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We all knew it was just a matter of time.  The horrible diagnosis of brain cancer basically sealed Senator Edward Kennedy’s fate.  I for one was surprised that he survived as long as he did – but then he had access to two of the finest hospitals in the world in Boston.

There was a time in my career, in the good old Loewen days, when Loewen purchased and operated the Doane, Beal & Ames Funeral Home, which is a very well known funeral establishment on Cape Cod.  In August of 1990, one month after I started working for the Loewen Group, I was invited to do a series of seminars for the Doane, Beal & Ames properties located on the Cape.

I had been a student in Boston and was well versed with the territory of Cape Cod, and the Cape was and is breathtaking.  When I arrived at Logan I rented a car and south I went, then over the Sagamore Bridge which is the gateway to Cape Cod.  I could taste the lobster as I drove.  Good stuff!

As I watched Senator Kennedy’s funeral ceremonies my memories flew around in my head like it was yesterday.  And for Todd Van Beck, yesterday and my association with Doane, Beal & Ames made for a once in a lifetime experience.

The head of Doane, Beal & Ames was a man named Bob Studley, and he was one of the most admirable and kind hearted human beings I have ever encountered.  He was a large man, had a wonderful smile, a tremendous sense of humor and had basically been the Kennedy family funeral director since the Ambassador had died in 1969.  Also Bob Studley was a stellar embalmer.  I respected him greatly and he and I became good buddies.

I probably made two or three trips a year to the Cape to do projects for Bob and his staff.  His right hand men were Ed Blut and Allan Copithorne, and the entire staff was really top notch – it was always an anticipated event to travel to the Cape and work with DB&A.

I remember one clergy seminar I was giving and during the lunch hour Bob came over to me and said “Do you have a minute?”  “Sure” was the response.  Bob walked me out of the church where we were meeting and introduced me to a man named Tommy.  Tommy was driving a black Lincoln town car and Bob said “Get in and I will follow you.”  I had no idea where we were going.

Tommy and I were now alone in the town car and the conversation began.  Tommy explained that he had been and still was the private chauffeur for the Kennedys.  I asked him how long he had been employed by the family and he said 43 years!

Being somewhat of a history buff, I immediately began firing him questions.  Tommy was a complete gentleman and answered them with kindness and patience.  Eventually we arrived at the Kennedy compound gate.  There were two black cars in front of the gate, with big burly men wearing black sun glasses with wires coming out of their ears.  Tommy rolled the window down said the magic words and the gate was opened.

Bob Studley was right behind us and he knew the Secret Service men by name, so instant access for him too.  The two automobiles circled in front of the main Kennedy house, we got out and the housekeeper and Tommy walked us up the front steps.  I looked to my right and far down on the porch was a wheel chair with an old lady wrapped up in blankets sitting in the Cape Cod sun.  The housekeeper whispered to me “That’s Mrs. Kennedy, be quiet, we can’t disturb her.”  I could not believe it.  Here I was, the Iowa farm boy, now just 20 feet from Rose Kennedy who was at that time 102 years old.

Quiet we were and into the house we went.  The Kennedy home was far from opulent, in fact I would describe it as terribly simple.  Green walls, photographs everywhere, old furniture, creaky floors.  I sat on John F. Kennedy’s bed, stood by the grand piano, sat in the private theater which obviously had not been used for a generation, and basically was treated like an old friend from out of town.

We went to the back yard and saw John and Jackie Kennedy’s home, across the street was Robert’s home and down the way was Ted Kennedy’s home.  It was certainly a once in a lifetime experience and one that actually today people don’t believe me when I tell them about it, even though I have pictures to prove it.  I can understand their disbelief because I couldn’t believe it myself when it happened, and had Bob Studley not used his considerable influence by being the Kennedy families' funeral director there would have been no way TVB would have made it to the gate – let alone walk through the front door.

However, what I was thinking about as I watched that wonderful Roman Catholic Funeral Mass take place in that old historic church, which I used to walk and drive by as a student and later as an educator at the New England Institute,  that old church located in that interesting area of Beantown known as “Mission Hill,” as I watched the funeral ceremony my memory of my visit to the Kennedy compound focused ultimately not on the buildings, or of seeing Mrs. Kennedy, albeit at a distance, but instead on a religious conviction.

