have written in past articles devoted to mortuary education over the years it was my hard lot to discover that students were changing, and I concluded that they were not changing for the better, in fact I concluded that the future of our great profession based on my conclusions concerning students looked dim indeed.  This opinion was formed before I made my trip to Northampton.

The old saying goes that you “can’t teach an old dog new tricks”, and I have often said that you “can’t teach an old undertaker new tricks,” but Lord knows I was wrong.  I was taught some new lessons.

Here is what I learned.  I had the good fortune of interacting with a score of mortuary science students from both Northampton, and Mercer County students from New Jersey who generously made the trip across the state line to hear my seminars.  I thank Rob Smith (headmaster of Mercer County) for his interest and organizational skills – Smith has always been one of my personal favorites.

My interaction with the Northampton student’s actually was predicated on the students own idea for a fund raiser for their fraternity.  Of all things these good students decided to sell, now get this friends, TVB’s CD which has all my management and outreach programs on it.  I said yes to the idea and freely sent John Lunsford a copy and he and the student’s made impressive cases for the CD, they set up a booth, they promoted the CD, and were very effective salespeople, because at the end of the day they sold $1,000 worth of the CDs and are planning to use the money raised for a charitable purpose. (What charity it was I have forgotten – but I am sure it is worthy.)

What I discovered in dealing with these fine students in the seminar and the CD project was several characteristics which made this old grumpy undertaker’s heart soar.  First of all they were all dressed impeccably.  Their dress was clearly consistent with the extremely conservative nature of funeral service, and not one of them, that I could see, was using the opportunity to make “a fashion statement.”  There also were no snooty “attitudes.”  The students were polite, all behaving as professional gentlemen and ladies, and they smiled, yes they actually were smiling, none of them looked like they had been sucking on lemons all day, and they conversed, they talked, they carried on conversations, they extended their hands in cordiality and hospitality, and they actually seemed to behave as if they truly enjoyed being mortuary science students.  I did not meet one cranky, grumpy, complaining, or ridiculous student – not one.

The students also seemed interested in my seminars.  They asked insightful questions, and actually some of them came up later and requested additional information.

Here is the lesson I learned.  I have been way too hard and critical of mortuary science students, and for that I publically apologize.  What I personally encountered at Northampton Community College renewed my faith in the future of our great and beloved profession, because no matter what we veteran funeral directors have to say about the future, the future of this great profession to a large extent rests on every breath of air that is taken by mortuary science students right this very moment across this county.

I am the past in funeral service; they are the future.  As I flew back to my world I felt the need to write this, to get my error in thinking off my chest, and to publically admit that I was wrong. Mortuary science students are mighty fine people – anyway the ones I encountered at Northampton fit the bill.

Anyway that is one old undertaker’s opinion. TVB

Posted Fri, 10/29/2010 - 10:16

In Washington state our law regarding Right to Control Disposition contains the following heirarchy as to who must authorize disposition, whether it be burial or cremation:

NEW PROPOSAL: (a) The agent so designated by the deceased. (see below - wording mine)

  (b) The surviving adult children of the decedent.

 (c) The surviving parents of the decedent.

 (d) The surviving siblings of the decedent.

  (e) A person acting as a representative of the decedent under the signed authorization of the decedent.

In the case of classes other than spouse, (children, parents, siblings) all members of such class have to agree on the form of disposition, and all must sign the disposition authorization. The provider must make a good-faith effort to locate all members. Occasionally this has been a problem, but mostly just in delaying the actual disposition.

In Seattle we have a very large active People's Memorial Association (over 150,000 members). They provide, mostly, low-cost cremation services.

PMA is proposing changes to this law (one proposal above is in bold). They wish to have the new class, Designated Agent, take precedence over all other classes, including surviving spouse.

Their second proposal is to change "ALL" to "A MAJORITY" of members of the authorizing class e.g. of three children, only two have to agree on form of disposition.

We are exploring how other states handle Right to Control. It is our understanding that at least half of the states do allow some form of "Designated Agent" but we don't know where such DA is placed in the list of classes.

As a state association, we want to be certain we understand all the ramifications of these proposed changes. We don't necessarily want to oppose the changes, but we want to make sure if such changes do go forward we do it proactively rather than reactively. Anybody's input will be most appreciated!

Judy Faaberg, Executive Director

Washington Cemetery, Cremation & Funeral Association

Of course what I am about to share is old-fashioned and today I suspect viewed as antiquated and possibly downright offensive, but here goes anyway.

I have worked with funeral home promotions for many years, and have seen some mighty impressive ideas and creativity show up with all sorts of concepts and efforts to make the funeral home more visible (in a tactful manner) in the community.

Here is the story.  When I started college back in another world I worked for a small town funeral home in Western Nebraska.  We did around 60 calls a year, but what we really did was operate a free ambulance service which responded to probably 300 calls a year.  My boss was a wonderful man, generous to a fault, a horrible business person, and just loved running his free ambulance service.  While many funeral directors complained about the ambulance my boss literally basked in delight when he got to turn on the red lights and blast the siren.  He did not make a dime on the ambulance but he had a marvelous time driving that vehicle at light year speed throughout the town and country side.  Looking back I have to admit that some of the most dangerous and life threatening experiences I have encountered was not with the sick or injured people we picked up, but it was riding along when my boss was driving.  He took chances on the road that today would be unacceptable and would probably get him arrested.

However he did two things with his funeral coach and his ambulance that I just thought would be worth sharing and I am not suggesting that anyone adopt these ideas, it is just my recollections of times long gone by.

First was his use of the hearse.  If we went for a couple of weeks without a funeral my boss would instruct us to drive the hearse downtown and travel up and down the streets of our community – and that was it.  The name of the funeral home was prominently displayed in every window so you could not miss or get confused as to who owned the hearse.  My buddy and I drove around for an hour or two.  Just driving that was it.  No waving, no stopping, no conversation – just driving around, and as we all know funeral coaches draw attention.

The first time he asked me to do this I thought he was crazy.  Adding to the nuttiness was the fact that he never took the time to explain to us why we were driving the hearse around in circles, but he was the boss so off we went.

However, and this happened constantly, on our very next call during the visitation period people would come into the funeral home and while they were signing the register book would nonchalantly mention that “good heaven’s you guy’s must have been really busy the other day, I saw your hearse I bet twelve times.”  The truth was we had not had a call for a month, but to the public’s mind we were mighty busy.  Today I call this a mobile advertising effort.

The other innovation that my boss did was with the ambulance.  Years before I went to work for him he had gone to every hospital in the area and offered to transport mothers who had had a baby and were being released from the hospital a free ambulance trip back home.

We even had a special cot with a canopy over the head end so the mother and newborn would not get too much sun.

We routinely took a mother and her new baby back home in grand style.  The ambulance had the name of the funeral home on every conceivable place on the vehicle, including the roof.

My boss gave us explicit instructions.  When we were about two blocks from the home of the mother and new baby we were to turn on all the red lights, and crank the siren up as loud as it would go to draw attention to the our arrival, and sure enough when we turned the siren on most every neighbor came out of their homes, and the family of the new baby was already present, and most everybody had cameras and were (they thought) snapping pictures of the mother and new baby, but what they were also doing was snapping pictures of our ambulance with our name prominently present in every photo.  We took our time in getting mom and baby out of the ambulance, we poised for photographs, we shook hands, we visited, and we basically did great public relations building for the funeral home through our ambulance.  There were some touching and memorable moments when we would take mother and baby back home.

In fact it was not unusual for someone to come to the funeral home to attend a funeral and proudly announce that they were an “XYZ funeral home baby.”  They seemed proud of the fact that the funeral home had delivered them home when they were born.

Today these ideas sound terribly old-fashioned and I suspect there are many reading this who will take justified exception with such past practices, but that is what we did, and here was the interesting fact: the public responded favorably to our innovative visibility ideas.

Anyway friends this is just another ambulance memory and thoughts of an old undertaker. TVB

Last week I spent a day teaching out at the “Farm” in Batesville.  I have lost track of the number of trips I have made to the “Farm” over the years, but suffice to say I have been making that journey many times over the past thirty years.

It all started out when I was teaching merchandising at the Cincinnati College of Mortuary Science and way back then we took two classes a year to Batesville (I think they still do this) to have the grand tour, and to let sink into the minds of the “baby undertakers” just what it took to make one casket – let alone seven hundred caskets a day.  To say the least, it was and still is mighty impressive stuff to take that tour.  Then for a decade I was involved with a large corporation who had a close relationship with Batesville, and since that experience went belly up, I have made a trip most every year for other funeral service companies who were having their annual training programs out at the “Farm.”  I have seen the “Farm” move from a small assembly of cottages to a terribly impressive training and conference center with a splendid lodge, and gorgeous surroundings.  Batesville, as with most everything, like it or not, has done this right, no doubt.

This last trip as I was driving from the Cincinnati airport and meandering across the country roads outside of Batesville I was just struck at what insight, vision, tenacity of purpose, and just good management the Batesville Casket Company has exhibited consistently over these many years.
Say what you want about the Batesville Casket Company, and there certainly have been detractors, but to be honest this company I believe has changed the methods of burial and now cremation across the globe.  I take my hat off to them and their leadership but particularly for their creativity.  Batesville I believe did not compete; instead, they created.

There was a time in funeral service when countless casket companies abounded in the field.  Looking back, there were probably just too many of them.  When I started one powerhouse company was the now defunct Crane & Breed Casket Company located in Cincinnati.  There was Belmont, Merit, Chicago, National, Springfield Metallic, Boyertown, Marsellus, Clarksburg, Connersville-Franklin, and Comet - well, the list went on and on.  In their own way each of these companies did an outstanding job, for the time they worked in.  However, it often took a month to get a casket from some of these fine casket companies, and Batesville, along with other things, changed all that.

I remember the first time we were able to get a replacement casket from Batesville in a couple of hours. We were stunned, and to tell the truth that experience alone changed the way we looked at casket companies.  Of course quick replacement of caskets is nothing new today, and if a casket company can’t replace them quickly, well then the individual funeral homes will no doubt determine, among other things, who sells caskets and who does not.

However beyond the reformation of the casket industry, Batesville had something else, I concluded on my last trip to the “Farm.”  The company clearly succeeded in implementing and leading a new vision of what a casket was, and more importantly what a casket could be, and that one aspect, I personally believe, changed the way the funeral profession viewed the casket.

Certainly our profession has learned much from Batesville’s Options program, and I remember when that program was rolled out the reaction many times was not supportive or visionary.  I remember hearing “Batesville is endorsing cremation!”  I don’t hear that comment much anymore. 

There have been a few, not many, just a few movements in our great profession that literally changed things.  Cremation is of course one of them. The movement from home funerals to the mortuary concept is another. Going from using ice to embalm with to accepting arterial embalming is another. Government involvement is yet another. And I would suggest that the work and success of the Batesville Casket Company ranks right up there with the other permanent changes in funeral service.

To be sure there are other great casket companies – no question about that. But thinking about my most recent trip and looking back at these many years, I cannot help but conclude that Batesville just changed the way the funeral profession viewed caskets, merchandising, and now cremation possibilities.

Anyway, I was just thinking about Batesville; my small brain was jogged by my trip out to the “Farm.” As always, this is just one old grumpy undertaker’s opinion. TVB

Social networking expect Ze Frank talked at the ICCFA 2010 convention about why funeral directors and cemeterians shouldn't dismiss social networks such as Facebook as places where people just "fool around." Yes, there is a lot of fooling around, he said, but that's what makes people want to hang out there--people like to fool around. But, he said, "if something important happens to the network, if somebody passes away, if somebody is born, if there's a crisis, the network goes crazy, because that's what it's primed to do."

I think about that comment comment every time one of my Facebook friends (the vast majority of whom are NOT funeral directors/cemeterians--I'm on there for social, not business reasons) writes about "something important." When a baby is born or someone has a birthday or gets a new job, congratulatory messages come pouring in. When a family member is ill, people write words of encouragement and hope. When a pet or loved one dies, people send condolences and remember their own losses. I'm amazed sometimes, having heard about some of the jaw-droppingly inappropriate and/or hurtful comments the bereaved are sometimes subjected to by people struggling to find something to say, how heartfelt, appropriate and helpful the comments are.

Last week I noticed a prime example of what Ze Frank described. Nicholas D. Kristof, Pulitzer-Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times, has a lot of followers on Facebook--more than 161,000. His columns tackle tough, emotional international issues--he is particularly known for shining a spotlight on the situation in Darfur. His Facebook updates citing the topic of his latest columns routinely draw 60, 90, 150 comments. But recently, several of his updates have been more personal. One early this month about having had surgery drew more than 300 comments. And then, on June 16, he wrote that his father had died. As of today, that post has drawn more than 1,000 comments--most from people who don't personally know Kristof and didn't know his father. Some simply say, "I'm so sorry for your loss," but all seem sincere and I'm sure were appreciated.

When I was a resident of Cincinnati, Ohio, my Saturdays were most often a day just for me.  I would sleep in, get up and go to Blue Ash Chili for a high cholesterol breakfast, then I would mosey downtown, park my car and sit on a bench at Fountain Square and people watch.  Cincinnati was, and is, a gem of a city. 

There were three major department stores close by, three major hotels, and an old F. W. Woolworth’s on 5^th Street next to the Elder-Beerman Department Store.  I would mosey down to Woolworth’s and have a BLT.  Sometimes I could see a cockroach scrambling across the counter to safety, but that really never bothered me. It surely freaked some people out, but not TVB.

This BLT lunch combined with my totally unhealthy breakfast meant I had probably devoured a side of bacon, but no matter; I enjoyed it and worried about the health consequences for a later day.  

After my lunch I would mosey down to the new Hyatt Hotel, which was a marvel when it was newly built. This I believe was the highlight of my Saturday, and the reason was simple.  In the Hyatt lobby there was a gentleman who was the only shoe shiner for the entire hotel.  I never, ever, found out his real name but that did not make much difference for he had given himself a name and an impressive title – DR. SHINE.

Behind his shoe shining stand he had a framed diploma (which he obviously had designed himself) which boldly gave testament to Dr. Shine having received the degree of MASTER OF DELIVERY (M.D.) FROM “SHOE U.”

Next to his M.D. degree he had another prominent sign which read “DR. SHINE IS IN RESIDENCY AND IS PREPARED TO TREAT PATIENTS – CHARITY CASES NEED TO WALK ACROSS THE STREET TO THE HILTON HOTEL.”  It was absolutely grand!!

Dr. Shine was resplendent with a perfectly white doctor’s smock, and he even wore a stethoscope around his neck, and when he rolled into his routine – watch out!

Dr. Shine had more energy that any person I can think of.  He was constantly dancing, laughing, talking, and hawking his expert M.D. services.

People would simply and innocently walk by and Dr. Shine would start yelling “Emergency, emergency, we have a shoe emergency, youreshoes are in a life and death situation, and I can save them, I studied shoeectomy at Shoe U.  I know how to perform them quickly and painlessly and I passed the course with an “A+!” and you need a shoeectomy stat!”  People in the lobby at first were startled by this man and the site and stir he created, but when they caught on, he had a totally captivated audience.

Performing a "shoeectomy"

Shoeectomy?  Who ever heard of that?  But folks, it worked, and worked in a big way.

When you got into his seat the real fireworks began.  First Dr. Shine would place his stethoscope on the top of your shoe.  He would listen intently, ask you to tap your foot three times and do it slowly, he would look at you with the stethoscope in his ears and look lost and forlorn and take a big dramatic sigh and just shake his head – just like real doctors do.

Then he would look up and give you the preliminary diagnosis which was always connected with the type of shoe you were wearing, and always the prognosis was not good.  Things looked bad.  Doom and gloom.  We have a deathly serious situation here.  Dr. Shine would look at you mournfully and announce in solemn, reverent terms things such as, “Sir, I have to inform you that you have a severe case of ‘deck shoeitis.’”  Or it could have been running shoeitis, track shoeitis, tap shoeitis, skateshoeitis, Oxfordshoeitis, wing tipitis, moccasinitis, loaferitis, golf shoeitis, flip-flopsitis, deck shoeitis, clogitis, bowling shoeitis, beach shoeitis, and climbing shoeitis.

Every shoe was infected and inflamed, and Dr. Shine knew precisely how to treat the condition.

Sometimes he advised that the person’s shoes really needed to die and be donated to the – now get this, folks – Shoe Zoo Museum for Lost Causes. 

