One of the great blessings in my life is that by guess or by golly, by accident and certainly not by design, and to my own amazement and surprise I have been fortunate to work with thousands of funeral directors across the globe in my career, which is now long, and has not been totally uneventful.

I have to confess that I have not found a more wonderful group of people to work with than funeral directors.  Oh, yes, there have been moments when I could have pulled my hair out, and yes I left several meetings wondering why people did not agree with everything that I said, but overall, over a perspective of 40 plus years I have concluded that funeral directors are really nice, caring, and very concerned people – no matter what the anti-funeral people say, and in the end how many people are going to listen to them?

Clearly every career has its blessings and its curses.  I can’t think of one job where some time, some place a person goes home walking on a cloud of happiness and success, or goes home in the depth of despair and laments the day they decided to get involved with “this job!”  Even the eternal optimists and Pollyanna’s of the world have the bad day.

I suspect the only people that really are plotting and scheming to ruin the day of the funeral director are the few anti-funeral people who continue to rant and rave about the long held lessons taught by their guru and inspirational leader, the now long dead Jessica Mitford.  I have held the opinion that everything I have read from the anti-funeral people when dissected is in reality just a turn, a spin on the contents of Jessica Mitford’s book “The American Way of Death” which was written over 45 years ago.  Mitford’s thinking today is ancient history, and the anti-funeral people have not come up with much new “stuff” save for their eternal war cry that “Funerals (and now burials, cremation, body donations, everything else in life) costs too much” and “Funeral directors are crooks.” The anti-funeral muckrakers dearly love to tell other people what to do and to give firm and self-righteous instructions and advice on how people ought to be spending their money.   I have put this thought in print many times but it is worth repeating here; the anti-funeral people frighten me, I am very wary of them, and I do most anything I can to avoid them and for one simple reason; they are a vexation to my funeral spirit – to my genuine love and devotion to funeral service.  It is wise for TVB to stay my distance from them and never ever under any conditions trust them.  I will have more to say on this topic at the conclusion of this article.  Anti –funeral people are not blessings.

BLESSINGS

Blessings – what a wonderful word.  In fact it is such a powerful word that the church has been teaching and preaching about the subject of blessings for two thousand years, and the church shows no signs of slowing down in addressing, interpreting, and reminding thousands, millions, billions of people what blessings truly are, and that a simple life lesson needs to be learned and learn well by everyone on earth concerning blessings just – COUNT THEM.

I have thought about the blessings of being a funeral director long and hard, and feel the need to share these simple thoughts.  Remember folks this is TVB writing so don’t expect too much.

I have concluded that funeral directors are just different from most everybody else on the earth – and thank God we are different.  I used to see this type of difference, this type of being separate from the crowd in the medical profession, and I still see it at times in the clergy, but the medical profession has clearly succumbed to big business, and the clergy – I will leave that subject alone in this article, for now.

Funeral directors are different.  I don’t know of many vocations where its members are so willing to invest their emotions in the lives of the people they serve than funeral directors.  I actually cannot think of another profession where the professional gets as emotionally and hence personally involved in such an intense way with the people who pay them for their services than funeral directors.  Yes, every profession will claim this intense relationship but when the subject of death is involved I think many other professionals prefer to make a hasty retreat and let funeral directors pick up the ball and create the relationship, and THAT IS A GOOD THING.  This is a real blessing for us and for the community we serve.  Funeral directors do not run away from death.

I have certainly seen the medical profession simply evaporate when someone dies.  Until I see the day when a hospital once again allows a funeral director to walk into the front door with the cot to remove a dead human being instead of us being directed to the door next to the garbage dumpster to remove a dead human body I will hold onto my long held view that the medical profession does not have much interest in dead bodies or in death.  There are some exceptions to this observation but not many.

I have often times asked myself “Todd why does this preacher give a well thought out funeral oration that lasts for a while and the name of the deceased is mention, as compared to this other preacher chap who gives a five minute funeral oration and then can’t get out of the mortuary fast enough?”  Yes I have seen the church leadership evaporate when somebody dies.  There are some exceptions to this observation, but funeral directors do not evaporate when confronted with death.