In my conversations with Tommy I ultimately asked the question, “Where you here when President Kennedy was assassinated?”  Tommy looked at me for a moment and replied that indeed he was on the property that fateful day.  Here is his story:

Mid morning on the 22nd a Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court who lived in Hyannisport phoned the compound and asked the secretary if anybody knew of any trouble in Dallas where the President was traveling.  The Justice said that he had just caught the tail end of a report on the radio which he thought said something about shots being fired at the President.  Tommy said that Mrs. Kennedy was out golfing, and the Ambassador, who was an invalid due to a severe stroke, was bedridden upstairs and was being tended to by a private nurse.

Tommy and the housekeeper turned on the television and radio and nothing was being broadcasted.  Then out of nowhere all the electricity went out.  Tommy said he went outside to check the electric connections and the sight that greeted him was ten Secret Service black sedans parked in the circle driveway.  Tommy was instructed to go back inside, and in short order one of the top Secret Service men came in and broke the news that the President had been shot in Dallas, and the reason they turned off all the electricity was they did not want the President’s invalid father to accidentally hear the news over television or radio.

In the meantime a contingency of Secret Service men went to get Mrs. Rose Kennedy from the golf course.

Tommy said that in about half an hour Mrs. Kennedy arrived home and went directly upstairs to tell her husband the horrible news.  She was in the bedroom for about fifteen minutes and people downstairs could hear the old man weeping.

Finally Mrs. Kennedy came downstairs.  While she was informing her husband of the shooting and now death more family members had arrived at the compound.

Mrs. Kennedy asked everyone to come into the dining room and, according to Tommy, who was present, this is what she said to her family:  “We have terrible trouble in Dallas.  Jack has been killed today.  Today Jack was called by our Lord to give an account of himself as we all will be asked to do someday. Today was Jack’s day.  We all will have to give our account to the Lord.  Our family has survived other losses and we will continue forward.  I am now leaving for Washington, and our family will be kept together – no matter what.”

Tommy had tears in his eyes when he told me this story and I am not ashamed to say that tears were rolling down my cheeks as well.

I watched the funeral Mass for Edward Kennedy, and watched closely the family and thought, Mrs. Kennedy’s religious conviction is alive and well in the Kennedy clan.  I thought of the continued, ceaseless round of tragedies that has befallen this uniquely American family, and as they took the Senator’s remains to Arlington my thoughts returned to Tommy and the fateful day I had skirted the Kennedy world and learned something about the power of a solid religious conviction and belief.

Having to give an account of yourself to the Lord, whether you are the President of the United States, a United States Senator or whoever.  That was Rose Kennedy’s approach to coping with the losses in her life.

Makes one stop and ponder the big questions of life – does it not?

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

F-word Number 2 is "flexibility." How many of you think it's important to be flexible in dealing with grieving families? How many of you are flexible when you're dealing with grieving families?

When you let your families rearrange and restructure and recustomize, you're showing them that you're being flexible.

Also, you may already do this, but if you don't, you should start using what I like to call "flexibility phrases."

Some of the most flexible phrases in funeral and cemetery service are:

"I'll try my best to do that."
"I'll look into that for you."
"I think that's a great idea."

Use flexibility phrases, because when we use these, we underpromise and we overdeliver. That's always better than overpromising and underdelivering. I use flexibility with my families and set them up to not be disappointed, and set me up to exceed their expectations.

A few months ago, I was making funeral arrangements for a middle-aged British widow. She told me she wanted both the limousine and the hearse to pick up her and the immediate family at their house before the funeral service. It's not part of our normal procedure to have the hearse go to the house, so I used a flexibility phrase and said, "I'll try my best to do that."

She says, "Splendid," then adds, "Now, Justin, of course we're going to need a walker."
I'm thinking she means one of those rolling aluminum walkers for her elderly parents, but she says no, that's not it.