Often times he would call out loud and clear for the hospital chaplain to come quick because in his words “this shoe needs sole” (soul, get it?).  When Dr. Shine would toss that one out the person getting their shoes shined would just howl with laughter.  Then off and on Dr. Shine would look around and lament and say “Oh, I wish I had my trusty nurse Sue to help with your shoe.”  Then he might come up with “I seriously doubt if I can undo the trauma to your shoe.”  Everything rhymed – everything.  “You and your shoe are in a serious health crisis.”  “You have no clue how to take care of your shoe.” “You need to shampoo your shoe regularly.”

Every shoe shine included a high level, dramatic “Code Blue” emergency.  You never knew when it was going to happen, but out of nowhere Dr. Shine would start yelling “Code Blue, Code Blue, bring the shoe crash cart - stat!!!!!!!”  His crash cart consisted of his drawer in the bottom of his stand where he stored all his stuff, and he would open the drawer, grab a polishing rag and yell “Stand back, stand back, I can’t find a heartbeat” and he would start doing his own version of Cardio Pulmonary Resuscitation on your shoes.  Dr. Shine would be slapping your shoes with his rag and saying, like they do in real CPR, “One, two, three, four, five – breathe, damn you!”  Each time he slapped your shoe was akin to another heart compression in CPR.  Then he would stop, take his stethoscope, check for a “heartbeat” and start all over again.  “One, two, three, four, five – breathe, damn you!”  Then suddenly Dr. Shine would, with stethoscope in his ears, look up and dramatically announce, “I think I have a heartbeat.”  Then under his breath you could hear him say (he wanted you to hear), “Damn, I am good.”  

To top off this comedy routine, Dr. Shine actually had fake prescription pads and everybody walked away with a “shoe review” as he called it prescription.  Dr. Shine’s prescriptions usually had something like this to say:  “I hope you enjoyed this shoe shine.”  “I certainly thank you for coming in.”  “Without people like you I would be out a job.”  “I hope I gave you a laugh or two.”  Dr. Shine always complimented, he always thanked, AND he was always the consummate gentleman.

He had one more sign he required that you read.  It said, “THE ETHICS OF MY PROFESSION (M.D.) DO NOT ALLOW ME TO ACCEPT TIPS – PLEASE RESPECT THIS ETHICAL STANDARD IN MY PROFESSION.”  Then Dr. Shine would wink at you with a Cheshire cat smile.

Dr. Shine charged $3.00 for a shoe shine.  I always gave him a $20 bill.  My shoes have never looked so good!

Oh, by the way – there was a line of people at Dr. Shine’s Shoe Clinic patiently waiting for his M.D. services.  Dr. Shine had a lucrative M.D. practice saving the lives of shoes.

Lessons for us from the "doctor"

I have thought about Dr. Shine many times over the years, and a couple of weeks ago I was in the Queen City to do a couple of seminars at the Cincinnati College of Mortuary Science and the world famous Spring Grove funeral home, cemetery and arboretum.  I stopped by the Hyatt and was informed that Dr. Shine had been tragically killed a few years before in an automobile accident on I-75 on the West Side.

I felt mighty sad when I walked back out on 5^th Street. I thought of my Saturdays and what utter joy and happiness my Shoe Doctor gave me.  

After those shoe shines I would mosey over to Arnold’s Bar and Grill and start on my Canadian Club drinks, I would eat their Dover sole, and by 8 p.m. I was sitting in the marvelous and grand “Music Hall” listening to the near perfect Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.  I was in a good mood, and Dr. Shine set that psychological stage.

Naturally no one in our profession would behave the way Dr. Shine behaved, but can we find ways to be more memorable? Can we leave a greater impression on the people we serve? Can we WOW our clients with those little things of service that Dr. Shine had so expertly discovered in his profession of shining shoes?  I believe this is a real possibility, and something that in these stressful funeral service/cemetery times deserves discussion and further exploration.

Anyway that’s one old undertaker’s opinion.  TVB

Are any members playing host to special Memorial Day services/events this weekend?

With the legislative action in California bringing some attention to the alkaline hydrolysis process, both within the profession and in the consumer media, now seems like as good a time as any to have a discussion on the process which has been called everything from “Cremation Lite” to a real “game changer.” In the past week there have been many newspaper articles describing the process. But the bigger story is yet to come.

While the process has had some institutional applications, at medical schools, veterinary schools, etc., let’s face it, the process is still in its infancy. No one is calling funeral homes asking the funeral directors to describe the alkaline hydrolysis process. The “wave” referred to in the page 1 headline of the May 13, 2010, edition of the Memorial Business Journal (available now as a free download) could conceivably be 10 years away. But questions are going to be asked about the same time Matthews unveils its commercial bio-cremation unit in St.Petersburg later this summer.

This will be the opportunity for all of funeral service to tell the story of what could be the next chapter in the disposition of remains. And, the conversation will have legs. Anything that aligns itself with the “green” discussion will earn its share of attention. So be prepared.

Hindsight being 20/20, it is widely acknowledged that funeral service dropped the ball when it came to educating consumers on all things cremation during its advent and climb. The discussion about the memorialization, the ceremony, was lost in a discussion about the process and price. Everybody knew there was fire and ashes but the part of the story that wasn’t told was that connection between the process and the service. The newspaper article that Curt Rostad referenced in the headline article described the disconnect succinctly: A funeral director recently was quoted in a news article (commenting on the effect of the recession on the funeral business) that “Some people can’t afford a funeral so they are choosing cremation.”

Somewhere years ago a connection was made that allowed cremation to become more synonymous with the word “funeral” rather than it being communicated that it was only a process — an alternative to earth burial for the disposition of the remains. Funeral directors not particularly happy to offer cremation disparaged the process creating an image-rebuilding project that is still underway. The public perception of cremation was marginalized as cheap, immediate and sterile. How could a process that used fire be seen as something so cold?

Cremation customers were sometimes viewed as low-level customers, “You want just a cremation?” Especially now at the ground floor of a new process, there is a tremendous opportunity to put focus back on ceremony as we talk about a new form of disposition.

Many of the people we spoke with see at least one major opportunity for funeral service in a conversation about alkaline hydrolysis and that is the connect the dots to the ceremony and memorialization process while talking about the disposition process. Funeral service forgot to include as part of the story of where the memorialization process plays into it, they got fixated on the actual disposition and not what leads up to it. The meaning and the value were never on the table during the discussion. The conversation may begin about what you do, but you can easily steer it toward why you do it.

A copy of the May 13 issue of the Memorial Business Journal is available as a FREE DOWNLOAD at www.memorialbusinessjournal.com

Edward J. Defort

All of us in this industry are on top of the cremation trend.  The general public pretends to be on top of this trend, but they are grossly ignorant (to no fault of their own) as to what cremation really means. I see a strong connection to the increase in cremation to being able to put off, ignore or prolong the process of death; this is unhealthy on so many different levels and I wish we could all do a better job of letting the public know this.

Currently, I'm working diligently to propose the construction of a beautiful, yet modest chapel on a small cemetery which our company owns in what is referred to as the "Lake Country area" of Wisconsin.  It's not exactly a rural community in comparison to what rural really means, but it is a smaller community which houses several prestigious lakes.  Included with this chapel is a crematory.   Because of this, the community is outraged.  I'm being threatened, am being called immoral and our company is being referred to as unethical and lacking values - all from people who do not know us personally or likely haven't been involved with actually having to make funeral arrangements for anyone closes to them.  Ouch!  To not take this personally is very difficult. 

I'm not ignorant to our society's general fear of death.  But, within the last 45 days, my eyes have been opened up and I have an entirely different perspective on the general stigma that death creates.  Although this crematory proposal is to be within a cemetery, which has been part of the community since 1847, I'm in awe of the different perception this community has of what we have been doing as a cemetery operation vs. what we are proposing to do as a cemetery operation which now offers cremation services.  My jaw has literally dropped when people try to communicate to me what they think is going to happen if a crematory operation is in their community:  the lakes in the area are now going to be polluted and contaminated; their children are going to get mercury poisoning, the soot created from the cremation process is going to leave a path whichever the way the wind is blowing that day.  I haven't had the courage to ask them about the cremated remains that they scattered over these same lakes because it was "mom's wishes" to do so. Why is this acceptable for them to scatter the cremated remains over the lakes, but they want nothing to do with really understanding how a human body was altered into that form. 

Last night I was watching "Taboo" on the National Geographic channel.  The topic was exactly what I'm referring to here:  The stigma of death.  It was a fascinating episode which I just happened to stumble upon.  It discussed and showed the Hindu vs. American culture's funeral practices along with other topics relating to death.  It reminded me of my hope for our society:  to be more accepting of death, of the conversation revolving around it and the healing process that a funeral, life celebration or some sort of ceremony brings to those left behind.  Ignoring the fact of life - death - is becoming more of the norm.  All of us in the funeral industry need to continue to help families through education and the encouragement of preplanning.   This creates a conversation which likely would not have been had if we didn't individually take the time to provoke a few questions to them. 

It is my hope that the hearing that we are holding on May 5th doesn't get too ugly.  I hope that my passion for showing people how we can help them in the long run by providing quality, personalized services, which now includes cremation, is strong enough to overpower the threats, irrational thoughts and hundreds of people who will be there to oppose the crematory. For what is a natural way to do business for us is causing normally educated and reasonable people to come across as the exact opposite.

Here and there, now and then over the years I have been privy, and been exposed to the contemporary idea that funeral processions need to be eliminated, and the anti-funeral procession people seem to have a variety of arguments to support such a movement.

In fact I just finished reading that in Gulf Port funeral processions are limited to five vehicles.  No question about it, in today’s society funeral processions are difficult – well, they seem to be in the great metropolitan cities anyway.  

I find it fascinating that people can easily drive 90 mph and maintain a distance of five feet or less between vehicles, but in the instance of a funeral procession the same drivers going 35 mph can easily have ½ a mile distance between cars.  I always took the position with drivers in funeral processions, as I did with pall bearers, that I must assume they had no clue as to how to proceed and behave.

Yes it seems that funeral processions are a nuisance, and add to this that many really nice people, really friendly people when they get behind the wheel of a vehicle experience the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde phenomena.  The attitude of friendliness and kindness seems to just “fly out the window” (pardon the stupid pun).

Now add to this that really nice human beings like to honk their horns, give non-verbal communications with their middle finger, yell, wave, shout, and literally try to push into the funeral procession and I guess I can see why government officials are saying ENOUGH!  

I was told the other day that I ought not to admit to being old, out of touch and ancient anymore, and I guess my counselor was right; hell, there’s nothing I can do about how old I am.  However I can remember, not too many years ago, when people even in the great metropolitan cities pulled their cars over, got out, put their hands over their hearts, and here’s one – TOOK OFF THEIR HATS when they encountered a funeral procession.  Don’t see that much anymore unless you are fortunate enough to live and work in the less complicated areas, such as the country, the small hamlets, the salt of the earth type places, the places where mutual respect for life and death is alive and well.  Those places are out there and interestingly the town officials in those pastoral, peaceful places have not felt the need to abolish funeral processions, and yes there are still people to will take the time and effort to get out of their vehicles, put their hands over their hearts, and TAKE THEIR HATS OFF – I personally approve of that type of behavior.

I fear that those type places are also vanishing from our midst.

Without question the police escorts, anyway the ones I have worked with over the years, are excellent.  They really tend to business.  Yet even with these efforts the anti-funeral procession people argue the powerful positions of traffic safety, traffic jams, motorist inconvenience, unnecessary slow downs, accidents and the like.

I suspect that when this issue raises its head in most communities the individual funeral directors stand up and try to explain the absolute value in funeral processions – I mean the procession is as ancient a human activity as anything in recorded history.  I suspect that funeral directors are stepping up to the plate and offering to take their funeral processions on a different route, than to lead the entire group up the acceleration ramp and try to stay together on a major congested messed up interstate.  I hope this is happening, because if the funeral director does not show up at the city council meeting, does not stand up and be heard, I fear that the future of the cherished funeral procession could well be in jeopardy.  

Funerals have already gone from being a 2-3 day affair, to now a 2-3 hour affair.  Please omit flowers seems to have taken a new life again.  Fewer people seem to be attending actual funeral services.  Fewer people seem to be showing up at wakes, fewer people are embalming, fewer graves are being sold, and now funeral processions are being fiddled with.

I will admit that it is much easier on everybody to not have to fiddle lining up a funeral procession, not battling traffic, and just meeting everybody where the disposition will take place – much easier. 

It must be another sign of the times.  However I would like to suggest that there remains deep value in the symbol of the funeral procession and there are indeed ways to hold on to that value without legislating them out of existence.

A former student of mine, Ted Reese from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, ran into this precise issue in 1995.  The following letters to the editor were published in the PATRIOT-NEWS.

Letter One:  The complaint

FUNERAL CUSTOM HAZARDOUS

Watching a long line of cars in a funeral procession moving uninterrupted through two traffic signal changes while endless bumper to bumper traffic is forced to a standstill, the observer wonders when society will get around to abolishing the custom that is inappropriate in these times of much road activity.

Besides, a motorized hearse rushing 40-50 M.P.H. to dispose a dead person’s body, does not seem to possess an aura of respect and dignity.

CHARLES ZYK

HARRISBURG

Letter Two:  The funeral director's response

PAUSE FOR REFLECTION

Mr. Charles Zyk of Harrisburg was delayed by a funeral procession recently, and it made him angry enough to write (Letters, March 24).  Yes, yielding to a funeral procession can be a frustrating, aggravating thing, especially in today’s high speed, fast forward world.

Although it may seem practical to abolish the custom of reverently accompanying a loved one (someone’s mother, father, sibling or child) to the cemetery, I ‘m concerned by the moral and ethical implications.  Indeed, the reality of death would be so much easier to accept if we could find more ways to ignore it and simply “dispose,” as he says, of a human body.

It has been said that the way a society cares for its dead is indicative of its respect for the living, and I am privileged to hold a license that allows me to serve the public by caring for the dead.  Sometimes, I have to hold up traffic to do so, forcing the public to take notice that a life has been lived and is now ended.

So, I offer my apologies, on behalf of my colleagues, to anyone who is delayed by a funeral procession today, and I suggest that others take a moment (while sitting in traffic?) to wonder who may be riding in the back of that hearse.  It may be someone you knew.

TED K. REESE

HARRISBURG - THE WRITER IS PRESIDENT OF REESE FUNERAL HOME, INC.

I admired Ted greatly for his stance and courage, and made me feel proud he was a former student of this grumpy old undertaker.

If we do not stand up for the value and purpose of the funeral, who will?

One last question:  Are we finding new ways to ignore death?  And is the abolishment of the funeral procession in reality another example?

TVB

As usual the powers to be within the leadership of ICCFA have done it again as far as being on the cutting edge of what is going on out in the real world of funeral and cemetery vocations.  A new survey (available only to those who attended the recent convention in San Antonio) popped up on my computer and I have to say that I was, for what this is worth, mighty impressed, and indeed fascinated with the results and information. It was like reading a moral treatise which has the outcome of making the comfortable uncomfortable and making the uncomfortable comfortable.

I have always been suspicious of surveys of most any kind.  I had a sociology professor in college who convinced me that when I looked at all surveys I should first and foremost see who paid to have the survey done in the first place.  I have actually found this pretty good advice over the years.  For instance, from what I can detect, every survey that law enforcement departments commission almost always concludes that crime is on the increase.  

Most every survey taken concerning the status of education concludes that we are not doing enough, not enough money is being spent, and that the system is in deplorable condition.  I mean my professor was of the thinking that if the education surveys reported that we were doing more than enough for students, that we had all the money we needed, and that representatives from other developed countries were scrambling to see how we did it – the obvious questions would be asked by somebody “Why does the school system need all this money?”  

Because of the influence of my professor I have become cautious and cynical about surveys, and in the past I have rolled my eyes and shook my head in disbelief with some of the surveys I have read and digested concerning this profession.  No need to elaborate on those historic events, but I need to say that of all the surveys I have read concerning funeral service, in the end and up to now, only the Wirthlin studies, of which there have been several editions, have captivated my attention and altered the materials that I have included in my seminars. Some of the Wirthlin conclusions were not pleasant – for instance the survey’s conclusion that the average American person does not see a distinct difference between a cemeterian and a funeral director – Lord knows that one stung when I read it.

To this day I know friends who will not believe or accept that conclusion from the Wirthlin study.  Who knows the final truth, but I concluded that this one particular piece of information was indeed accurate about cemeterians and funeral directors, even though I had to endure and process some mighty significant ego bruising along the way, but that is another story.

Now ICCFA has stepped up in a big way and commissioned a study, the results of which were shared this week to people who had attended the recent convention in San Antonio.