Few if any career choices require the ability and perspective to deeply deal compassionately yet at the same time professionally and financially with people who are experiencing the death of somebody significant to them.  To be sure there are callous, burned out funeral directors – but honestly folks, not many.  Nurses deal personally and professionally with people but I have not ever encountered a nurse who also is involved with the financial payment agreements between the patient and the hospital, nor have I ever seen a nurse really worried about who and how the towel they just used is going to get laundered and how much that laundry is going to cost and who pays the laundry bill.  I also don’t know of an instance when the chief hospital administrator asks the orderlies on the floor how much brain surgery ought to cost, and then takes the advice.

When I was operating mortuary colleges and dealt with the future of this great profession I found I ended up evaluating student’s not based just on their grade point average or even their ability to pay the tuition (a position got which me into a peck of trouble with my higher ups and betters) I privately evaluated them on this one factor: did they possess that extraordinary capacity for emotional involvement that is needed in crisis management to help friends, and strangers alike when death entered the picture.  Honestly I had students with a perfect 4.0 GPA who were the most selfish, self-centered, narcissistic human beings I had ever encountered, and I would not under any conditions had called them when I needed a funeral director.  However I had students who had a 1.999999999 GPA, but they were blessings, they had the funeral director spark, and because of my belief in them I would end up giving them the 100^th of a point, and I never regretted doing this although I was not popular with not just a few of the regulatory agencies that I was compelled to deal with.  Yes, I was too easy – guilty as charged – however I have never once buried a copy of somebody’s GPA with them in their casket.

The capacity to build a trusting relationship with a stranger in say less than ten minutes which is usually the time a funeral director has to accomplish this simply means that people who become funeral professionals are different from the average person, and this difference should be celebrated, shouted from the roof tops, and never ever discouraged or minimized.  It is a true blessing.

The human attitude that most funeral directors possess of universal compassion for the least of these is certainly an admirable trait and I want to suggest it is admirable in the extreme, and also a trait that drives the anti-funeral people nuts because they can’t control what is in a funeral directors heart and if funeral service is anything it is a matter of our hearts.

The anti-funeral people have attempted for years to create the profile that funeral directors are creepy, weird, and strange beings.  Their efforts are always doomed simply because of our ability to help grieving families with not only their business arrangements but also in handling and understanding their grief and no matter what that ability is impressive to say the least.  The anti-funeral people not only can’t do this, they don’t want to do this.  Too much work, too much of a personal investment, much easier to sit at a computer and blast away than to jump into the deep end of the funeral directors swimming pool.   I personally believe that hundreds of thousands of human being are living their lives more fully concerning overall mental health because somebody in funeral service had this blessing of talent, knowledge and skill in their very being.  I also want to suggest that the world desperately needs more people like funeral directors that can combine kindness and compassion even in the light of some of the most distasteful circumstances that can happen in any community.

Let me further make my point.  When was the last time you went to Wal-Mart or a café, or the dentist or Hospital and the clerk or waiter, or hygienists or physician referred to you as their “family?”

What a superb service idea and concept we in funeral service arrived at years ago – our customers are our “families”.  Would you prefer it when you bought your shoes, groceries, car insurance or video games or got your teeth cleaned that the people serving you, or supposed to be serving you, would view you and treat you like you were part of their own family?  There is a reason why people like funeral directors.

I believe that funeral service is probably the only career where total strangers to the funeral director can consistently expect such treatment.  This is a blessing to our communities.

Another blessing which is seldom talked about in our great profession is the funeral home itself.  In reality, no matter if the funeral director owns the building or pays the rent, in reality the funeral home belongs to the families that are being served.

To be sure the funeral home is only a substitute for the family’s real home, but in the end when somebody is dead it ends up being no less their own home, for a while.  I believe this is one of the real blessings of being a funeral director.  I remember a veteran funeral director telling me once that when I opened the front door I was in reality welcoming our client families into THEIR home.  The funeral home is a place maintained for the families so that they feel not just comfortable, but that they may hopefully feel right at home.  I have always liked the old home concept in funeral home buildings.

Every city I have ever visited I have noticed that overall the funeral homes are the most beautiful buildings in the town.  Funeral homes, overall, are not only marvelous they are also homey.  I personally always liked the old funeral homes with a front porch and the new ones that have a good old-fashioned front porch.  Good stuff!

Ever taken a hard look at other places of business in your town?  Go take a tour of your tax accountant’s place of abode, or take a look at the waiting area at your dentist’s office or your psychiatrists place.  My psychiatrist’s office is a museum to the memory of Dr. Sigmund Freud, which might well have silently contributed to my own deteriorating mental health issues over the years, which I would be happy to share with the reader in another article.  Oh, by the way – ever visited one of the anti-funeral people’s offices?