She explains that it's English custom to have someone literally walk in front of the hearse and lead the deceased and mourners out of the driveway of the residence toward the church for the funeral service. Remember when Princess Diana passed away? The boys, Prince Henry and Prince William, walked in front of the hearse.

Again, that's not part of our normal procedure. So I used a flexibility phrase and said, "I'll try my best to do that."

When the day came, there I was, literally walking in front of the hearse, showing the entire neighborhood how flexible I can be.

So I guess the moral of this f-word, flexibility, is that if you truly are going to be flexible, you must not only talk the talk, you've also got to walk the walk.

This article compiled from an address presented by the author at the 2006 ICFA Annual Convention

How well do you know your clergy? How well do they know you? We need to build trust, share secrets. We just don't know one another; we don't know what one another does.

You don't know what your minister does. You don't know his schedule. You don't know how he works with families.

You also don't know what he's afraid of and I'll tell you what, ministers very often are afraid of death and dying issues. Not oil hove been trained in those issues. Oh, they took a little smathering of pastoral care, but they didn't talk about the other things that go on.

They also have difficulties with their own funerals. I've talked to ministers and their wives in the home about doing prearrangements, and ministers are in more denial than anyone else in the world about this.

Do they talk about preparing their families for death? No. They keep them out of the firey pit. But what they don't do is talk about the journey, the pilgrimage.

Ministers don't know what you do. Recently I was talking to a priest and he said, "You know what I wish the funeral homes had? I don't know if this could be done but maybe they could have a casket that's not as expensive as the other caskets but it would be there so the body could be brought into the church, we could celebrate the Mass, and then the individual could be cremated afterward."

I looked at him and thought, "My word, he's been in this town for four years. I know the funeral directors in my town have this available, and yet they have not shared this with him, so how could he share it with his families?"

The synergy between funeral directors and clergy is just waiting to be tapped. We have to be willing to listen to them, answer their questions. Bring them into your world; let them travel with you. Let them see where their people are taken care of.

This article compiled from an address presented by the author at the 2006 ICFA Annual Convention

What are the big events in our lives? Graduations. Weddings. Funerals. A lot of work goes on behind the scenes to produce big events. As funeral directors, we sometimes operate as project managers. We discover what the client wants, let them know how much everything costs, create a budget and do a cost analysis to make sure what they want will fit in the budget and coordinate the suppliers and vendors.

Whether it's a wedding or a funeral, we have a lot of information the family doesn't have. They may have bits and pieces, but they don't know how to pull it all together. They come to us for that. There are people who plan their own funerals, just as there are people who plan their own weddings, but in general, we are the paid professionals who know how to provide the products and services they want. We have the experience; we have the knowledge.

Even if you still do traditional funerals, there are non-traditional things you can add to them. These aren't things I created; I learned from other people and other companies.

Start relationship-building immediately

Everyone spends a lot of time making sure their employees know how to handle a first call, but what's important to us is what we do after we get that initial notification.

Our funeral home is still new in the market, so after we get the first call, we want to begin serving the family right away; we don't want to take a chance on losing that family to another funeral home. Someone in the family may say, ''I know this funeral home over here, I don't know them."

We assign a family service representative to the family and get into the home as soon as we can, whether the death occurred at night or during the day. We don't wait for the family to come to us, we don't say, "Be at the funeral home at 3 p.m."

We send the funeral director to the home to introduce himself or herself. We take a cooler filled with beverages and ice, a 64-cup stainless steel coffeemaker, coffee, sugar, cream, cups, an assortment of teas and 10 folding chairs.

At the home, we try to make a family assessment. We have what we call home concierge services to help the family out. They've had a death and now they're going to have visitors. Family and friends are going to be coming to the home, so we want to make sure the home looks good. Do they need lawn service? Housekeeping? We make those services available to the family.

We have a relationship with many of the hotels in our area. We find out how many family members may be coming from out of town and instead of them getting just a standard room, we try to upgrade them to a suite at the same charge, since they're going to be doing some visiting at the hotel.

Our philosophy on guest services is that anything the family wants or needs is our responsibility to make sure the family gets.