Before I get into some observations I need to again say that this survey is not final word concerning funeral service and cemetery work, I don’t believe such a source of final information even exits.  However what struck me as attractive was that while this survey was indeed sponsored by a funeral, cremation, and cemetery association it did not candy coat some glaring realities about how Edith and Archie Bunker are looking at our world.  I believe it would have been might easy for the powers to be at the ICCFA headquarters to censor some of the results, it would have probably been much easier politically for them to be sure, for I have seen that done before and because of the censorship was deluded into thinking here and there that some privately selected funeral “fact” which was published in a survey ended up not being a fact at all which messed up my thinking and truth awareness about how things were truly in the real world.  No examples of this are necessary; we, or most of us, have been there and experienced the consequences of being out of step with what the community knows, expects, and wants from a funeral home and/or cemetery.  Being out of step is no fun.

I applaud the courage of ICCFA to publish this survey as the results came in to them.  Some of the results were good news, and other results indicated that some trends that you and I have accepted as gospel truth, as to being where the future lies, and has taken on a life of their own is not necessarily true, and in some instances far, far, far off the mark.

For thirty years I have known that funeral service and cemetery work has been and is changing.  However I also knew and experienced that the banking world went from human tellers to robots tellers in parking lots, to men and women of integrity to men and women in the penitentiary.  I also know that Hospice work went from all volunteer people, fulfilling a calling, to today professional marketers wining and dining people in the medical profession in order to get their business of dying people.  Yes indeedy I don’t need a survey to tell me things have changed.

Any survey that concludes and states that things are changing is to me humdrum, but this survey added some tidbits which I found changed my attitudes and also affirmed some long held beliefs about my beloved profession.  Here is an example.

This blog is not intended to let the cat out of the bag concerning the contents of the entire survey results, but a few carrots I believe is in order and will be approved of.  The first carrot concerning the survey is the verifiable truth that the environmental stuff has power, it has substance and it is what much of the public is looking for.  Never mind that when I was a college student in 196_ the famed ecologist Dr. Paul Ehrlich came to town and said that for our environment to return to what we had just 50 years earlier (which at that time would have been 1919) it would take us 500 years to accomplish, never mind that.  The good ecologist might be wrong, he was wrong about other things, but what matters today is that Archie and Edith Bunker are interested in the environment and if they have lived with this interest and conviction for their lifetime they are going to march right into the funeral home or cemetery office with such an attitude.  I don’t know if “green burials” will be the answer, but certainly it seems to me that wicker coffins are something to look at seriously.  The survey is packed with golden nuggets like this one.

The survey covers many important issues such as the power of word of mouth (does that really still matter?), the attitudes of people towards the death of a pet, the presence of religious activities at the time of funerals/cremations/dispositions, is preneed really as important a movement as we think it is or is it not? And a bunch of other eye openers.  It was a good read.

I can say this, the content of my writings and seminars will be altered because of my acceptance and belief in the integrity of this survey.  It seems to this old undertaker that the author of this work and ICCFA are telling it like it is.  Good stuff.  

TVB

On the surface of it, it would seem that humor and death are literally opposites of human emotions and experience.  I have found nothing really funny about death, although some of the most hilarious events in my life and career have indeed happened on funerals.

There seems to be nothing funny about the painful emotions that death creates, namely deep, profound, acute grief – nothing funny about pain and grief.  Grief hurts; death can be terribly untimely, unexpected, and inappropriate even though the death rate is always 100%.

The human emotions caused by death and grief can kill.  People can and do self-destruct when confronted with such inevitable life situations.  Not everybody, to be sure, but enough to capture our attention. 

As a funeral director I have, as have colleagues, been subjected to death humor regularly.  I need not elaborate; needless to say we all in funeral service have experienced it, and what is impressive is that most of us understand the genesis of such behaviors.

I have long felt that people have a natural built in fear of death.  This seems a good thing in a way.  A respectful fear of death certainly teaches people to avoid needless dangers in life.   However this learning about death's fearful possibilities is not something we are born with, it is developed learning, and in the absence of this type of learning people grow up with the meaningless idea that death has nothing to do with them, and if and when the subject pops up, humor is often used to distance a person from a subject that they are fearful of and hence causes them anxieties, and few if any people want to feel anxious.  We have learned to laugh at death, laugh in the face of death, laugh at deaths power, laugh at people whose calling in life is to minister in this death world, laugh, make sport, ridicule, make jokes, laugh, laugh, laugh.

Being afraid of something is a mighty powerful motivator to create a language that distances people from reality - here is a sample of euphemisms that humans have made up to address the subjects of death/the dead/dying:  Dirt nap, pushing up the daisies, passed, ex-, demised, expired, gone to meet their maker, stiff, resting in peace, kicked the bucket, in a better place, six feet under, crossed the bar, bought the farm, belly up, checked out, departed, done for, liquidated, perished, in repose, rubbed out, snuffed out, wasted, cashed their chips, cashed out, checked out, croaked, finished, kicked off, snuffed, gave up the ghost, wacked, terminated, put down, eternal rest, laid to rest, was a goner, rode into the sunset, that was all she wrote.

We have done an excellent job in making up an entire language that makes fun of grief and death, and add to this that certain comedians make big money and get big laughs on this subject and the conclusion can easily be make that laughing at death makes people feel safe, secure, comfortable, and also totally deluded.  There is another story to be told to be sure.

I have found that in my seminars I can use humor, but only if it is directed at myself, and certainly if the humor concerning death and grief is not too honest, not too direct, not to disturbing.  Interestingly during breaks at my seminars all kinds of people, hospice workers, clergy, funeral directors, cemeterians, come up to me and tell me humorous jokes and stories about grief and death, but oh my if they are told in public, or shared with the group, most everybody seems to freeze.

So humor abounds, jokes are told, people laugh, but concerning death and grief only under certain circumstances which almost always mirror the basic concept of being afraid of death.  This environment needs an atmosphere of being safe, secure, and comfortable – and don’t share the death jokes you heard during a break in a seminar.  There is a dynamic which makes something funny between two people during a break time, but totally off limits being shared with a group.  Interesting? 

I once saw a Catholic priest give a seminar to the Association for Death Education and Counseling in Portland, Oregon on humor and death.   He had collected an array of cartoons from a variety of sources and all of them were irreverent, candid, blunt, raw but terribly honest.  The audience at first was stunned into absolute silence, and I thought to myself “How are you going to get out of this one?”  However by the end of the seminar most people were rolling in the aisles while at the same time trying not to laugh too much in front of their colleagues.  Such is the utter power of laughing at death, and this was a group of death professionals, the cream of the crop so to speak.  I remember when the priest finished and took a break the laughter had vanished and people were judging the rashness, the boldness, the offensiveness of the priest.  Interesting?  He was not invited back again, even though or in spite of the fact that people were laughing till their sides hurt.

It fascinated me to watch those dynamics – laughing one minute, utterly judgemental the next.  Interesting dynamics. 

Remember Johnny Carson?  Anytime he ran into trouble in his opening monologue he would tell a joke about the world famous Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California.  Johnny Carson, I thought anyway, gave the impressive Forest Lawn company free publicity on national television.

The queen of the muckrakers, none other than good old Jessica Mitford, went to the bank laughing at death and funerals.  Hell she made almost an entire career on using humor and death and she perfected her anti-funeral craft with great skill and delivery. 

My old professor the Rev. Dr. Edgar N. Jackson, who seriously took Jessica to task wrote in a book review in October of 1963 of Mitford’s book “The American Way of Death,” that “If this fear of death motivates attacks upon funeral directors, Jessica Mitford must be frightened to death of death.”  No one ever said it better.

The great Union Theological professor and world acclaimed philosopher Paul Tillich said that death-anxiety is the basic human emotion.  It underlies all our other fears and apprehensions about the process of living. 

I have concluded that when dealing with such an all pervading and unfocused emotion such as grief and fear, it is not surprising that one’s anxiety leads one to forms of acting out that may seem incongruous, immature, and utterly fearful simply because we are operating in the area of non-rational.  The death rate, rationally and bluntly speaking, is 100% but just try to get a group of people or one individual to rationally respond to this fact of life.  Some get it, many do not, and the number of those who do not get this rational truth I want to suggest is growing day by day.

People who are fearful and anxious usually have a strong need to reduce the bothersome subject in size to something that can easily handled, or they think can be easily handled.  This works sometimes, but usually not with larger than life subjects.

One hundred years ago sex was taboo.  People were excellent at reducing the formation of babies to small size bites which they thought made the touchy subject of how every human being on the planet got here more manageable.  Hence the small easy story of the “stork,” or the small easy story of the “cabbage patch.”  Storks and cabbage patches were much preferred by many people over the honest and rational penis, ejaculation, vagina, sperm, egg – much preferred – and look what happened.  Unwanted, untimely, unexpected pregnancies abounded in this country.  Sex was too large a life subject to be relegated to the stork or the cabbage patch.  Same is true about death and grief the defy reduction, can’t be done successfully.

I believe that each person on this earth is in reality in a fight for life.  Though conditions concerning this fight differ greatly, none the less the fight continues and part of this battle is the balance between the tensions created by confronting the larger than life experience such as birth and death, and the necessary humor that we use to embrace these serious sobering issues and not become so overwhelmed by them that we are paralyzed.  So at times and at certain places humor has its place.

My son fights in his life his own serious, sobering life issues which have taken time, love, more love and more time.  However as serious as his challenges are, the other night he told a story about one of his roommates in the place that is trying to help him and the story involved this chap using crack cocaine.  Trust me folks, I have never ever thought cocaine was a humorous subject, but by the time my son was finished telling this ridiculous story I was laughing my ass off.

It is not unusual then, based on the following analysis, that the more serious the human problem, the more likely it is to become a subject for humor.  This I believe is the embryo of undertaker jokes.  They hurt, they sting, and yes they are horribly boorish but I believe they stem from something much deeper, much more profound than a knock knock joke.

The other side of humor, while it can be caustic and rude, is that it also can be pure mental health.  I had a professor in Boston once say that a good belly laugh was worth ten valium.  I believe the good professor was correct.

Humor reduces stress, and this is clearly evident on funerals.   I remember once a woman came running into the narthex of the church.  The place was packed, and she saw me and came running over and in a loud voice said, “Do you have a car for the ball bearings?”  I had no earthly idea what she was talking about.  I asked her to repeat her question.  She yelled in a loud excited voice “My son is one of the ball bearings, do you have a car to take him to the cemetery?”  OK now I got it.  Pall Bearers were today on this particular funeral transformed into Ball Bearings.  Everyone in hearing distance started to laugh, and finally the woman blurted out, “Oh my God, I mean the pall bearers car – good God what did I say?”

Here were people in grief, and out of the blue humor popped its head up, and people released their tension.  So yes, while death and grief are serious sobering larger than life experiences, grief and humor are too, and are related, and this relation can be and often is both useful and valid in expressing the natural human emotions which run high at such unique special times in life. 

Looking closely at community rituals and practices one realizes quickly that there are many ways that people try to manage their anxiety about death – and usually some form of humorous acting out is a silent yet powerful companion on such activities.  Let’s take Halloween for instance.

I used to love Halloween when I was a child.  I still love Halloween and relish staying home and handing out all the goodies to the goblins, witches, ninja warriors, and Star War people who ring my doorbell.  Great fun and I get a great laugh out of the vampires, ghosts, and monsters.

The theme and history of Halloween, no matter how well it is disguised, is unquestionably death.  Interestingly on Halloween parents can without even knowing it act out their death anxieties in a socially accepted manner.  They dress their children up in the symbols of death – skeleton suits, death masks, and ghostly dress.  They send their children out into the dark of night, fully aware of the hazards, but willing to take that calculated risk (on a temporary basis) so as to have it all over with and then the little ones return back to normal, safe, secure ground in only a few hours.  Once again the environment of risking death culminates hopefully in safe and secure ground, but still with the accompanying delusion present.  The delusion of course is the reality of death is ever present because on the sobering serious side of life we all know that some little ones every year and at every Halloween never make it home from their night of trick or treats, some are poisoned, some are kidnapped, and some are murdered.  Yet the risk is still taken, and to be sure it is a calculated risk on the parent’s part, for unquestionably they are skirting death.  It is a powerful silent symbolic death lesson whether people are aware of it consciously or not.

If a person were to stand back and take an rational, clear objective look at the strange and bizarre behaviors that takes place on Halloween night, one would have difficulty making sense of it – unless that person sensed its deeper meaning, which many people do sense to be sure.  All Soul’s Day after all is one of the major events in the Christian Church calendar.  I believe that when parents accept the events of Halloween and take the calculated risks involved they are probably in the end expressing their need for a symbolic, socially approved way of getting close, in possibly dealing with, albeit it temporarily their own particular form of death-anxiety. 

Possibly the intensity and frenzy with which Halloween is prepared for, commercialized, and socially approved may be a clue to the degree of death-anxiety that parents and the community feel in this culture.  Halloween has all the ingredients necessary for personal death awareness.  Death symbols, risk taking, and possibly hopefully a safe return to the nest.  It is like putting one’s big toe in the deep end of the pool and safely pulling it out again.  Yet once again even in this metaphor many people drown when they put their big toe in the deep end of the pool.

Certainly our behaviors at Halloween is lighthearted and humorous, but yet in the church calendar the holy drama of the death and resurrection of Jesus lacks humor, its function may well also be related in a big way to the emotional needs expressed in the sportive counterpart that occurs between Easter at one time, and the next Halloween.  The theme of both is precisely the same:  death.

While I personally do not like undertaker jokes (I have always been thin skinned and ultra sensitive, I can dish it out but can’t take it) I believe that when anybody confronts death honestly, whether it is in jest as in Halloween, or in all seriousness as in Easter, one may very well reduce the intense anxiety that surrounds the emotional hazard of personal death, personal grief, and personal dying.

I believe that in laughing we tend to reduce the magnitude of the perceived threat.  I suspect the worst approach is to not laugh at death or take death seriously – but instead to be indifferent to the subject.  That possibility, today a reality, frightens me.  Death illiterate, death indifferent people I believe can and do dangerous things, for if one is numb, desensitized, neutral, immune, and utterly indifferent to death, I believe one will be the same to life, and can possess the ability to mow down one's school chums without giving much concern or awareness to the literal, rational and honest permanency of their actions for onesself and others.  I have been told that cold blooded killers have a soulless look in their eyes.  I have a suspicion that it is better for young people to use humor with each other.

Grief and death are sobering subjects.  Sex is a sobering subject.  Financial security is a sobering subject.  Health care is a sobering subject.  These subjects are so sobering that if humor is not injected, if some light hearted comment is not made, the reverse of healing and help will certainly occur.  Fear will take over, and while this might be a great motivator, too much fear stops the human experience questing for personal peace and contentment in its tracks.

Jack Benny made fun about his being a miser and he was hilarious.  He made the obsession with financial security look ridiculous, while all the time watching him I knew that being serious about financial security was important.

George Burns made sport of being old and having sex.  He quipped once “Making love after you are 80 is like playing pool with a rope.”  Certainly intimacy is important, and it can be terribly sobering, but George Burns helped balance out the realities of aging with a quick joke, which I found really funny.   However I told this joke at a seminar and was never asked back.

When the humor eventually comes my way about my job, my work, the endless undertaker jokes, I try to understand, have a laugh, and not take it too seriously.  Not too long ago a man came up to me and said “Todd do you know the definition of self-control?”  I did not know the answer, so the man replied, “It is the undertaker trying to look sad at an $80,000.00 funeral!”  He laughed and laughed.  I patted him on the back and said “That is a good one.”

Emotionally, physically, spiritually and socially it is just possible that the humor people employ to face death and grief may be many times a useful and necessary device for reducing one’s own anxieties to small size bites which are palpable and manageable.  What I used to view as offensive and inappropriate is I believe, in context, quite valid and helpful.

Our state now requires that a deed must accompany the sale of a cemetery space.  I am looking for a copy of a deed that other cemeteries are using.  It does not matter what state, we are just looking to see how your deed is constructed.  Any help would greatly be appreciated and copies can be emailed to gardenmemorialpark@gmail.com 

Thank you,

Eric Nicholson

This week I received a message from a former student of mine who today is a success in our profession (no thanks to me having been his professor). His message caught my attention and once again I sat in my office asking myself questions about the state of the state of this great profession.

Here is the situation my former student encountered.  In one week two former casket company sales representatives and executives from two separate casket companies died and my former student received the call to serve both families.  I gleaned from his message that these two men had worked in the casket world for decades, and between the two many decades of work had taken place, and I was of the thinking that thousands of casket had been sold to funeral directors who in turn sold them to bereaved families.

Both casket representatives were immediately cremated.  No casket, no embalming, no flowers, and no nothing save for the incineration of the dead human remains, and an instruction from the descendents of both families concerning the disposition of the cremated remains.  There you have it in a nutshell, and this made me start thinking.