I have concluded that the beauty of most funeral homes is an unconscious way of buffering the perceived ugliness of death.  I also believe this is the motivating reasons behind beautiful caskets, beautiful flowers, etc.

I am keenly aware today that strip mall funeral offices are present, and I believe that is ok.  Sympathetic service is sympathetic service no matter where it is rendered.  I once knew a funeral director who owned a funeral home and not one piece of furniture matched and he did an adequate and livable number of funerals.  So yes the funeral home can be beautiful, but the real beauty of funeral service is what is in a funeral directors heart.

With this said I have to share that rarely if ever have I seen one building in any community where a financial contract for funeral goods and services can be signed one minute, and then there are emotional farewell kisses to the deceased in the same building within 48 hours.  That is a blessing.

CURSES

Blessing is a nice word, curse is not.  However life is difficult, and how many times have you heard someone use the word curses?  Even the Wicked Witch of the West yelled in frustration at the top of her evil lungs “Curses, curses, curses” when Dorothy and Toto escaped.

We all contend with curses, some real many imaginary.  So are there curses in being a funeral director?  Yes to be sure, there are, and I hope these observations don’t unduly offend anybody – it is just my perspective.

Is being compassionate a curse – Lord I hope not, but being too compassionate too often translates into being blinded to the harsh realities of life and that can translate into being a curse quickly

In my own career I found myself years ago being so honestly compassionate, so quick to sympathize with the families I served that I ended up being blinded to the stark and harsh and I mean harsh realities that I was operating a business.  I understood grief, compassion, caring, and being concerned but trust me folks my banker did not understand most of those concepts, and in the end I had to file bankruptcy.  Certainly I cannot blame my business failure totally on my compassion, but the truth be told I simply did not balance it out – too damn young I guess – youth is wasted on the young.  If I only Knew 47 years ago what I know today………..

I over loaded my families with services, and free services to boot.  In so doing I was giving away more of my profits than I ought to have.  My competitor down the street really was in charge of my pricing and I got that inside information as to what my competitor was charging from some of the traveling salespersons.  It was a pretty shaky system.  Oh, by the way, my banker was not void of all emotions, he certainly experienced intense acute grief when he found out I had filed bankruptcy.

Todd was the freebee king, I was the Santa Claus of funeral service, free services everywhere.  I added and added service upon service, but failed to add up my blasted ledger book until it was way too late.  Those “little items of consideration” those “sundry items of service” that I was so proud of and which I hoped drove my competitor nuts really added up over time and translated into lost revenues and lost profits.  My attitude that I was going the extra mile for “my” families was simply not really that appreciated by my families and was certainly an irritant to my banker.  Poor chap, I drove him booty!  I was just overdoing it.

The bottom line in all this was that my compassion and concern as a funeral director was a total blessing in dealing with families but it ended up being a curse in taking care of my business and my banker.  I discovered way too late that the risk involved of the extra mile of service enhancements which I was so proud of was not in my performance of those extra services but in my utter failure to charge for those services.  Things have definitely improved in this area, mostly due to a great form called the General Price List, but anybody reading these words and if my story rings a bell I offer this simple thought – balance compassion with business reality.

To this very day I find it remarkable and just plain funny that the anti-funeral people always accuse funeral directors of making huge profits, of making tons of cash, money everywhere when in reality the innate compassion of the typical funeral director really creates just the opposite – I really don’t know a funeral director who made their financial wealth in the funeral business alone.

My curse was this:  I just did not get the hard truth of life that as owner of a funeral home that I had just not a high responsibility to my clients, but I had an equal responsibility in a fiduciary way to myself, my heirs, my employees and my community to earn a fair profit.  I was mighty guilty of letting my warm feelings for my families cloud and disturb the way I did business, and I paid a heavy price.

Here is another curse – possibly not a curse, but a characteristic of most funeral directors that causes us pain and anguish.  Most funeral directors are so sensitive to their families’ needs that funeral directors themselves become very delicate and mighty vulnerable.  Because of this silent psychological influence funeral directors are highly sensitive to perceived slights (real or imagined), and we are mighty vulnerable to any type of criticism (real or imagined).