Transportation is a key service for us. All of our funeral packages include four hours of sedan service. They can use it to go to the grocery store, the doctor, the pharmacy, the cemetery—anywhere they want.

Get to know the family

Doing weddings, we talk to the brides, ask them what type of wedding they would like. Big or small? In Houston, San Antonio or the Caribbean? The key is to ask a lot of questions and listen to what people say.

If you ask people what type of funeral they want, some people will tell you. But I don't start funeral arrangements by saying, ''What kind of funeral service would you like? Do you want a chapel service or a church service?" I begin by going into their home and saying, “Tell me about Dad. What was important to him? Where did he go to school? What organizations did he belong to? Who were his friends?"

We had one gentleman who had been an avid jogger. His widow told us he had always jogged in the morning, so we recreated a final morning jog. The hearse with the casket inside met the joggers at 5 AM and accompanied the joggers for a two-mile run. That meant so much to the family; it was very meaningful to them.

At the funeral home, we create a living room setting for the family. When we're at the home, we get their framed pictures, photo albums, awards, blankets—whatever is special to the family. We remove all of our pictures from the wall and put up theirs. When the family and friends arrive, they find something familiar.

We have a children's center. We found that very few funeral homes in the Houston market had one, so we created a room with murals on the wall, video games, paints and toys. We want families to know that children are welcome at the funeral home. People can drop off their children at the center and then go to the chapel for services. We get children involved in the funeral by having them write a love letter to grandpa or a painting that can be placed in the casket or a memorial book.

We do video presentations. Every funeral home is presenting families with a memorial video tribute. If you aren't, you're really missing something. At graduations, people take videos. At weddings—do you know how much brides are spending for videos? In my market, $2,500 to $3,500. You can have an outside firm do it for you.

We give the videos to as many people as we can. The minimum number of videos we produce for any family is 12, because it's a commercial—our name appears on the video at the beginning or the end. We give it to them because it's a commercial. Do you know how many people go home and watch these things? These should be automatically included in your packages, as far as I'm concerned. It doesn't take a lot of pictures to do an effective one.

I also do something I call Theater Under the Stars. In the back of our funeral home near the parking lot, I have a 7½ by 10 foot screen where we show the memorial video at the end of the service, if we haven't shown it in the funeral home. We ask everybody to join us outside; we have blankets for the kids to lie on, a few chairs. In Houston, the weather's about 70 year round, so we don't have the weather constraints some of you do.

Family time and the "universal meal"

We do a private family visitation. This is very powerful. We find out how many people are in the immediate family—it may be five, 10 or 20. They've been running around getting ready for the funeral, trying to find clothes, going to the airport. So we have them come in an hour before the visitation for family time and what we call the universal meal.

First we take them into the living room and show them the memorial video, then to the chapel to have private time with their loved one, then to our memorial fellowship center. They sit down for a meal at a table set like it would be for a wedding, a round table with fine linen, candles and seasonal flowers. They enjoy a meal and talk about the good times, about Dad, about Mom.

Serve them a wonderful meal. It's priceless, and it's not very expensive. An outside catering firm handles it for us. Some of our families have requested beer and wine. We don't have the permits, but the catering company does.

Of the 65 families we served the first year, 90 percent wanted this. We haven't served a single family in the last four months that didn't want this. You can get food from the $5 to $7 range up to $50 to $60 a head. (If you've paid for a wedding lately, what did you pay for the reception dinner?) Introduce the product to them and families will spend what they want to spend.

Some studies tell you food service is important for funeral homes, some say it's not, but I think it's one of the most important values you can offer. If you're not serving food as part of your services, begin to do so.

During public visitations, we have a choice of beverages, including coffee. I like coffee; and my pet peeve is old coffee, so replace it every 30 minutes. We bake fresh cookies, an idea I got from going to time-share presentations. Let the smell of fresh-baked cookies go through your funeral homes and have someone walking around with an elegant tray offering people cookies—oatmeal, chocolate chip (that's number one).