I have the firm conviction that it is anyone’s absolute right to choose what they want.  No question, I mean this is American – freedom reigns supreme.  The funeral profession and cemetery activities will not fold up because two former casket sales reps, or someone else for that matter, decided to do what anybody finally decides to do.  Options and alternatives are quite popular in our society today and the insightful funeral profession offers scads of options and alternative.  This decision concerning the two casket representatives is not the end of the world.  There are many more important issues confronting the human experience than what happened to two casket reps who sold caskets thousands of times.

However this situation just started my brain thinking again about the state of the state of this world of death that we all live in.  Here are some unanswered questions that I have, and as I always like to learn stuff about my profession, so I openly ask for anybody reading this to jump in the deep end of the pool and educate this old fat grumpy undertaker as to why these things continue to go on.   Remember these questions come from Todd, so don’t expect too much sophistication.

Here are some questions:

1.  Why would someone who has sold caskets for decades to hundreds of funeral directors upon their own death would not utilize a casket? 

2.  Why would a funeral director, who has conducted hundreds and in some cases thousands of funerals in their career, upon their own death not have a funeral?  I remember several times in my own limited career that some mighty prominent funeral directors died and nothing was done.  No ritual, no ceremony, nothing.  Why?  Does this not strike anyone else out there funeral land as something to question?  When a funeral director does not have a funeral for themselves what kind of a message is sent to the community that they have served faithfully for years?  Is it not an oxymoron, the funeral director might just not like funerals?

3.   Why it is less expensive to cremate a dead human body than to dig a grave usually? Crematories require thousands and thousands of dollars of equipment and facility investments, and cremation requires certifications, training and expensive on-going maintenance,  and has significant liability and is a time consuming procedure, and then the post cremation activities are involved and requires meticulous attention to detail, but yet to dig a hole in the ground with a mechanical digger, which takes much less time than to cremate, and if the grave, God forbid, is dug in the wrong place the error can be quickly corrected (an error in cremation cannot be corrected), and there seems to be no certification and formal training to dig a grave, so why does this cost more money than to cremate?, And if you die and want a burial on a week-end the cost can be ten times what a cremation costs to accomplish.   So here is my question: why is digging a grave so much more expensive than cremating a dead body?

4.   Why is it that embalming a dead human body is cheaper than digging a grave?  A dead human body was alive, lived life, and influenced others.  In some religions the human body is sacred.   Learning the art and science of embalming is not a snap.  It takes time, several years of college education, mentorship, internships, study, examinations (tons of them) skill, knowledge and expertise.  Embalming a dead human body appears to me to be ten times more intricate and requires ten times more skill and knowledge than it does to dig a hole in the ground, no matter how important that grave might be.  Why is this?

These are four questions that just baffle me, and I ask for and am extending the right arm of fellowship to any reader that can help me fill in the blanks concerning this stuff.  I am obviously missing something here, but then missing stuff happens to me all the time.

I am asking for insight, for education, for your thoughts out there in the funeral/cemetery world, and please don’t give a thought if your answers establish that the person (me) who generated these questions is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, many people have concluded that fact years ago.  Your thoughts, honest candid thoughts, are welcomed, and at my stage of life and career, well, folks, when you have been shot with seventeen arrows the eighteenth one does not hurt very much.  I hope to hear from many of you good folks.

TVB

The Washington Post has written stories on just about every aspect of the paralyzing snowstorms that have closed down many government offices and businesses, and today the funeral directors who stay on duty no matter what get their due. Finding a cemetery that can handle a burial is one of many challenges, but the story notes that Arlington Cemetery is plowed and handling services unless canceled by the family.

Read the full story at: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/11/AR2010021102134...

In the last several weeks the subject of mortuary education has again popped up.  One of the professional journals did a survey of the state of the state of mortuary education and the results were not favorable.

A few good folks weighed in with thoughts, (including myself) and there were some salient points made.

One of the points made was the issue of requiring a Bachelor’s level degree for entry into funeral service – no matter what the position.  I took that position, and believe in my heart of hearts that this is an important issue, even though in most places this dream appears to have become the impossible dream – but people do need to dream, and funeral professionals these days need to dream about the future and take those dreams very seriously.

First a quick word concerning what has become the impossible job of being an instructor/professor within the world of mortuary education.  I have spent a few years of my career fulfilling this type of job, and I can tell anyone reading this, teaching mortuary science whether it be in the arts or sciences or both is not an easy task.  In fact it has gotten progressively more challenging and just plain difficult over the years for one major reason – lack of time.

The curriculums of each of the testable subjects on the National Board exam that have to be taught in mortuary colleges has consistently increased year by year, decade by decade, American Board meeting by American Board meeting, and THAT I BELIEVE IS A GOOD THING.  Reformation and expansion of any professional curriculum is a good thing no matter the profession.

However within the mortuary science arena a major glitch exists.  While the information concerning each subject area has grown, the amount of time that is given to teach this additional academic information has not grown in tandem.  The result is that in 2010 professors of mortuary science are literally scrambling to get all the information stuffed into say a quarter, or a semester, but certainly stuffed into on average one calendar year.  This curriculum crunch translates into students taking packed quarters after quarters or semesters after semesters.  

For the good student, who would succeed under any academic conditions, this is not a problem.  However for the  low average or poor student way too often the results of the necessary curriculum packing results in less than successful performance and many times failure.  Let me state this: I believe that when mortuary science students do fail it is not always the fault of the mortuary science instructors or even the student; the “dump-truck” approach concerning the literal ton of information that must be taught in such a short time must be taken into account to be fair to everyone concerned.

I know firsthand when I was teaching I most times took a sigh of relief when the quarter was over and I was successful in getting taught all the required information which was necessary to insure that the students had gotten what they needed and gotten what they had paid for.  

Add to this was the glaring situation that the curriculum itself was not only crunched for time, but the curriculum as a result was lop-sided.  In other words there were subjects that had few if any questions on the National Board being given the same about of credit hour value as subjects that might have dozens of questions on the National Board.

Looking back it is amazing that the system works as well as it does, and my hat goes off to the mortuary science instructors, who are relegated to basically the same amount of actual mortuary arts and science teaching time that was used in 1930 but today add to this 1930 time hundreds more pages of require curriculum.

So what to do?  I want to suggest that the mortuary science curriculum in order today to be able to just breath, in order for the professors to take their time in teaching, in order for the average or poor student to improve, in order for long term learning (vs. stale memorization) to take place, in order to raise the professional standards of this great profession a serious, progressive, timely, long overdue movement of establishing as a minimum a Bachelor’s degree in funeral service needs to take root and be allowed to grow and flourish.

Minnesota did it, Ohio did it.  If those great states can do it the possibility and nay reality exists that every state can do it.  

The other benefit of requiring a Bachelor’s degree is that the curriculum can be given fresh life of academic freedom and philosophy that instead of the education being taught to pass an extremely important examination, the teaching could also take place in the classroom or internet that reflects the nobility of the concept of education just for the time honored sake of education – for human learning.  

Education for the sake of education, my oh my, how many times in my career had I wished that in say funeral service ethics for instance I might have spent another week on the philosophy of what the great thinkers of the western world had to say about the ethical care of the dead – and trust me my friends they most all had something to say, and what they said WAS NOT THE PHILOSOPHY OF IMMEDIATE DISPOSITION OF THE DEAD – FAR FROM IT.

However I was not able to accomplish that teaching ideal and hope, and is it not sad when a mortuary educator wants to teach more but does not have the literal time to do it because of ancient constraints?

Education for the sake of education, what a strong, liberating, forward thinking position for funeral service to adopt, for a profession is always gauged and ultimately evaluated by the educational requirements that must be attained in order for entry into such work.

When I was in Mortuary College I took a ton of chemistry, and I hated it, and I judged it as to its daily relevancy in daily funeral service/embalming work, and from that myopic position, chemistry just lost out.

However today I don’t look at my chemistry studies in mortuary college just based on its relevance to embalming – because if I did chemistry would again lose.  I am damned happy I took chemistry even though it drove me nuts.

Today I realize that I was educated in chemistry, not just for embalming, but for the quality of my life – for human learning.  I don’t use chemistry when I embalm, per se, but I use it every day of my life.  Little things, like this.  My father is an extremely bright person, but when he and I watch the Discovery Channel I most often can follow along when they are talking about chemistry.  This is NOT the case for my father however; in fact this bright man would not know the atomic chart from a pipe organ.  That, my friend, is a living example of education for the noble sake of education, no matter what, I have a understanding of chemistry, my father does not, and I learned that material in mortuary college, as well as a whole lot more stuff, but even then we were slowed by the issue of NO TIME.

Today’s mortuary science instructors need time, more time, and I believe that can only be accomplished when funeral service universally across this great country adopts, implements, and protects the minimum level academic requirement of a Bachelor’s degree.

Anyway that is one old undertaker’s opinion.  

TVB

I have been on many interesting and growth filled trips in my long and not totally uneventful career, but this last week end in Denver, Colorado has to be in the top five of these experiences.

My assignment on this trip was to do a couple of clergy seminars for various churches and one seminary.  I was looking forward to this Rocky Mountain trip because 38 years ago I lived 100 miles north of Denver in Cheyenne, Wyoming where I worked as a funeral director and unbelievably a Deputy County Coroner for the Wiederspahn Chapel of the Chimes. (Today owned by my good buddy Roger Radomsky and family).

Because Cheyenne was only 100 miles away, I-25 and Denver became a second home for anybody who worked at Wiederspahn’s.  All the remains we received or shipped out came in and out of Stapleton Airport in Denver, and all the trade embalming we needed done was taken care of by a wonderful old man named Floyd Stevens, who owned a leviathan mortuary building on East 17^th Street in Denver.  Floyd Stevens opened in 1932, and Floyd was still embalming in 1975 when he sold the firm to Crist’s.  I liked Mr. Stevens a great deal, all he wanted to do was to embalm – and he was damned good at what he did.

Colorado has had an interesting funeral service history.  First of all, the first mortuary college was opened in Denver by Dr. Auguste Renouard in 1874.  George Olinger founded the National Selected Morticians in Denver in 1917, and the Archdiocese of Denver opened up a mortuary on the grounds of Mount Olivet cemetery in the 1980’s (which created quite a fuss) and then of all things the Colorado State Legislature sunset the State Board which interestingly gave beautiful Colorado the distinction of being the only state in the Union that had neither a funeral director or embalmer’s license.  That also created quite a fuss.  

When I return to Denver it is like walking down my past history in funeral service.  I enjoy the trip and of course I always have to have the prime rib at the Brown Palace Hotel does not detract from my fun in the least.

Friday evening late the plane landed and my gracious clergy hosts picked me up, and off we went.  I was put up at the Marriott downtown, which is not too shabby.  The seminars, there were four of them, went fine as far as the evaluations went. Of course the standard response from the clergy was, as always, “Why didn’t we get this stuff in seminary?”  This is always the lamentable state of affairs with the clergy, but the seminary curriculum committees have been totally disinterested in any curriculum proposals I have sent in – but then of course my stuff is most often not that good or well thought out.

However something marvelous happened to me while I was in Denver.  This marvelous occurrence was very close to home and involved a longtime friend of mine by the name of George Malesich – he was a former student of mine at the ICCFA University in Memphis. 

Here is the inspiring story:

In April of last year, for a variety of reasons George Malesich and his buddy Donald Shirey, Jr. opened up a new funeral home, they are partners.  Both men had been employed by a high profile mortuary/cemetery company when they decided that it was time to venture forth into the risky world of independent entrepreneurship and open their own funeral home – from scratch.

New funeral home buildings had certainly been built in Denver, but existing funeral home companies had built them, and according to my memory a spanking new independent funeral home had not been opened in the metro area in decades.

I wanted to see George’s and Don’s place first hand.  So when there was a break in my work I caught a cab and out to a place called Arvada I ventured.

The cab dropped me off and George and Donald were there with big smiles.  I asked them what the building had been at one time and they announced proudly that it had been a former “Seven-11.”  The building is approximately 1,800 square feet, not big, but what they have done with 1,800 square feet is truly remarkable.  

When I looked around my thoughts went to the fact that most every funeral home in the country when they first started out began in humble surrounding, not cheap or distasteful, but just humble surroundings.  This little mortuary is tastefully humble.  It is truly a home like environment, and remember folks these chaps are just getting started and ALL beginning are difficult no matter what they are.

The second thought I had was the story of Boyd R. Braman in Omaha who managed a prestigious funeral home for many years and then out of the blue resigned his position and marched up 72^nd St. about 8 blocks from where he had worked and bought an abandoned fast food restaurant and at age 65 remodeled the facility and started a funeral home.  Today the Braman Mortuary Company is building their second facility.  What I remember most about Boyd Braman’s courageous decision at age 65 was that most all the other Omaha funeral directors thought he was out of his mind.  I remember that only a single funeral director across the river in Council Bluffs actually wished Boyd success – and they had been classmates in Mortuary College in the 1940’s.

The thought crossed my mind as to how the funeral community in Denver was responding to Donald and George.  I was to learn in a short period of time from George and Donald that not everybody in funeral service was smiling and hoping for good tidings, no it was even worse; many were not taking them seriously and some are having a good laugh – that is too bad. I don’t know if today I could in good conscience laugh at somebody who is actually doing what I wish I could or would have done in my own life.  I can’t laugh at people who are trying, I used to be able to do that, but not anymore

The Malesich & Shirey Funeral Home is a nice place, pure and simple.  They have watched their pennies and have set to work a quality service system whereby they can really and truly handle any type of situation or circumstance that is requested.  The preparation room is top quality, and the furnishings are appropriate and tasteful.

George and Donald have predictably discovered that not everybody in Denver is supportive and encouraging and in fact reports that George and Donald have received are much like Boyd Braman received when he opened up in Omaha, the sentiments and opinions of this new venture are not nice.  It appears some think George and Donald are nuts (history repeating itself again), and while I am no psychologist I can assure anybody reading this that George Malesich and Donald Shirey are not nuts ,they are funeral business pioneers in a place called Arvada, Colorado.  

There will always be naysayers.  There will always be people on the sidelines laughing at the risk takers, it just seems to be part of the human condition, and even Jesus was misunderstood amongst his own.

I believe that it takes guts to pursue this type of voyage.  Because certainly somewhere down the line their funeral ship will encounter rough waters, but nothing ventured, nothing gained as the old saying goes.  The test for these two chaps will be how well they navigate the rough waters.  

As I spoke with these two delightful men I got envious myself.  All I have done mostly in my career is speak and write, and that is an odd way to make a living is it not, with one’s pen and tongue?  I wish them luck, they have already done an impressive number of calls, and walking around downtown Arvada with them it just seemed that everybody in town knew them or of them and they all seemed damned happy to have their own funeral home in town.  All funeral service is ultimately local, is it not?   What a joy is was to see what these guys are trying to do.  Bravo, boys!

Click here to watch the hearings going on right now before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee. Paul Elvig of ICCFA is among those testifying. cam girls

I ordered and just finished reading the publications “Undertaken With Love: A Home Funeral Guide for Congregations and Communities,” written by a seemingly nice group of people – Donna Belk, Margalo Eden, Gere B. Fulton, Wendy Lynons, Joyce Mitchell, Holly Stevens. This manual was accidentally brought to my attention several weeks ago when I stumbled upon an article by self-appointed “funeral expert” Holly Stevens. (I had never heard of her in my life.)

Once again I am stumped at what these self-appointed funeral reformers are trying to accomplish. This do-it-yourself funeral manual, like all the rest, starts out with the funeral horror story, and usually it is one distressing incident that the funeral reformers band together around and create a mutual exaggerated mission that funeral directors need to be muzzled and funeral homes need to be—well, they ought not to make too much money, that’s for sure!

For over one half century the anti funeral reformers battle cries have always been the same, money, funeral directors are crooks and in reality you really don’t need a funeral director/embalmer.

The high expectations that their beloved Federal Trade Commission Rule would finally accomplish the moral self-appointed task of muzzling undertakers, and making sure the undertaker and his/her family did not make a living did not work, in fact the Funeral Rule accomplished just the opposite by driving the costs of a funeral higher and hence neutralizing the funeral reformers main goal.

Now what should we do, the anti-funeral people, licking their wounds and feeling sorry for themselves asked? If a federal rule backfired on us in a major way what should we do? So once again they regrouped (remember Nietzsche – a mutual object of hate is a powerful motivator for people to band together) and came up with a highly original idea: “Let’s teach people how to do their own funerals—the do-it-yourself funeral program.

Yes, the do-it yourself funeral program—it is fun and easy, and costs hardly anything and you don’t need that pesky undertaker running around.