Let’s explore this issue of criticisms further.  I believe firmly that the real tragedy, the tragic legacy of the work of funeral critic people like Jessica Mitford was not the implementation of the FTC Rule, (which they still take full credit – which is a lie) the real tragedy of the people whose entire lives seem to revolve around tearing funeral directors to pieces is the damage that their wicked, wicked criticisms has caused on the self-esteem, on the self-respect, on the basic self-image that funeral directors have of themselves.  Most in funeral service will humbly deny this, but in working with thousands of funeral directors for over 40 years I know they find a good old fashioned ego massage very attractive.  The media beats us up constantly, many ministers beat us up constantly, and certainly the disciples of Jessica still beat us up any chance they get, and over a period of almost a half a century of this insane tit for tat I believe the results have been just plain hurt feelings.

I know of criticisms that funeral directors have taken to heart so much that they take them to bed with them, mull on them, it keeps them awake at night, and God forbid the criticism comes from a client family and the psychological results of those criticisms and their effects on our psyche too often has a lasting effect, which is usually not good.

Another reason I believe that funeral directors are extremely vulnerable and sensitive to criticisms is that really beyond the media, the anti-funeral people, and some clergy, funeral directors are in fact rarely if ever criticized.  This is absolutely true, the Gallup Polls have clearly indicated for years that funeral directors are highly esteemed in their communities.  Let us recall that the infamous Federal Trade Commission hearings were originally launched because the FTC received 177 complaints from families in American when during the same time approximately 2 million funerals were conducted.

For my part I have tried to toughen up by trying to observe and hence understand better how much and how often other people in business and the community get criticized all the time.  I personally criticize many people who perform services for me.  I don’t like the old lady that works at the dry cleaners because after 10,000 years of dropping off my suits she still can’t get my name right, and when I brought this glaring lack of customer service to her attention she did not even look up at me.  However our funeral service world is much different.

I believe firmly that most every funeral director works extremely hard.  Being a funeral director is not an easy job.  Most every funeral director I have dealt with is a terribly obsessive meticulous human being who watches every tiny, little, minute, issue concerning service to their families.  I call it professional nitpicking.  And nitpicking is a really good thing, but it also has a price, because when a funeral director knows they have crossed every “T” and dotted every “I” in preparing for a funeral and then a criticism arises most of us are devastated – in fact maybe too devastated if such a thing is possible in a world where the truth is you only have one chance to do it right.  However our high level sensitivity in nitpicking about our funerals many times is not sadly realized nor totally understood by people who make constant natural criticisms about everything and everybody just as a way of life – those folks are out there.

I went to the dentist the other day.  All my life I have detested dentists.  I criticize them constantly and with unabashed boldness will tell the dentists, the dental staff that I place dentists and snakes on the same level – I am terrified of both – and I am never ever never ever going to change my immature attitude.  I told this dentist/snake idea straight out to the lady who was going to clean my teeth and folks she could have cared less.  She just told me to sit back and here is one for you – RELAX.  I realized that this dental lady, this lady who was going to freak me out, cause me pain and anguish was in her world just going about her daily routine, and didn’t care much about my emotional health, or the lack thereof.  In fact she actually seemed bored by the cleaning, while all the time my knuckles were white gripping the dentist’s chair and  if I could I would have been yelling and cussing her out but she had me in an extremely vulnerable position with suction tubes, gauze, and strange sounding machines packed tight in my mouth.  Here is a confession:  If anybody would ever compare snakes to funeral directors I would be so offended that violence or at least a good old-fashioned tongue lashing would be in the works.  The dentist lady just let my remark roll off her back.

When the dental torture was finally over I was emotionally and psychologically spent and I looked to her for some sympathy, some concern, and some compassion.  I got nothing, absolutely nothing.  She did not even ask me how I was doing.  Nothing – next appointment.  She was just going about her daily routine and she had her routine down to a science.  She no doubt has had hundreds of dentist cowards like me, but obviously she has just gotten used to it.  She was tough, not thin skinned.  She had developed a callus.  In fact I have observed that most everybody who deals with the general public has developed a callus to the never ending criticisms that they have to endure daily

Not so with funeral directors.  I want to suggest that we get criticized by our families so rarely that when it happens it is nothing less than a shock to our entire system of psychology and mental health.   BUT THANK GOD MOST FUNERAL DIRECTORS ARE NOT CALLUS.  This issue of lacking a “callus” is truly a blessing, but also is truly a curse, but we need not imitate the dentist teeth cleaning lady.  Funeral directors are not known for being emotionally callus, and the ones that are overly callus play right into the ancient stereotype of the cold-blooded, creepy merchant of sorrow – the undertaker with the tape measure.  The typical funeral director thinks more with his heart than most people, and because of this vulnerability funeral directors take very personally any criticism even when we know from a purely rational point of view that the criticism is unwarranted and sometimes downright crazy.  Yes!   Some family members we all have served are unstable, and not just from grief.  A callus here and there is a good thing.