At the reception, try different foods, offer people a variety. We set things up beautifully, use fine china. If you don't do anything else, have a nice dessert tray. Ninety percent of our families want this food, and they're paying for it. Make it pretty so they'll talk about it afterward.

If you don't have banquet facilities, find one near you and work out a deal.

One of the most important organizations for you to get to know is the National Association of Catering Executives. These are the event planners; become a member of NACE in your community.

More ideas to consider

• Use candles. Have candlelight prayers. There's a company at the convention that sells candles without wax (Candle Perfection) you can burn in your funeral home.

• Use your vehicles more. You have all of these expensive vehicles, get your name on them and use them. The majority of my customers have come from my bridal market, so we give them a choice. They may spend a lot of money and get something similar to what they had at the wedding.

• Offer choices for recessionals from the funeral home to the cemetery. People are willing to upgrade and do some special things, just as they are with brides. Brides pay for a limousine driver for five hours just to be driven from the church to the reception hall and after that to the hotel. They pay for five hours; they use it for 30 minutes. You have wonderful things available in all of your markets, such as buggies, carriages. Create a beautiful scene.

• Offer more locations. I've been in the business less than two years and I have one funeral home located in northeast Houston. I'm already a million dollars in debt; I can't afford to keep building funeral homes, so I figured out a different way to expand. Wedding chapels are usually available Monday through Thursday, because when do the weddings take place? Friday through Sunday. So during the week, you can rent beautiful churches, nice settings, for very little money, because they're just sitting empty.

• Upgrade your boutonnieres: Please, there are options other than carnations and roses. Take a look at what else your florist has, upgrade and make them fit with the season. It doesn't cost more than $1 per boutonniere. You'll be amazed at how many women will love this, and who's our market? The women are making the decisions.

• Investigate online funeral programs. You're going to be hearing more about this. Before Coretta Scott King's funeral, more than 500,000 programs were e-mailed to people, and by the end of the funeral, they estimated that more than 10 million people had gotten it. Put your funeral programs online and send it to your families.

• Offer a variety of music. Instead of an organ or piano player, we use a harpist, a string quartet. Because of the Latino market in our area, we also make mariachi bands available, and a lot of customers like this for the cemetery. How many of you know the bagpipers in your area and can call them right now to schedule them for a service this afternoon?

• Offer butterfly and dove releases at the cemetery. For the doves, we decorate the cages. And you know they aren't doves, they're homing pigeons. We release them at the cemetery and they fly back to the funeral home for us to use again. For butterfly releases, we have the children at the committal service open up the pouches and release them. If you win the hearts of the children, you win the parents. (How much money do parents spend on children's birthday parties?)

• Have a photographer available. Either have a staff photographer or a company you can outsource to. When families come together for a wedding or a funeral it's the only time you can take all these wonderful photos that are lifelong keepsakes. Offer a photographer for the reception and the committal service.

Funerals are not about us; they're about the families. You have to give the families what they want. Do things to make your funerals different and unique.

This article compiled from an address presented by the author at the 2006 ICFA Annual Convention

It's not what we say, it's what we do for our customers that counts. You'll find this session frustrating if you do not perceive yourself to be about gracious hospitality, or if you believe you can cut expenses without cutting service to the customer.

Let's consider some important opportunities for customer service from the moment you receive the initial death call to after the service.

How you look, how you act, what you say and what you do from transferring the person who died to the arrangements and planning process with the family to the execution of the planned tribute all matter to customer satisfaction, which is measurable.

How well are packages received? It depends on whom you ask, but from a value meal at McDonald's to a $65,000 Lexus, consumers are oriented toward choosing packages at all price points.

True personalization

Heffner, a second-generation funeral director, is president of Heffner Funeral Homes & Crematory, which includes 12 locations in Pennsylvania and one in New York. He is active in the Pennsylvania Cemetery Funeral Association and the Cremation Association of North America and has served on the board and as a vice president of the International Cemetery and Funeral Association. He is dean of the ICFA University College of Cremation Services. He is frequently invited to speak at meetings of funeral and cemetery professionals.

This article compiled from an address presented by the author at the 2006 ICFA Annual Convention

Copyright ICFA 2006