To this end, the ever present Lisa Carlson (who is a terribly bright person) wrote the blockbuster book “Caring for Your Own Dead” in I believe 1987, published by Upper Access Publishers, in Hinesburg, Vermont.  Even the goddess of death Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross proclaimed in her quote on the cover of the book, “I love the idea.” What an endorsement!

Of course even with her endorsement we all knew even in the late 1980s that Dr. Kubler-Ross was not herself, and even my mentor, professor and friend Rev. Dr. Edgar N. Jackson, who knew and worked with Kubler-Ross told me straight out in a conversation during this period, “I worry about Elisabeth.” However an endorsement is an endorsement and it is still high risk behavior to say anything remotely uncomplimentary to Dr. Kubler-Ross, so I will leave that one alone.

I have all the editions of Carlson’s book in my library and I have to confess that the work she did of ferreting out all the myriad state laws concerning disposition of the dead is extremely impressive and I use her book as a quick reference tool constantly. Thank you, Lisa, job well done—better you waded through the swamp of state laws than I.

So there we are. For a little over twenty years the doing-it-yourself funeral idea has been roaming around looking for a home.

Now another attempt by the self-appointed funeral reformers has been made.

The manual I just finished reading is simply paper with the same old information that Ms. Carlson put together years ago with some nice additional art work, which I thought were excellent examples of modern art.

The table of contents is predictable. Titles like “At Life’s End,” “Then and Now,” “Finding the Law,” “With Our Own Hands,” “Setting Out Together,” and finally “Down This Path.” The manual ends with online resources. The titles basically reflect the contents of the chapters. For instance the one called “At Life’s End” covers the dos and don’ts when someone dies at home. The chapter “Finding the Law” is self-explanatory—in  other words the writers warn that the do-it-yourselfers should find out the law so no one gets in trouble with the sheriff and/or the state.

Peppered throughout the chapters are readings, verses, group and individual assignments which really reminded me of the lovely Quaker Meetings that I have attended in my life. Beautiful sentiments, kindness, love and gentleness abounding with open arms and open hands. I love that kind of sentimental prose and poetry and want to thank the writers for including such beautiful thoughts—Good Stuff.

Naturally a few of the contributors appear innocently to be self-proclaimed funeral historians and attempt to cover the segment of funeral service history, embalming, undertaking during the time period of the American Civil War. Trust me folks, these obviously really nice people have not got a clue concerning that particular period in funeral service history, not a clue.

The writers also strongly suggest that the do-it-yourself funeral disciples read the Funeral Rule of the Federal Trade Commission and understand it. Yeh, sure, my 85 year old mother in Iowa is going to study and understand the General Price List? Yeh, sure! Also these writers say the FTC rule does not apply to home funerals. Possibly they are right, possibly not—this issue has not really been tested, but I suspect if the do-it-yourself funeral movements gets a real foothold, the FTC will have something to say as they have something to say about everything, and they probably will not be saying “no regulations for you, do-it-yourself funeral people.”

Now to be fair, we all know that in only a few states is the involvement of the funeral home required. Of course the liberating fact of all this is that funeral homes and undertakers were involved with community deaths long before any laws were enacted, let alone enforced. Funeral service IS NOT dependent on laws, funeral service is dependent on relationship-building in communities.

Clearly the writers are people of convictions, and for the layperson reading this manual, the unfortunate danger lurks in the distinct possibility that these funeral reformist might just be mistakenly perceived by, say my 85 year old mother, as knowing what they are talking about. However, I have seen convictions, firmly held life-long convictions, simply evaporate in the face of a life crisis, such as the death of a significant person. If funeral directors deal with anything, it is crisis after crisis.

Here is an example of firmly held convictions vanishing in the midst of trauma which involved the services and presence of funeral directors. There was a time when funeral homes operated the emergency ambulance service, and here is the case study.

A man in Omaha was cutting a limb off a tree and he was sitting on the end of the limb that he was trying to cut off. In short order the branch broke and down he went and when he hit the ground he suffered a compound fracture to his left femur. A neighbor saw him fall and called the Omaha Police Department and called our funeral home for the ambulance. When we arrived this man was howling with pain.

A crowd had gathered and in the midst of this drama a woman came running out of the next house screaming that we should not touch him, nor help him, they did not need us, in fact she told us to go home. She explained that the man was a member of a religion that denied medical treatments under all conditions, and that all we needed to do was to assist this gentleman into his house—they would take it from there. She was clear that the funeral home ambulance was not needed.

Folks, this man’s femur was sticking out of his leg and the police and we were trying to move this man up his front steps, through his front door and lay him on his sofa.  He screamed bloody murder throughout the entire ordeal, and I was psychologically frazzled and started thinking that I ought to have become a fireman instead of a funeral home ambulance man.

My boss and I got back in the ambulance, and as we drove down the street my boss looked over at me and smiled and said, “You know Todd, don’t feel too bad, I will bet you by the time we get back to the funeral home this poor chap will have had a significant religious conversion.” I had no idea what he was talking about.

However when we pulled into the funeral home parking lot the secretary came running out saying that we were needed to return to this man’s house immediately and take him ASAP to the university hospital. The man with his femur sticking out of his body had converted from his firmly held conviction and decided he did need the services of the ambulance. So much for firm convictions in the light of drama and trauma. I never knew if the man lost his leg, but if the poor chap had held rock solid on his convictions, losing his leg would have been a real possibility.

Next: Good intentions aren’t enough when faced with a dead body

When I was in seminary we were required to do this assignment.  It was simple.  We walked to the Public Gardens in downtown Boston, and were asked by the professor to mark out some undisturbed piece of ground four feet square and then we were asked to examine very closely the variety of life which existed in such a small area of earth.  It was astonishing.  

There were many species of plants; evidence that mice had been roaming around; spiders, ants, and other small creatures abounded in just four feet square of earth.  Then the professor brought out a microscope and WOW what an incredible array of microorganisms all functioning in perfect association with the larger life forms which we had seen with our own eyes.

Then the professor gave each student a small garden spade and asked us to dig a small hole, small enough that the Boston Police Department would not notice, for digging in the Public Garden was illegal – and here we were seminary student’s breaking the law.  Oh well………

Just a few short inches into the earth it was literally amazing.  There were more insects, earthworms of various kinds, and a fresh array of bacteria right in the middle of downtown Boston.

I know that if we had not stopped we would have eventually reached bedrock and in the rock formations there would be hundreds of feet of dense fossil deposits laid down through millions of years representing the remains, the evidence of a myriad of dead species and an astronomical number of individuals who died.

The lesson that day was clear.  In that little square of ground in downtown Boston we witnessed an interdependent community of life in which birth and death were continuously taking place and in which extreme diverse life forms were sheltering and nourishing one another, constantly until death stopped the cycle.  The evidence of this stunning feat is well written in the rocks beneath the earth which tell the story of this process going back through millions upon millions of years.

Humankind is part of this ongoing community of nature, on a world scale subject to the same cycle of birth and death which governs all other creatures, and like them we are totally dependent on other life.  

It has been my observation that sometimes in our high rise apartments, living in the fast lane, our manicured suburbs, our obsession with youth and being carefree and endlessly happy, and our chromium plated institutions we tend to forget this.  I forget this.

Our need is not to conquer nature, the results of which attempts are frighteningly glaring at us as I write, but instead to live in harmony with it.  This does not mean rejecting technology, but it does mean adding deep thinking, developed philosophies concerning the meaning of life and also death.  Thinking just about life at the total exclusion of thinking about death simply does not work, because without thinking about death, death becomes something that is to be feared, and when we are fearful about something that is 100% guaranteed to happen – well, the results are not good.

Birth and death are as natural for us as for the myriad forms of life in that little square of ground in downtown Boston.  When we have learned to accept ourselves as part of that community of nature, then we can accept, explore and hopefully find meaning in death as part of the simple natural order of things.

Without thinking, pondering, meditating, praying about the particular subject of death, ours and others, we commonly behave as if we, and those we love, were going to live forever.  What a shameful attitude to possess. It is shameful because it is wrong, for all must die – and we cannot ever know when this will happen.

Throughout my entire career the subject of death has been taboo, and those of us who are called to minister in this world are viewed – well that is fodder for another blog when I am in a bad mood – and it seems utterly impossibly to get death education classes implemented in our educational systems – seminaries are not even interested.  This makes me sad, and this is really unfortunate for death is a normal and necessary part of life.  I am of the thinking that until our culture learns to face death honestly and accept it as part of growing up; we are not living at our best.

Anyway that’s one old undertaker’s opinion.  TVB

The first month at my first job in funeral service (I was very young), the firm I was associated with was summoned to a mansion to make the removal of an extremely wealthy person who was a member of one of the pioneer merchant families. In other words, he was "loaded!"

Everybody in the area knew he was a total recluse and basically was never seen anywhere, let alone at the great big department store his family owned downtown.  I had driven past this man’s mansion a thousand times and it was a gloomy “Withering Heights” looking thing which had a scary looking brick wall surrounding the property.  Every time we would pass the mansion, the same story would be told.  Whether the story was true I never found out, but it was one hell of a story.

The story goes that this old multimillionaire recluse had been a passenger on the “Titanic.”  As everybody knew, the “Titanic” sank with a terrible loss of life.  However the stunner about this old recluse and the “Titanic” was that this man was supposedly the man who had dressed up like a woman to escape the fate of the ship’s sinking – remember, women and children first.  The story that somebody had dressed up like a woman to get off the “Titanic” was common knowledge; I had seen it in the 1952 movie “Titanic” with Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck.  However, the local twist was that this recluse millionaire was the actual person who had acted in such a cowardly manner.

The story continued that this man returned home in total disgrace because he had easily been found out and quickly identified, and that his utter and complete shame was the reason for his total withdrawal from society.  It was one hell of a story, and gave us all the heeby jeeby’s when we would tell it.  Today I doubt that it is true, but it is still a good story.

This night the alleged “Titanic” recluse had died and the firm I was associated with was called in.  My boss told me to say nothing, absolutely nothing, just stand there looking stupid, which I was able to do perfectly without any error.

When we arrived at the mansion, we were instructed to go to the back door for privacy.  As we entered the mansion, the widow was sitting at the breakfast nook with a half empty bottle of vodka – it was 5 a.m. and she was popped.  I felt sorry for her until she opened her mouth.

The bereaved widow left nothing to the imagination.  She declared to all that her husband was worthless, the years with him had been wasted, that he was reprobate, rogue, a rascal, who ignored her and worse was a complete and worthless coward, and she wanted him out of the mansion – NOW!

Her instructions were clear.  Burn him up immediately.  Do nothing, say nothing, just burn him up.   Not even an obituary, although she did ask if cremation was absolutely the cheapest way to go.  What did she want to do with the cremated remains, you ask? Who cares? was her response. She told us to do what we wanted to with them.  I suspect they are still sitting in the mortuary, in the eternally, absolutely free cremation storage closet in the basement of the mortuary since 1966!

I did not feel so sorry for her when we left.  In fact I felt mighty happy to get out of that house with a deranged widow present who was polishing off a gallon of vodka and sitting extremely close to carving knives and other such sharp kitchen weapons.

Not one word was said on our trip back to the mortuary.

The millionaire was cremated.  End of story?  Well, not quite yet.

About two years later we received another call from the mansion.  There had been another death.  This time, however, we did not take the funeral coach, but instead the sedan. 

Once again my boss instructed me to play stupid and say nothing, and I am happy to report  that my skills at acting stupid had definitely improved over a two year span of time – by this time I was an expert at the art of stupidology.

Once again we went to the back door, and once again here was the wife of the deceased millionaire at the breakfast nook, again with a bottle of vodka, again chain smoking, again dressed in a skimpy nightgown – she was again popped.  The only difference, which was a big difference, was that this time she was out of her mind with grief.  She was weeping, sobbing, crying, bawling so much so she could not talk.  Finally she blurted out, “She is in there,” pointing to the mansion’s library.

“Ishy Pishy Poo Poo” had unfortunately passed away.  The death was not totally unexpected as the poodle was 300 years old, but still the death had come as a horrible shock to the nervous system of this poor woman.

Courageously my boss looked my way and instructed ME to pick the dead dog up and wrap her in a baby blanket and carry her gently out to the sedan.  I damned near burst out laughing – you want me to wrap up a dead dog with a what? but my boss was deadly serious – he was not laughing at all.  The removal was professionally made and off to the mortuary we went.  Not one word was said, but having grown up on a farm where animals were usually seen as just animals, my brain was spinning with thoughts that still to this day must be kept private.

“Ishy Pishy Poo Poo” was placed in a solid bronze child’s casket filled in the bottom with dried ice, and taken to the mansion to lie in state in the library surrounding by Ishy’s favorite toys, bones, rags, food and water bowls, winter apparel and of course surrounded on the book shelves by the likes of “Moby Dick”, “The Scarlett Letter,” “Plato’s Apology” and other classics in literature.

A grave was dug on the property and the local vault company lined the grave with concrete and brick.  In time an extremely nice monument was erected with Ishy’s vital statistics engraved, and the inscription “Love Is Eternal.”  I was not allowed to attend the funeral – it was a private affair.

The pet owner’s grief was real.  It was true.  It was authentic.

Having grown up around farms, I was struck for many years after this experience by the seemingly odd fact that this pet owner would expend more time, money and emotion on a dead dog than on her own dead husband.  However my confusion over such life matters simply reflected my innocence and naïveté concerning such matters.  I was unenlightened. I had not lived long enough.

I today watch the pet funeral area growing by leaps and bounds, and I say bravo.  Yes, it is probably sad that a woman will think more of memorializing her dog than her husband or vice versa, but who is to really judge this?  Is it really that sad?  I say no, it is not.

Given the state of affairs concerning just marriage – let’s see a 50%+ divorce rate for going on a half a century, then add to this everyday cheating, lying, and a myriad other reasons why human relationships fall apart . Contrast to this vulnerability the possibility of loyalty, unconditional positive regard, total commitment, fun, entertainment, cuddling, walking, playing with a pet. Why shouldn't the living give their dead pet who was more trustworthy, kind, and considerate than the dead human the experience of leave-taking and saying a formal goodbye?  I again say bravo.

In fact, children are instinctually programmed to have funerals for their dead pets, long before they have figured out the meaning and purpose of adult funerals.  Leave a child alone and don’t let adults fiddle with things and corrupt them, and sure enough, when their pet dies there will be some type of funeral.  Too bad children grow up and become adults concerning funerals.

I have watched, albeit from a distance, one of the large professional associations embrace pet funeralization and memorialization and I say go for it.

Given the fragility of human adult relationships these days, the innocence and security that many pet relationships offer creates bonds, lasting bonds, which are filled with wonderful memories.  Honestly I have encountered many adults that when I look back at my relationship with them the memories are – well let’s just say they are less than stellar – and some of these people have been dead for years – I have not forgotten.

However when I remember my little dog “Tinker Bell,” yes folks that was her name, “Tinker Bell” (anybody want to make something of this?), my memories of that little dog are of sitting with her on the banks of the Nishnabotana River in Iowa and pouring my soul out to her about people who had upset me or did not understand me – my goodness Tinker Bell was a marvelous listener.  In fact I have never encountered any human being who could match her in listening skills.  She seemed to understand that you cannot talk and listen at the same time.  She never said one word, just listened and licked my face – what great memories.

When my dog was put down (that’s an Iowa phrase) I was devastated, however my buddies and I gave her I believe four different impressive stately funerals in one day, and while I could not afford a solid bronze child’s casket, my buddies and I all worked on an orange crate and painted it a beautiful bronze color, lined it with a white sheet, put a transverse cut in the lid and held a public viewing in my barn. That was indeed “Tinker Bell’s” precious metal casket.

Grief is an emotion pure and simple.  Love is an emotion pure and simple.  They go hand in hand in life.  I have had people in my life profess love and take it back and I have done the same thing.  I have had people all my life say this and that – but it was only words, no action, and I have done the same thing.  Yes, here and there in my life noble human beings have emerged who are trustworthy, loyal, and kind and good listeners, and when that happens my life is indeed sweet.

It was my pet, however, who batted 1,000 in these “sweet” characteristics.  It was my dog who was my buddy and friend, companion and confidant.  It was my dog who when she died indeed deserved a funeral – she got one, and even to this day I feel peace of mind and a long standing feeling that I and my kid community did the right thing – she died in 1962.  I bet even Ishy’s mother would agree with me on this point, with or without the vodka.

It is a danger for human beings to distance themselves too far from our animal friends and compatriots – we inhabit the same globe – none of us can escape, we are on this planet together.  Bonds that create security, stability, comfort, loyalty, support, unconditional positive regard, I vote are good no matter where they come from.