I once served a family who were composed of a group of wisenheimers.  This group had a wisecrack to say about everything, and I as usual took the wisecracks to heart – a big mistake.  When the family came in to see the remains and upon looking at the deceased one of the brothers looked at me and said, “Are we in the right room, I mean who is this in this box?”  I damned near fainted.  I went upstairs and almost cried.  I took the comment to heart, it destroyed my week, and even to this day 40 years later I still get emotional about the incident, but today the emotion is not sympathy it is pure disgust at the jerk that made that comment.  Truth is the dead person looked marvelous – I had done a good job.

Later, after the funeral was over, the wise guy came up and told me he was just “picking” at me.  I was not amused and I could have popped him right upside the head.

Here is the curse: I was thinking more with my heart than with my brains and the consequence was that I got all upset, and I mean really upset.  I even considered discounting the entire funeral to correct my deficiencies as I saw them.  I mean folks I believed the wise guy, I took him very seriously.

I bet I made 100 phone calls in a two days period asking my friends and trusted associates what I should do.  Every one of them, even the President of the funeral directors association assured me the guy was probably a crank; however I suspected that even the people I was talking to for comfort and understanding would have reacted the same way as I was.

The wise guy ended up thinking my misery was humorous; he had really gotten one over on the undertaker.  Ha, ha!  Looking back I can see that I was a raw nerve simply because I had never had to cope with a family making such a hurtful and glaring criticism.  Yes, to be sure there were families that nit-picked on this and that, but I was always able to correct the situation.  Because of my sensitivities and hence vulnerabilities I was unable to think rationally about the unwarranted criticism I had received.  I needed, as strange as this sounds, to develop a small callus to such events, which I have certainly done over the years, but I had to grow up concerning the inevitable issue of criticisms, because the truth was more unkind remarks were in my future – it was a matter of professionally growing up.

THE CURSE OF CURSES – THE DREADED “LOST CALL”

    The lost call has to be the most treacherous form of psychological trauma that a sensitive funeral director can endure.  This is all the more magnified in small town American where everybody knows everything, and people actual seem to keep count as to what families go to which funeral home.

Nothing derailed my psychological mental health more than the glaring knowledge that a family had rejected me and called the other funeral home in town, and the slap in the face was even more disastrous when I knew bloody well that we had served that family in the past. Not fun, and who do you and I talk to about the lost call?  Not many people are going to warm up to a conversation where the undertaker is pitching a fit about losing a call – not many, and if you do share the frustration and rejection who do you trust?

I remember very well taking this one particular elderly lady, who seemed to be at deaths door weekly, in our ambulance from the nursing home to the hospital.  According to her family every ambulance trip we made would certainly assuredly be the last.  This cycle of being at death’s door went on for two years.  Then the old lady would suddenly recover from her near death experience and the family would call me to haul her back to the nursing home.  This cycle went on and on for several years, and true to my sensitive nature of being helpful to others I never once billed the family for all the ambulance trips.  Not one dime exchanged hands between the old ladies family and the funeral home, but I rationalized that if I was really nice to them like furnishing free transportation when the elderly lady died I was certain to get the call.  And besides I was only charging $25.00 for an ambulance call.  I figured I could make a lot of lost $25.00 ambulance fees with the expectation of receiving several thousand dollars to do the funeral or so I thought.

One fateful afternoon, the day after I had taken this old lady to the hospital for the 183^rd time the newspaper arrived, and the elderly lady had died and the family had called the other funeral home in town to do her funeral.  I was stunned, my eyes welled up, I was so horribly hurt, I felt betrayed, and I felt anger.  That family might as well have put a slug in my brain and heart.  Compounding this was the fact I was totally confused and mystified as to what I had done to create this lost call catastrophe.

The truth is I wasn’t bothered in the least about losing the funeral sale (money? Who cares about money?) What I was at my wits end about was because I personally had lost the family.  The consequences of my private hell were not pleasant, and particularly for people who were easy targets behind closed doors, like my family.  Behind closed doors they and my dog caught all my repressed anger and frustration and I am ashamed to admit such behavior, but I had basically lost my mind, and to make matters worse when I went down town people would stop me and say, like Job’s comforters in the Bible “We sure thought you would have buried so and so.”  Or “Didn’t you take her to the hospital a dozen times, why did they call the XYZ funeral home?”  I wanted to shout at the top of my lungs to those people but did not of course was: “Take her!!!!! Take her!!!!! Yes a hundred dozen times I took her hell I hauled that old lady one hundred times, back and forth, in the middle of the night, in rain and sleet and for what?  Heartaches that’s what heartaches nothing but heartaches!”  Of course I smiled the professional funeral directors smile, made some small meaningless talk while all the time repressing furor, and suppressing my anger and went home and shut the door and poured a drink and went nuts all over again.

Six weeks after my lost ambulance trip client’s funeral was conducted by the other funeral home I ran into the deceased woman’s son on Main Street.  He smiled broadly at me and walked right over to me and said, “Gosh almighty Todd we want to thank you for how nice and kind you were to Mother during the last couple of years, we all appreciate you so very much, you were so excellent on the ambulance.”  I couldn’t take it any longer, I felt a little flame of confrontation growing in my brain and it got bigger and bigger until I was ready to burst, so I swallowed hard and gently asked, “Did we do anything to offend you or your family or mom on the ambulance calls, I just need to know because you used the other funeral home for her services?”  I could not believe I even asked the question because I was taught to suck it in, forget about the lost call, and move one – great advice coming from funeral directors who actually behaved worse than I was when THEY lost a call.  I learned the behavior from them!

The son looked at me and put his hand on my shoulder and said “Heaven’s no, Todd you were great, really mother really liked you.”  I could feel my heart hit the pavement.  Then the son said, “You know my wife and I talked about this at some length and being in a small town we decided that we really needed to be fair and since we had given you all of the ambulance business, we decided we would give the funeral to XYZ.”   I just stood there looking like I had the IQ of a rabbit.  I later learned that some “brain” in our little town had convinced this family that Social Security was paying me directly for all the ambulance trips and that they didn’t have a thing to worry about.

I did not, for once, do anything wrong, but I suffered the tortures of the condemned and damned over this lost call – it was a curse.  In this families mind they innocently had a perfectly legitimate reason for using the other funeral home, made sense to them even if the fact was based on hearsay.  Looking back I think I ought to have sent some bills to them.

Interesting turn of events huh?  I suffered, and made everybody else miserable over basically nothing.  Talk about a disconnect! I thought I had been betrayed, while the family thought they were being fair and equitable.  My conscious was driving me crazy while the family’s conscious was clear as a bell.

It seems clear that funeral directors live in a world where sensitivity is a blessing and a curse; it hurts in a big way when families do not appreciate, or appear not to appreciate our innate gift of being sensitive.

I had to toughen up.  I had to get thicker skin a little callus if you will.  I had to learn a hard lesson that no matter what I can’t be perfect all the time and I can’t be all things to all people.  Mistakes, miscommunications are just an inevitable part of life, no matter what Zig Ziegler says.

One way I toughen up was to get OUT of the ambulance service in 1982.

With all this said here is another lesson I learned in my life.  If mistakes are going to be made, if errors are going to happen, funeral directors need to error and make mistakes on the side of kindness, sensitivity and compassion rather than mistakes and errors on the side the selfishness, aloofness, and callousness.   We need to toughen up, form a callus here and there, but not to the glaring extent that other professions have done.  If funeral directors compromise sensitivity we are truly headed down a slippery slope.

THE IMPOSSIBLE CURSE

I have spent most of my professional career trying to explain the values and benefits of the funeral experience to anyone who would listen.  I have tried to contribute by writing, speaking, teaching and helping people embrace the subject of death and funerals.

Throughout the years I have known that the basic subject that funeral directors are asked to cope with, deal with, help with, is in the end an impossible subject to be assigned to tackle, and there are many anti-funeral people who take full advantage by demanding from the side lines that funeral directors tackle the impossible, and then jump all over us when the impossible task cannot be fulfilled, and I am not talking about the task of doing and giving funeral services, no one does that better than funeral directors, I am talking about the impossible subject of human death.