My vote is for us to jump on the pet funeral and commemoration movement in a big way, it seems to possess all the ingredients necessary to really help people out. And in the end what more do we have to offer our communities, our friends, our family, and today, our pets?

I believe that funeralization and memorialization are wise and valuable for all life, no matter their technical genus or species.  Saying goodbye under any conditions just makes sense.

Anyway that’s one old undertaker’s opinion. TVB

Last week I spent a very nice day doing some training.  What a wonderful, professional group of individuals in the group – no grumpy, fussing complaining people – no, not one.  It was fun, energizing, focused, and above all dedicated to discussions and knowledge about one major subject – serving families better.  It was refreshing, and did this old undertaker’s soul a world of good.

During the time that I had to teach I posed a question that I always ask any group I am working with:  “What do you think is the greatest threat and challenge facing funeral service today?”  I believe it is a good question to ask because the question basically cuts to the chase of what I believe seminars should be all about and eliminates any potential “Pollyanna” stuff which one often encounters in what is called group thinking.  I mean, really, anybody can deal with the good times, when things are going really well, that takes little talent. But are these times in funeral service/cemetery work good times and going really well???????

Here are some of the responses I received to my question:  casket stores, WalMart (of course nobody liked WalMart), cremation increase, lost casket sales, government regulations, poor recruitment efforts, changed people, changed demographics, changed value systems, funeral director wannabes butting in, aggressive sales techniques, and general malaise and apathy concerning detailed funeral service.  One courageous funeral professional even remarked that they thought one of the major problems funeral service was experiencing was preachers who did not know how to preach and hence ruined all the good work of the funeral home!

It was a great discussion and all the responses were valid I, thought anyway, to one degree or another. 

Privately, and I eventually shared this thought with the group, I have been haunted by an issue which just does not get discussed or explored much in professional circles, the almost silent issue of dwindling time.  In other words the erosion of the time that people spend these days in funeral and cemetery activities, in rites rituals and ceremonies, in leave-taking, in saying goodbye, in saying their final farewells.  This dwindling of time haunts me, and I believe we are already experiencing the consequences and they are not favorable.

When I was 14, my grandfather died in Southwestern Iowa.  He was 90 something, we really never knew how old he actually was, because he was born in Holland and never had a birth certificate.  He did not even have a Social Security number, and could not read or write English.  He smoked 20 cigars a day and had seven children.  I adored him.

Upon his death we called the trusty old Blust Bros. to come out to the farm to get his body.  What a nice way to describe an undertaker – trusty and old.  Later that day my grandmother and a few select family members, me included, picked out the casket in the showroom in the back of the furniture store.  Everything came to $800.  My grandfather had kind of prearranged his funeral without the help of the Blust Bros. by putting ten $100 bills in an envelope which was labeled “Funeral.”

My grandmother just handed Henry Blust the entire envelope and said “Take out of that what you will need.”  Mr. Blust counted out eight $100 bills and handed the rest back to my grandmother.  What a transaction – win/win in 1964!  Until the day she died my grandmother thought that Henry Blust was a saint from heaven because she received a “refund” on her husband’s funeral – two hundred dollars!   Trusty old undertaker Mr. Henry Blust did not take all her money – now there is a refreshing idea.

The first day at the viewing our horribly dysfunctional family gathered in the large room at the Blust Bros.  Some of these people basically hated each other and had not talked to each other for years even though they only lived maybe seven miles apart.  The Van Becks weren’t and are not today the Waltons. No one ever said “Good night, Todd Boy” to me.

That first day, seeing my grandfather, we all cried for six hours.

The next day new people started showing up.  There were some tears for some, but basically we were all standing around getting all the most recent updates on the gossip concerning our family.  You know the drill – who is back drinking too much, who is cheating on their spouse, who got kicked out of high school, who just lost their driver’s license, who is still borrowing money. You know, gossip – our family seems to thrive on it.

The third day at the funeral home the place looked like we were having a party.  Food was everywhere, people were laughing, some still crying, but most were just talking about what a long and useful life my grandfather had lived, and it was concluded by everybody that this fact was a comfort and blessing.

On the fourth day we had a funeral for him at 2 p.m. (that is when Protestants went to heaven in our little community) and buried him in the Oak Hill Cemetery in Hancock, Iowa.  After the funeral we all returned to the basement of the church, where the church ladies as usual had prepared a funeral feast.  Trust me, folks, Iowa church ladies know how to put on a funeral feast – nothing better not even at the Tavern on the Green in New York City.

Here are a few more particulars. The casket was a cloth covered wood, and looked real nice.  The outer box at the cemetery was made of wood which was an old railroad shipping case.  There were some nice flowers.  The preacher did a nice job.  It was a nice funeral, a nice experience, and in three days our entire family had moved from crying and weeping to celebrating. BUT IT TOOK THREE DAYS – IT TOOK TIME.

From a funeral service perspective, here are some particulars. First off the Blust Bros. building was used for three full days. The lights were on, the air conditioners were running full blast, the taped music was playing, the register book was out, the public was showing up by the tens of hundreds, the Blust Bros. were on the floor of the funeral home and not sitting in a coffee lounge watching a soap opera or Bob Barker giving away a new car.  They had embalmed my grandfather and he looked great.  They had dressed him and he looked really spiffy.  They had NOT put on too much cosmetics.  The funeral coach was not new, but it was shiny and clean, and the Blust Bros. were dressed impeccably. 

Here is a private thought.  I pangs me to drive by a funeral home at night and see that the entire place is dark – nothing is happening – nobody is going in or out, and I know that inside the building there are five deceased persons.  That bothers me. 

Looking back at my grandfather’s funeral, it was full of meaning, it was full of memories, it was full of emotion, and it was full of life.  It was definitely worth $800.

BUT IT TOOK TIME.

I have told this experience to thousands of funeral and cemetery professionals across North America and when I tell this story everyone gets a peaceful smile and pensive look on their faces.  I ask them “Do you think this was a valuable experience?”  They all nod in the affirmative – yes, indeed.

Last week when I was doing my seminar I flew into my old hometown Cincinnati, “The Queen City.”  I miss Cincinnati terribly.  I was getting my rental car and looked at the morning issue of the local newspaper and started reading the obituaries.  Here is one that caught my attention and sent chills down my spine.  “Calling hours at the mortuary starting at 11:00 a.m.; funeral will begin at Noon.”

One hour!  One hour!  One hour!  Now in these times, add to this immediate cremation, immediate burials, private graveside services, private services, services at the convenience of family. Well, here is a question:  If we have gone from memorializing our dead for three days of time say 35 years ago, down to 3 – 5 hours of time today, what will be the time that people use for funerals in the year 2020?  Three days down to three hours!  Dwindling ...

Dwindling, dwindling, and dwindling!  Fewer people attending funerals, less time being spent memorializing our dead – dwindling.  

I personally believe that dwindling time is the greatest threat to the future of the funeral.  Without time or without our making the precious little time we have to serve a family absolutely the most meaningful that it can be I believe we will continue to see the natural erosion of the funeral experience.  Funerals need time they always have and always will.

To this end I believe that just simple awareness on our parts of this silent issue is tantamount to our improving this situation.  Our awareness of this silent issue of dwindling time will stimulate professionals in funeral service and cemetery work to adapt, and adopt the new and improved methods which are being promoted everyplace and everyday to serve families to the best of our abilities within the time constraints that modern life and times are imposing upon us.  

We can and do have an influence on the decisions that our families make.  

Anyway that is one old undertaker’s opinion. TVB

I do not like to bring up subjects that annoy people.  Well on second thought there are a few people I like to annoy, but not many.

With that said, and with profuse apologizes made right now before I really say anything, I have noticed that the press is amazed at the number of people who die at this particular time and have no funds per se for a funeral, cemetery plot, or even cremation.  Also the newspapers are reporting that this trend is not going to slow down anytime soon.  Once again I sit back and wonder the same old thought, why is it that the press just misses so much about the truths, the many truths, the glaring truths, about funeral service?  

For years I have known that the press does not “get it” about us and for a while I thought it was because they were just rash, rude and rough, but over the last several years I have developed a sneaky suspicion that they really do “get it” they just don’t want to report it, because “getting it” about funeral service almost always translates into the average Archie and Edith Bunker in America ending up being quite interested in our fascinating profession, and that translates into “good news” for us.  We know the press gives lip service to good news, but does not really like good news because good news does not create fear, and worse yet the readers and listeners of the news might just conclude that the world is not such a bad place, and that idea terrifies media people, who seem to thrive on doom and gloom. 

I can’t empirically prove this, but my old trusty Iowa farmer’s instinct tells me I am right on the mark about this issue.  Good news just does not sell – that is really a shame. 

So now the media is telling us another doom and gloom story that people are in a financial bind because the economy is in the bucket and of all things this is affecting funeral service.  Now there is an extremely insightful idea – something in life affecting funeral service – my, my they do know how to cut to the chase.  I would venture to think that the only people who are not in a financial bind concerning just about everything in life are those fat cats on some famous street in New York City whose mouths are watering right now in anticipation of some mighty obscene bonuses which I think you and I are paying for.  I also suspect that those fat cats are not in the least concerned about paying for a funeral when they need one.  In fact it might easily be predicted that these fat cats will never ever be concerned about death care costs, because I have noticed when a family pulls up in a Bentley their loved one usually goes out in a carboard box with no services whether the Bentley is paid for or not. 

In my career it is Archie and Edith Bunker, the salt of the earth, common folk who pull up to the funeral home in a Chevy whose loved one often times goes out in a wood or metal casket, with some services.  Thank God for the common folks, I believe they are the foundation, the rock, the anchor of our great profession – but exploration of that subject is being held for a future blog.  (I can’t still believe I am blogging!).

Anyway.

For many years I have been told, undercover of course, that people who select cremation are, well, cheap, they don’t care, they are strange.  Might I balance the scales here a tad?  For my entire career I have encountered clients, no matter what method of final disposition they select who are, well, cheap, they don’t care, they are strange (to me, anyway, and I have been mistaken many times in these judgments).

Sometime back I concluded that people choose cremation because it reflects in an almost unconscious way how they have lived their lives, long before they encountered any funeral director and/or cemeterian.  Long, long before.

I believe that in the instance of cremation the attraction –  again almost unconsciously these days – is because it mirrors how these good people, common ordinary people have eaten, driven, entertained themselves, cooked, washed, taken care of their autos, just lived daily life long before they were involved with our profession. In other words they walk in the front door with already set lifestyles, attitudes, values and convictions concerning the disposal of the dead, and unfortunately they might well have formed these pretty solid ideas without any input from any person from our profession. Now that is too bad.

Seems to me that most people make medical decisions in consultation with a physician, dental decisions in consultation with a dentist, financial decisions with a banker, educational decisions with a teacher, but too often, way too often, rock solid decisions are made concerning death services or the lack of them without any consultation with the funeral director.  To be sure consultations with funeral directors happen every day but possibly not on the scale to which is might or should.  Too bad so many people have such solid opinions and arrive at such convictions concerning anything to do with death and fail to converse or communicate with the funeral director.  We have some dandy valuable information – anyway I believe we do.

In fact I had a woman tell me once, very innocently that she spent more time picking out her hair dresser than she did the funeral director when her husband died, and her experience with this 11^th hour funeral director was not good.  When I suggested to her that it was her responsibility to select a reputable funeral director to insure she didn’t end up with what she encountered with the “last minute” guy she got grumpy with me. 

So right now, people, good common ordinary people, have become used to a way of daily life which is quick, painless, easy, instant, and perceived as inexpensive - this latter point is all the more critical these days.  Put all those ingredients together and when people walk into the funeral home it might well be way too much to expect on our parts to ask them to “slow down” and smell the roses, and experience something which we know is valuable but they have not developed those insights which are common knowledge to you and I.

For years we have known in funeral service that people want instantaneous gratification.  Now add a terribly shaky economy to this mix, and the implications for funeral service are something to monitor and examine carefully.

When I was a child in Iowa if I ordered a hamburger, French fries, and a soda it took on average about half an hour for my food to show up, and guess what?  We all waited, never complained, had no high expectations, we just sat there waiting for the food – of course that was in 1956.

My father would take our car to the service station to get the oil changed and we had to leave the bloody vehicle all day long and three service attendants worked on the project throughout the entire day – of course that was in 1962.

Let’s do an internal check.  How many of us would wait for a NUMBER FOUR at Burger King for say half hour?  How many of us would leave our auto at Jiffy Lube for an entire day just to get the oil changed?  I am predicting - - - - NOT MANY!

Now add to this social condition the ingrained social mores and folkways about life being fast and easy and add a horrible economy. Why would anybody these days wonder why the number of people who die and have no money would be increasing? 

The average layperson might be interested in such news, but for you and I this reality is yet another truth concerning people caring, or not caring, for their dead in a consistent manner with how they live their life day to day.  This is a powerful insight which calls out for analysis and action, for if anybody in our profession wants to get a true, accurate, real insight as to where funeral service has been and where it is going, all anybody in any funeral home or cemetery needs to do is to get out of the office and walk downtown and witness daily life, soak it in.  This is a real type of focus group as sure in its accuracy as if a funeral company paid a professional focus group leader $100,000 to come to town and tell them what’s going on.

Downtown, neighborhoods, the local café, the church suppers, and scouting activities, the Friday night ballgames all are living indicators, all are truth serums as to what is going on in your communities, which will ultimately translate into what is going on in funeral service, cemetery work, cremation, burials, and yes, even indigent/penniless deaths.  I find it disconcerting that the poor indigents or just people who can never pay for a funeral through no fault of their own never before made the newspapers until now when increasingly their deaths create (according to the reports) an economic hardship on the community.  Can the indigent and poor of this country when they die possibly be a problem?  The dead being a problem, what are we coming to?  I think a much better question would be to ask is why is it that these people dying without any money, did they once have money, and if they did what happened to the money, which appears today to be translating into a pauper’s grave or immediate cremation?  What happened to these people? 

Yes people are going to care for their dead in a consistent manner with how they live their lives, and if now they have no money – well my friends in funeral service, what are the alternatives? 

Do you think any of the bonus people, the very wealthy, would, because of this terrible economic situation kindly make a large contribution to the “Worthy Poor Funeral Fund?”  I doubt this very much, and as has been the case before in funeral service history, the responsibility of caring for the dead in good and bad times falls to the local funeral director/cemeterian.

I am of the opinion that these poor economic times will see funeral history repeat itself so in the end the compassionate, caring and concerned service to humanity regarding basic care of the dead, regardless of monetary wealth, regardless of station in life, regardless of unavoidable changes in life circumstances and fortunes, will end up on the front door step of the local, hometown funeral director, as it always has in the past.  Thank heavens many funeral homes still have good old-fashioned front porches on them – the front porch has always been a symbol of safety and comfort which are mighty important mental health assets in turbulent times like these.

A great American funeral director - I mean folks this gentleman was one of the best in our profession - once passed along two pieces of funeral service philosophy, not advice but philosophy, to me.  First he said that the word “No” should not be in any funeral director's vocabulary, and second he said, “If it is mentionable by the family it ought to me manageable by the funeral home.” 

This great American funeral director was named Alfred Bickford Marsh and I worked for him while I was a student in Mortuary College in Boston.  No matter who walked through the front door Mr. Marsh embraced them, exercised unconditional positive regard, and became a legend in funeral service.  What an honor it was to work with him.

My friends, Al lived his philosophy with a consistency that most men never attain in life.  He had the ability to gauge his community, he accepted always without question any call, he served "the least of these," and he drove a 1964 Plymouth Fury which seemed to always be in the shop.  The stellar human beings who have been attracted to funeral service make one proud.

Times are not good right now, and there are good people who are living in a consistent and required “new economic” manner by having to watch pennies, to tighten up the belt and yes to spend money on life essentials and in the end possibly die without funds. 

This is happening right now, but as mentioned before, consultation with a funeral professional is ALWAYS a good idea.  Since funerals and death activities are important aspects of living life, given the current situation might it not be wise that funeral homes/cemeteries rekindle, rejuvenate, rebirth the advance planning programs, and get out into the communities and tell our important story? Not to make a sale, but to help a friend make wise and careful and informed decisions and help them make the future not such a scary place.

Anyway that’s one old undertaker’s opinion.    TVB

I just finished reading a short news clip concerning burying the dead with respect and dignity.  I read nothing new in this short article save for the fact that the author was a clergyperson associated with the Unitarian-Universalist Church.  Having been a Unitarian myself for years I found it interesting that a clergy of this particular denomination would even give the issue of treating the dead with respect and dignity a glance, let alone compose a short epistle on the subject.  Bravo – I personally thought it a breakthrough of sorts to have a leader in an extremely liberal religious movement, where many of the Memorial Societies in the country are located and who historically have promoted cremation and memorial services, to take up the torch that the dead deserve respect and dignity.  This clergyperson focused her outline on an examination of the seven corporal acts of mercy, the seventh being “burial of the dead.”

It would be a miracle if this clergyperson’s thoughts took hold in the mainstream, but hope springs eternal and concerning the care of the dead I have discovered, at times much to my chagrin and at times much to my own humor, that almost anything goes these day.  In fact I had a conversation with a buddy of mine yesterday conceiving the idea that what we could do next with cremated remains is load them up in empty shot gun shells, blast them into the sky, and gather the casings and get them bronzed and engrave the name of the deceased on the outside – and sell them.  I then discovered that once again my imagination is not that sharp, for a farmer in Iowa is already offering this type of service to his community – does death creativity and invention have any limits? 

Will Durant, the great Columbia University philosopher, once remarked that “religion is the last subject the intellectual tackles,” and so right was Mr. Durant.  If you want controversy just start talking religion and surely you will find the controversy you are looking for.  

However let’s tackle religion a bit concerning this haunting 7^th Corporal Act of Mercy – burial of the dead.  From the outset let me assure my associates and friends that I am not anti-cremation, and I recognize the foolishness of taking such a position in this period of death care history (but as any student of history knows the popularity of cremation will change over time).

With that disclaimer said let me state a few facts regarding the historical traditions of the Judeo-Christian tradition in regards to this 7^th Corporal Act of Mercy.  Historically the Christian church and the Jewish temple have basically been against cremation – it’s true.  Now of course this stance against has changed in a big way, but the history has not changed.

For years I have been told by not just a few people that funerals are “pagan.”  It is abundantly clear that those who pontificate such remarks have no clue as to the relationship of paganism and cremation.  It was the pagans, not the Jews or Christians who embraced cremation.  Throughout the history of Judaism and for most of Christian history cremation has been an extremely rare practice, and the early Christian believed firmly that cremation was not a wise decision, based on the following:

• Pagan cultures used cremation as a method to deny the reality of the Christian conception of a bodily resurrection and hence used the burning of a dead human being to mock the Christians belief in a bodily resurrection.  We need to remember that the dualism of body and soul is not a Christian concept, but it instead emerged in the Greek philosophies of Plato and Aristotle.  
• The Bible clearly teaches that the human body is the Temple of the Holy Spirit and cremation was viewed as an extremely destructive process as compared to earth burial.
• Jesus was not cremated.
• The early Christian equated fire with hell.
• Cremation caused practical problems even in the early period of Christianity in determining foul play and the cause of death.
• Cremation was formally prohibited by Constantine the Great, the first world leader to embrace Christianity.

In time the issue of cremation became so frustrating to the Roman Catholic Church that Pope Leo the XIII issued Canon Law #1203 which reads:  “The bodies of the faithful must be buried; cremation is forbidden.”  Then #1203 goes on to prohibit all Roman Catholics from joining memorial and/or cremation societies whose purpose according to the church is to deny the bodily resurrection.

On May 8, 1963, Pope Paul VI removed Canon Law #1203, and recently I was informed of the cremation of a Monsignor in the Roman Catholic Church.  Things have indeed changed.

However this history, while possibly interesting to some, does not address the 7^th Corporal Act of Mercy which was not removed by any council of the church; the concept is alive, but maybe not well.  “Burial of the Dead” continues to impact our culture and life, and when one stops and seriously ponders this act of mercy some sobering thoughts come into mind.

First the 7^th Corporal Act of Mercy does not say “Cremation of the Dead.”  It clearly states “Burial of the Dead.”  I think however what this really is saying has not so much to do with the method of final disposition – I mean what you have in a grave over a long time, you have in a crematory chamber in a very short time.  The implications must be of a deeper more thoughtful nature.

I think this 7^th Corporal Act of Mercy is a clear call to those of us who decided to devote our lives to the ethical care of the dead – regardless the method of disposition.  It falls, in a big way, to every funeral profession, embalmer, cemeterian, everybody involved with our great profession, to think out, practice, and instill the ethic of Reverence for the Dead in the minds, hearts, and nay souls of everybody involved with this terribly important work.

To be sure the family unit is fractured, and sometimes the very next of kin are not in the least concerned about what happens to Dad’s body – but that does not automatically mean that you and I should abandon our level of care, abandon the 7^th Corporal Act of Mercy – just because we are standing in the shadows of a disunited, disgruntled, disharmonious family unit.  No our work, our mission, our calling supersedes the agenda of any wacky family.

I have only to alert my associates and friends to the horrors of necrophilia, to the atrocities of the German concentration camps where millions of dead people were treated in a most repulsive manner, to the anguish that a family and community feels when a dead body cannot be found, to prove that someone has to be charged with the responsibility of maintaining the 7^th Corporal Act of Mercy, and my dear friends that charge falls to you and me.  This is a good profession to be involved with.

However one last question lingers in my mind and I will simply poise the question without any attempts at answers or analysis.  The Christian perspective is of a true bodily resurrection; the scripture writers do not separate the body and the soul as the Greeks did.  No one talks much about this, and the last time I taught this stuff in a Sunday School class, people who had chosen cremation for others and also themselves got mighty defensive and did not much like the historical background.

Still, whether it is popular, or even in our contemporary culture, rational, if the bodily resurrection is accurate, if the ancient teaching is true,  then the question can easily be raised: What is going to happen to all the hundreds of thousands of people who have been cremated?  I have found very few people interested in exploring this with me. Anybody in blog land have a thought or two?  I would be mighty interested.

Anyway that’s one old undertaker’s opinion.

 TVB

Last week my phone went off the hook.  One call after another and the conversation was almost verbatim on each and every call.  Then the emails started and I finally had to log onto the internet and read the story about a man being arrested in Texas, charged with abuse of a corpse. That was the reason for the calls.  Basically the allegations reported this week on television and the internet go something like this:  Photos were taken which indicated this individual had crossed the line concerning physical contact, possibly intimate contact, with a corpse.  Added to the allegations is that in his quest to contact a former friend via the internet, he inadvertently posted these corpse photos on the internet and the friend turned him in to the police, who took action.

My editor and good buddy Susan Loving, who is outstanding at her job, sends me news items now and then, which I greatly appreciate. The other day she forwarded me a news piece called “Weak Economy Sparks Rebirth of Funeral Sciences." I have to admit that when I finished reading the article I was not particularly impressed however I did make notations to myself for later reference, and filed it away in my gigantic file label “Untruths About Funeral Service.” Well “later reference” time is today.

It appears that the idea that funeral service is “recession proof” has taken on a life of its own. After a lifetime in funeral service I personally have never once seen any hard data to support such a claim. Announcing to the world that funeral service is recession proof is not true. The people who look at funeral service as a highly secure line of work are not giving any attention to the glaring fact that yes, the death rate is 100%, but when a death occurs the family just might NOT call your funeral home. Here is a funeral truth – there is one hell of a bunch of funeral homes out in the world. Any funeral director who is seasoned knows very well the haunting, sickening, feeling when you pick up the newspaper and the other funeral homes in town each have two, three, ten, twenty funerals going on and I have not had a call in three weeks. The 100% death rate means absolutely nothing unless the family chooses to call YOU.

The other item which the article Susan sent to me referred to as additional proof that funeral service is recession proof is the frequently heard claim that no funeral homes went out of business during the Great Depression. Where do they get this stuff from?

Again without any hard data it is easy to make the claim that no funeral homes went under during the Great Depression because once again the death rate is 100% and families had to pay the funeral bill. The idea that families had to pay the funeral bill during the Great Depression is totally absurd. I worked for many years with several funeral directors who were extremely active in funeral service in the 1930’s and when I poised the question of how they survived all of them responded with this: “We gave away a lot of funerals."

The reason the funeral homes during the Great Depression survived was not because every family could pay, but because in order to keep their client base the typical funeral director was obliged to be understanding and give the funeral away and/or accept what little the family could afford to pay, or if the family agreed to set up payment plans. The recession proof fantasy of funeral service during the Great Depression in truth came down to the kindness and generosity of the funeral directors in this county.

To survive these funeral directors had to wait to buy the new hearse, had to send their children to public schools, had to eat a different diet, had to pinch pennies, had to go without new clothes, had live very frugally, as everyone else did in this country.

However many undertakers did close their doors during the Great Depression – and not because of a shaky economy but simply because many undertakers refused to leave their downtown undertaking parlors and relocate into one of the big mansions in town that the owners had lost because of the Great Depression. The “funeral home” as we know it today had its genesis during the Great Depression because home funerals were vanishing as families relocated to smaller homes apartments and the undertakers, the forward-thinking ones anyway, could buy these gigantic homes for a song and have the funeral home downstairs, and their family would live upstairs. Then when Charlie’s mother died the family would call their funeral director friend who had remodeled and refurbished the old mansion and say “Can we lay Mom out in your living room?” So the funeral home was actually the home of the funeral director and his family.

So yes, some undertakers did fold up in the Great Depression because they refused to change with the times. Now there is an interesting idea, changing with the times. To prove this point just look at how many funeral homes to this very day are located in old mansions, and then take a look at how many undertaking parlors are left on Main Street downtown.

Today many, many funeral directors still will open up their hearts and give a funeral away. This has nothing to do with a recession because in good times and bad the poor and disenfranchised have beenwith us constantly, and while Sears or Macy’s don’t have to deal with the poor, funeral directors are ethically obligated to serve regardless of economic trends. Yes to be sure there are today certain funeral companies whose have a very strict payment policies, and even some who if the bank will not help the family the funeral home suggests that the family go somewhere else. I understand all the rationale for such behaviors, but I also know that those types of strict policies will have consequences in the future.

I have a great friend who I admired and loved greatly in funeral service. He was very successful and one time I asked him “What one thing do you attribute your success to?” This Great American Funeral Director did not hesitate at all and said, “I have always taken care of the poor."

I went to a meeting the other evening concerning our profession.  It does not matter whether the group was composed of cemeterians or funeral directors, not in the least – or it should not matter, anyway, not these days with what is going on out in the death care world.

The basic meeting agenda which was printed on nice paper was a supposedly devoted to a discussion about the rapid changes in the demographics, the market, the buying habits of consumers, and the like.  I thought the agenda looked really good, and was anticipating learning some additional information concerning what the hell is going on out there.  I guess everyone attending had the same idea – at the beginning of the meeting anyway.

Present at the meeting were a few personalities whose histories preceded them as being touchy, moody, and at times argumentative and confrontational.  Out of thirty people this small group represented maybe three. 

I thought that time was of the essence because there was one invited speaker who really knows her stuff, and I was looking forward to listening to her presentation.  In her talk she made natural and predictable references to different groups which make up our profession.  I thought her remarks both well thought out and timely.  However in referring to different “groups” in the death care profession a fuse was ignited with some of the “touchy” group and off they went.

I have been to meetings, too many meetings over my career, where the results of the meeting ends up being a witch hunt aimed at portions of our profession who are not even at these meetings.  You know what I am talking about.

The “touchy” group began ranting and raving about ancient, and I mean ancient history, concerning the long time biases and simmering anger that certain groups have towards one another in the death care profession.  I heard absolutely nothing new; I had and have been listening to these types of divided diatribes for years, and in time several of the other attendees just started to roll their eye balls in disgust and frustration, because it was the same old stuff.  You know the routine – this group is errorless and clean and saintly, and this other group who is not in the room is foul, corrupt, egomaniacs, and control freaks. 

I drove home that night feeling a pit in the center of my stomach.  I thought “have we made such little progress at finding our unity within our diversity?”  Yes, there is the idea – finding unifying ground within the diversity of all the groups which today make up the death care profession.  Boundaries and territories seem clearly evident to be evaporating before our eyes – why?  Because the public is demanding that the boundaries and territories which have caused such acrimony and dislike in the past go away – now!

I remember when I read the first Wirthlin Study and saw the information which, in a nut shell, said that the American public really does not see any difference between a cemeterian and a funeral director.  I was dumbfounded I could not believe it, but then when the second Wirthin Study came out it said the same thing.

The fracturing of any professional group into splinter groups rarely, except for social reasons and purposes, works very well.  It doesn’t work well because of scant resources, repetition of services, and the like.  However it seems clear that within the death care profession there are splintering groups all over the place, and make no mistake, there are consequences for this division of the house.

I gave a major talk one time which got me into a whole lot of trouble.  I stood up in front of a group of death care professionals and said publically the radical thought that we need to unify, we need a type of a Moses figure who can bring the groups together into one strong organization which has great resources pertaining to people, money, talents, vision and action.

In this talk I asked this question “Who speaks for death care?”  Not who speaks for cemeteries, or funeral homes, or preneed programs, or grief counseling, or monuments, or ground maintenance, or insurance programs, or any of the traditional splinter groups, but who speaks for death care overall?

We all know that lawyers basically do not like each other – that is common knowledge, but you would never ever know it by the work and activities of the American Bar Association.  The lawyers might fight and scratch each other’s eyes out in the real world, but when they need to stand up together as a unified group there is one organization which represents them, and the American Bar Association does have power and resources. Can you even imagine how far the Federal Trade Commission would get if they tried to implement the “the Lawyers Rule” to regulate the lawyers in this country?  Enough said on that point.

What a mess the medical profession is in.  The problems of health care make our problems look like kindergarten stuff.  However the physicians of this country, while certainly in turmoil, are represented by the American Medical Association, and when the AMA says something even the President of the United States listens.  One organization, representing the myriad of levels of medical practice in this country, and it works exceptionally well.

Everybody knows that drinking too much milk or eating too much red meat is not good for you – everybody knows that – but according to the American Dairy Association, drinking milk is not only good for you it is sexy – “Got Milk?”  Do I even need to identify which association developed the national branding of “What’s for dinner?”  Red meat might not be good for you, but you would never know it from the work of the American Beef Association.

Here is a fantastic vision.  What could be the possibilities available to the entire death care profession if all the major organizations, while maintaining their own autonomy, just pooled enough money without regard for being in total absolute control of everything and took that impressive amount of cash and hired a posh Fifth Avenue advertising company in Manhattan and developed a national, country-wide advertising campaign around the themes that what the cemeteries, funeral homes, preneed programs, etc. do for the community is good and right and brings tremendous benefits to all communities, and run that commercial as many times as the American Dairy Association runs “Got Milk” and do not stop.  Make the ad part of the American popular culture.  Here is an idea – make death care work popular and interesting to the public.

Here is even a more crazy and nutty vision.  What would be the potentials, the possibilities, and opportunities, and the results for the future of this great line of work if the major organizations and associations amalgamated together?  Standing together as one voice representing the entire world of death care as does the AMA or the American Bar Association?  What might just be the results?   The closest thing I have seen in this direction is the open membership policy of the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association, but can more pioneering work at finding this unity in our diversity be done?  I say let the thing be pressed.

Driving home that evening I was sad.  We are still battling the same old ghosts of ancient days long gone by.  As I climbed into bed I thought that if I wrote this I would again get in trouble, I would certainly be offending somebody’s territory or boundary.  I thought is it even worth the effort of taking this position?  I know I would probably have a better chance at changing the financial structure of China than calling for unity within the diversity of the death care profession, but I think it is worth the risk, so here is the call.

I know we have come a long way at working for cooperation and common ground and the work continues, and I am going to ask the indulgence of the reader to balance what I am saying with what I experienced at that terribly disappointing meeting, but I have had this unification, amalgamation feeling and idea for a long time now, and thought it just might be worth making it public again.

Anyway that is one old undertaker’s opinion.

TVB

The FTC has postponed the enforcement of the new federal Red Flag Rule that requires businesses to implement a written program for the prevention and detection of identity theft to November 1. The original effective date was August 1. The ICCFA offers members a sample Red Flag compliance program at no charge. Contact General Counsel Bob Fells at rfells@iccfa.com to obtain a copy.

The FTC says it will educate businesses about whether they are covered by the rule during the next three months and what they need to do to comply. (See http://ftc.gov/opa/2009/07/redflag.shtm for a news release about their activities). Generally, if a business only accepts credit cards as a payment for goods and services, they are not covered. However, if a business accepts multiple installment payments or helps customers fill out a credit application they may come under the regulations. We encourage you to check the FTC Web site for FAQs in regard to the rule's coverage. (See http://ftc.gov/bcp/edu/microsites/redflagsrule/faqs.shtm#B).

Businesses can learn more about the rule and how to comply with it by reading Fighting Fraud with the Red Flags Rule: A How-To Guide for Business, at http://www.ftc.gov/redflagsrule. A sample compliance template for businesses that are at low risk for identity theft has been developed by the FTC and is available at http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/microsites/redflagsrule/RedFlags_forLowRiskBu....

The New York Times' latest story on Green-Wood Cemetery might be of interest to any cemetery interested in finding new grave spaces in old sections. 

But despite the title ("Where the bodies aren't buried"), the story is primarily a feature on Kestutis Demereckas, who has worked at Green-Wood for 17 years. It doesn't go into detail about how he determines precisely where there are available spaces, saying only that he uses cemetery maps, surveys and burial records.

The story notes that Green-Wood has created new spaces by the tried-and-true method of closing roads and paths, in some cases creating hundreds of new spaces in the 478-acre cemetery. Finding spaces that were never used in long-developed sections has yielded far fewer grave sites, but old cemeteries with little land left may find the search profitable.

www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/nyregion/19graves.html?emc=eta1

Please read this touching essay by Nicole Brodeur, a columnist for the Seattle Times, about her family scattering her mother's cremated remains. When Nicole wrote about her mother's death last year I emailed her and we corresponded for a little while about life, death and memories. I was glad to see this follow-up column. I posted it on my facebook page with the comment that while a lot of people in death care disapprove of scattering, and that I agree there should be a place to "visit" your loved one, that does not mean scattering can't be a meaningful, healing experience and form of disposition. Just a refreshing look at our profession from the point of view of those whom we serve.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nicolebrodeur/2009465947_brodeur14m.html

My new bride Georgia and I returned from a week honeymoon yesterday afternoon. We spent 8 great days traveling England from Kent up to Oxfordshire. Our headquarters were at the Charing Cross Hotel next to Trafalgar Square and we were in the thick of activities.

I have enjoyed a fruitful and long association with many funeral directors in England for many years, and each and every trip I have made over to the Merry Old country I am always struck by the solidification and stability of funeral service in that country. American funeral service seems adicted to the flavor of the week, but not so in England. I am not in any way suggesting that American funeral service ought to imitate English funeral service, but, my friends, there are some points of difference which make me ponder the endless race that American funeral service is caught up in, a race where it seems nobody really knows where the finish line is.

First off, English funeral service is a thousand times less complicated than it is in the US. The English simplicity in funeral service is glaringly seen by the type of facilities that are used. Most times the funeral establishment is just that-- it is not a home, or a mansion, or a palace, it is a store front establishment, like any other business might use, be it the clothier, pharmacy, pub, or even a motor company. Their simple but tasteful facilities certainly contribute to the very reasonable charges that the typical English family encounters.

We saw a typical English funeral in Oxford and as always I was mighty impressed. The funeral directors were dressed in mourning attire, black coats, white shirt, gray vest, black and gray stripped tie, and stripped pants, respendent with silk top hats. It looked exactly the way I used to dress for a Heafey funeral 40 years ago. Also, they do not block out the interior of their funeral coaches with drapes. The coffin (few caskets are used) is up high enough that the public can see it clearly and the flowers are placed on top of the funeral coach.

I have a good friend of mine in Glasgow, Scotland, whose funeral faciility is possibly 3,000 sq. feet, and out of this single corner building he manages to run over 800 funerals a year. Very impressive.

One of the points that seems to baffle American funeral directors is the fact that there is no certification or licensure required to be a funeral director or embalmer in England. They have impressive voluntary certifications which many people use, but the government makes no requirements. The first time I was exposed to this system, I was shocked and challenged the wisdom of no license. The English funeral director shot right back at me and brought to my attention the baffling array of requirements from state and state to become licensed, which he suggested was ridiculous, and then he capped off the English position with this stunner - just look at how much unlicensed work goes on in every state in America. He had made his point.

Lastly, the English might have simple, quaint facilities, visible funeral coaches, classy funeral attire, and really reasonable funeral charges, but what the excell at is memorial masonry, monuments. Every time I visit Westminster Abbey I remind myself that I might be in a church, but where I really am is a cemetery. The English have a extremely high cremation rate, but interestingly, almost everybody is embalmed and they have a full-service traditional funeral. Throughout England, memorials are seen everywhere, which speaks to me that this wonderful group of people remember and revere their dead.

The dead in England seem not to be the cause of complication after complication as is the trend today in America. Of course in the end, people will care for their dead in a consistent manner with how they live their lives, so in American it is extremely fast, quick, whereas in England the funeral is much slower, simple, and body-centered.

This trip made me homesick for the good old days in American funeral service. Say - when exactly did dead bodies become a problem for us? Just a question. TVB

Well, I suspect by now that everyone in funeral service has heard the sad news about the funeral museum (the Museum of Funeral Customs) in Illinois. I have been trying to keep up with the difficult events that are happening in the Illinois Funeral Directors Association because I know so many funeral directors in that great state. I first want to express my feelings of concern for what they are experiencing. There are very many really great funeral directors in Illinois.

It appears that one of the temporary casualtities of the association's turmoil has been the closing of their museum, although tours still can be arranged by appointment. Yes, to be sure, this is not good news. Any closing of anything which helps people understand better what funeral service is all about is always a sad thing, and this museum did help people better understand funeral service. I will hope that in time a new life will emerge for the museum of funeral customs.

However, right now, this whole issue of history and funeral service history in particular has really captured my thought processes. The care of the dead has a history which is basically as long as is the experience of life on earth. Everything, everywhere has died, and anything that is so connected with the life story has to have a tremendously rich history. And to be sure, funeral service has a rich history, which as far as I can see is only represented by a smattering of funeral home exhibits and the museum in Houston and the one in Springifield.

I have always loved history and am reminded of Winston Churchill's quote: "Study history, study history, study history." Why? Because anyone who does not know and understand history is basically vulnerable to repeat past mistakes and errors which in these days can easily be catastrophic.

I am concerned, however, that history is not looming high on the priority list, and I will give you an example. I looked at the seminar list for the upcoming ICCFA convention in Vegas next month and I was immediately struck as to what a white elephant I was in the programing. This is not a complaint, but just look at the list of seminars (http://www.iccfa.com/convention/sessions.htm). Almost without exception (the exception being my seminar) the topics are high tech, infomercials, electronic arrangements, funerals on the Web, etc. Really good information for anyone looking into the future of funeral/cemetery work.

Then here comes my seminar: "The Funeral and Assassination of Abraham Lincoln." The other seminars are looking 144 years into the future, and I am looking 144 years in the past. However, because of what has happened to the Illinois museum, I am concerned about preserving our funeral/cemetery past as much as I am concerned about looking into the future. Don't you think they ought to go hand in hand? Possibly what is why the wise people who planned out the convention choose to put this old undertaker on the program. Maybe our history was calling out to them also?

My friends in funeral and cemetery service, think about this with me for a moment: When I was a student in Boston, I walked past the J.S. Waterman & Sons Funeral Home on Commonwealth Avenue everyday. Waterman's opened in 1838, when, guess what, Martin Van Buren was president of the United States! What other business in Boston or any other city could claim that history, and Waterman's is still doing funerals.

Yes, my friends, there is a story to tell and a good one, so let's all keep our fingers crossed that somehow, some way, the good folks in Illinois can resurrect their museum.

Anyway, that is one old undertaker's opinion.
 

What is an Italian company doing in Brazil? In the case of funerary and memorialization product manufacturer Biondan, it's building a complex of schools (Pão de Vida) that gives children born in poverty the education and skills they need to create better lives for themselves and their families.

Some of the children at Pão de Vida

This transatlantic charity project came about as a result of company founders Arturo and Walter Biondan being introduced in 1993 to Sister Arminda Terraneo through a mutual friend. Sister Arminda has lived in Brazil since 1980 and been honored for her work there.

After hearing about the appalling living conditions in the shantytowns of Vila Cafeteira, the Biondan brothers traveled to Brazil to see for themselves. Impressed by Sister Arminda's attempts to help the people, the entire Biondan family decided to donate funds for a complex of schools called Pão de Vida (Bread of Life). Elizabetta Biondan raised additional funds with an appeal to others in the stone, marble and granite industries through AZ Marmi, the Italian trade magazine she runs.

Pão de Vida includes not only preschool, primary and secondary schools but also training to help students learn a trade or profession; an IT lab; a sewing lab, which produces school uniforms in addition to teaching a trade; and a hairdressing lab. Students receive meals and medical, dental and psychological care. Sister Arminda hopes to add certification programs to help graduates with employment.

Pão de Vida has 150 teachers and service staff and about 1,500 students. All funds are provided by the Biondan family, friends and business associates. For information on how to donate, go to Biondan's Web site (http://www.biondan.it/) and select "charity." For more information, e-mail luisa.terranneo@libero.it

Walter and Arturo Biondan visit Pão de Vida; the plans showing the buildings at the complex.

Walter and Arturo Biondan with some of the children; Elizabetta Biondan being welcomed to the town.

Some alumni success stories cited by Sister Arminda, who is still Pão de Vida's general manager:

Rafael, the fourth of 10 children with a single mother, was able to find a job at a methane gas station. After graduating, he was able to take a computer course, obtain a driving licence and is now able to support his entire family.

Merinha, the eldest daughter of five children with an elderly father and a mother unable to speak due a medical condition, completed her studies and succeeded in landing a career at the SADIA factory in Mato Grosso, the second  largest food company in Brazil. She applied for this position on the Internet, a common enough occurrence in North America but previously unheard of in the shantytowns of Vila Cafeteira.

Felipe, the eldest of three children, completed his studies and gained a place at a university. He started a gymnastics academy on entering university and is already planning to enlarge his business because of the high demand. Felipe plans to graduate from university in June 2009.

Jean, the son of a local driver for the police force, is proudly studying business management at university and is soon to graduate.

Ramon, the youngest of three children, lost his father while young. He is extremely intelligent and during military service attended a course that would enable him to make a career in the army. Top of his class, while waiting to be called up, he is studying accountancy at university.

The March 3 edition of Wireless is out. If you have not seen it or, like me, have your email software so messed up that you can't see any pictures or follow any links, here is the handy Web edition.

Some provocative news today ...

When I was a young lad growing up in Iowa I would walk right past the local funeral home on my way to and from school. The funeral home in our town was founded the same years as the town, and the building was really a most impressive “mansion,” if such a thing is possible in a small Iowa village, population 1,500.

On the front of the funeral home was a big black clock. For years the clock hung from the front porch of the funeral home until the new owner remodeled the building and enclosed the porch. In enclosing the porch, he made an alcove where the big black clock would sit for another 100 years. Everybody in town looked at that clock when they would pass the funeral home. People would set their watches by that big black clock. People would use it as a barometer as to whether they were running late or early. The clock was a landmark fixture in our town. That big black funeral home clock had a large face, large numerals and hands, and below in solid black letters it said BLUST BROS. (They were our trusted undertakers.)

The other day I received a phone call from a funeral director who asked me a terribly interesting question: “Todd, why do so many funeral homes have a clock on the front of their building or standing in their front lawn?” I was absolutely baffled, and because I do not like being baffled about anything concerning my beloved profession, I was now on the hunt. I had a mission, and I found out some interesting facts which I will share with you later, in part two.

As I pondered my own experiences, I realized just how many funeral homes I have seen over the years have had clocks on their properties. When I was working for Heafey & Heafey in Omaha, the Brewer-Korisko Mortuary in South Omaha had a clock over its portico which was a landmark for people who lived in South Omaha.

Even I had clocks on the two funeral homes I owned a lifetime ago in Iowa. I remember very well when I moved one of the clocks to what I thought was a more prominent location on the building, I received so many phone calls complaining and scolding me about moving that landmark that I ended up moving the clock back to where it had originally been—behind an evergreen bush. Logical or not, people do not like rapid change in a funeral home, and I learned that lesson the hard way.

I remember being in Seattle for a seminar and going by the old ER Butterworth & Sons building, now The Chapel bar and a law office. Sure enough, over the front corner of the building still stood that magnificent clock which had been Butterworth’s trademark for decades.

One of the most impressive funeral home clocks I have ever seen is on the building of the Fox Funeral Home in Forest Hills, New York, which is owned by my longtime friend Wayne Baxter. That clock is also a Forest Hills landmark and has graced the building since it was built.

Just finished watching a presentation by Robin Heppell on "How to Spy on Your Funeral Competitors."

Well worth the 18 minutes, and it's free!

A couple of my reactions:

• Rob extols the virtues of using Firefox over Internet Explorer. Yea! I couldn't agree more. Nor could my husband, as he so adamantly explained in this post.
• Rob repeatedly advises viewers to use the information he provides responsibly. I'll echo that.
• The Quarkbase.com thingy Rob shows us how to use is very, very cool. I looked up iccfa.com on it, and was pleased to find that our rankings are skyrocketing (which is probably due in large part to the fact that the iccfa.com site is new vs. our former icfa.org site). However, I was perplexed to find that our site language is listed as "Croatian." Weird.

Want to learn lots of cool stuff about your own site and your competitors'? Check out Rob's video at: http://www.funeralfuturist.com/how-to-spy-funeral-competitor/

We now have an "Industry Blogroll" posted in the sidebar at the Cafe and Blog Corner. I think it's a useful resource and encourage everyone to take a look at what is being done in this arena. It's the beginnings of a blogroll, anyway, because some google searching revealed that there are not a lot of industry-related blogs out there, at least that google is reporting in the top ten or so pages.

That's good news and bad news. It's bad news because industry members are missing an opportunity to tell their story in a medium that has become influential. The lapse is more troubling in its opportunity cost: There are more and more people reporting all sorts of personal stories on blogs and forums, and some of those stories may be defining this industry or even your company for people searching the Internet for information about death-related service providers. If you are not telling your story, someone else might be.

It's like if a disgruntled traveler writes a compelling tract about a bad experience at a Holiday Inn in a particular town, and if you are searching for information on accommodations guess which hotel you probably would steer clear of if there were no alternative information available?

Good news: The field is wide open, largely free of competition, ripe for harvest. If a consumer is looking for frank information from service providers in your area, chances are there are not too many.

The value of a blog is it offers an opportunity for you to part the corporate veil, to allow potential customers a view inside at the mindset of the people running your company. You can jettison the corporate-speak required by your marketing communications and talk about the true-to-life aspects which everyone knows are a part of every business: Such as, "we had a problem today and here's how we fixed it; boy we will never let that happen again" or "what happened today reminds me of why I am in this business."

The customers you will be serving in the future ... heck, this also applies 100 percent to the association business: The customers we will be serving in the future will be less and less influenced by our "official" proclamations about our companies. They are looking for credible references, such as other customers (tripadvisor is one of the best examples), but to the extent they will listen to us talk about ourselves, a blog is the best avenue open to most of us. (An active community forum might be even better, but that is tough to pull off and a topic for another day).

And again, there are not a lot of them out there. Start a blog for your cremation service, cemetery or funeral home, give it a title that includes your company name, funeral, cemetery or cremation services, and make your city/state info readily available in a subtitle, and update it regularly, and you will be near the top of search engine listings for your area. Tell about what your company is doing, what your personnel are doing, and - assuming you are truly committed to your work - talk about your life in relation to the business.

People are skeptical of our advertising messages. They are more interested in what we as people are doing in our jobs, and how that might relate to using our companies' services.

There is a void of credible information about most of the companies in our industry. A blog is an easy first step you can take to begin to fill it.

Soon I'll do a post on corporate blogs from other industries so you can see how it can work, as well as more about the mechanics of setting one up. In the meantime, if you are interested in the subject, feel free to contact me via the contact form with any questions you may have.

Argh! My newsletter is going out late again!

As cemetery and funeral professionals, how do you deal with failure of vendors to deliver when you need them to?

As the executive director of the Washington Cemetery & Funeral Association, now entering my 20th year in that position,one of my duties is to publish 10xyear a newsletter for my members. I work hard to get them out on time. When I encounter a glitch I go nuts.

My current problem is the vendor from whom I lease my printer. I won't name names here as the situation is ongoing. The issue is the vendor is failing to live up to its contract, i.e. to provide me with the supplies and service I need to produce all my printed materials. This leaves me with two options: go buy the supplies and pay for the service, which our association's limited budget wasn't prepared for, or be late with my newsletter.

I finally found a seller of the supplies I need with at least a price we can short-term afford but it's still a real sock in the gut for our budget.

I feel it's very important that I get mailings out to my members on time. I lose sleep over it when I don't. I'm now waiting for the supplies I need to print my December newsletter and it's January 5. This makes me see red. Probably my members don't check their calendars every month and say, ah-HA, Judy's newsletter is late again. But I don't want to risk even one person's displeasure (or ah-HA).

It's different when it's a family you are trying to serve and the casket or grave-marker or whatever doesn't show up on time. How do you handle it? Internally and externally, I mean?

This probably should be a network topic, and probably it will be, but I just wanted to vent.

Thanks for listening! Commentary welcome.

Judy Faaberg, DP, CCP