I have concluded that funeral directors, particularly in this rampant out of control death denial and death anxiety  age we live in have to face up almost constantly to the obvious fact that our job is different than any job on earth.  Funeral directors are in the unique position of offering a type of service that may well be needed, but is rarely wanted.  It is a sticky wicket.

The Pollyanna’s of the world (which I have little use for) have proclaimed to me in a futile effort to instruct me in a better way of thinking and hence make my observations and experiences more contemporary that, according to them “No one wants to have to call a doctor, or a lawyer, either because Todd that is most times not a good situation.”  I want to throw up when I am tossed that terribly naïve and nay offensive position.  I have been in medical situations where I damned well wanted to call a doctor, and would do anything he or she told me to do – and money was no object.  I have found myself in great need of a lawyer when there has been deep private trouble, and was damned glad to get and pay for the lawyer’s advice and counsel.  But even I don’t want to speculate too much what it would mean in my private life to need to call a funeral director.  This is heavy stuff to be sure, and no matter how people rationalize the subject there is little positive to the subject of death, it basically terrifies people.

Funeral directors are special people no question about it, for few if any professions can deal with a subject like death, and deal with that subject exclusively and in doing so sustain the public’s anxieties about the subject, their avoidance of the subject and at times their glaring ignorance of the subject and then when a death occurs here present in our profession are people who can help guide the survivors, help counsel them, walk with them, and direct them to and discover in the end making wise and helpful decisions.

However none of what I just said changes the core fact that no one wants to have to call the funeral director.  It is a cardinal strength of funeral service that our members not only understand this situation, but are respectful and yes sensitive to this reality.  The death rate is 100%, but no one outside an insane asylum would be foolish enough to tout that fact in today’s world to Archie and Edith Bunker, even clergy squirm and Hospice workers giggled and squirm in their seats when I share this unarguable and inevitable statistic.

Here is an example:  I know firsthand of zoning commissions that will welcome the zoning application of a gas station in a neighborhood that will be opened twenty-four hours with one thousand neon lights glaring into people’s bedrooms throughout the night, but the same zoning commission will flatly turn down the zoning application for a new funeral home to be built in the same neighborhood  Public meetings after public meetings will be held on the funeral home zoning issue and parent after parent will with self-righteous indignation prophesize that if a funeral home is built in their neighborhood the little children living in proximity will end up being another “Sybil” having to deal with sixteen personalities because they saw a funeral coach drive by while they were riding the tricycles.

I have seen all my life businesses trying to create increased demand for their services and products, and the results have been often times highly successful – remember the phrase GOT MILK?  Milk drinking soared.    Of course most everybody likes milk.  Even the sainted Hospice organizations today are trying in a big way to create increased demand for dying people now there is a change in attitude for you to ponder – marketing for dying people and Hospice marketers are some of the most well trained promo people I have ever encountered.

However no matter what funeral directors cannot create an increased demand for our services, no never.  The funeral profession and its members are unique and special.  All professions claim this, but I can think of very few who really can prove it like we can.

THE SUBJECT OF DEATH – THE KING OF TERROR  (Blessing or Curse? You decide)

Every funeral director I know I believe ought to have a Ph.D. in experiential expertise concerning the blunt, harsh, raw date realities of death.  However people I have discovered have learned the lessons of a basic primal fear of death – we are not born with this, it is learned, but for most it is a lesson well learned. The fear of death can be a lifesaver because it often times stops people from doing stupid things like jumping off a mountain or play chicken in an automobile or experimenting with drugs.  For most people I would like to suggest the fear of death really surpasses all other human fears.  In fact most every religion has at its very core their central belief system is an attempt to answer this ancient eternally haunting question “What happens to me after I am dead?”  Some of the most powerful and influential religious movement on the earth have emerged basically because they came up with an answer to that glaring question.

The reason that funeral directors and the subject of death are so important is that in the end every human beings relationship with death is so important, and funeral directors usually emerge as the one primary single living symbol of death in any community.  This is where all the undertaker jokes emerge from – not from humor, but from primal fear.

I have concluded that the fear of death is not just a primal fear, it is THEE primal fear.

To be sure death can be viewed as a welcomed visitor in the sick room, but even that attitude is much more of a psychological grief coping mechanism, and certainly a good one, rather than a statement that one actually welcomes death, and particularly their own death.

I have the thought that death is, for many, is the ultimate bad thing, and this ultimately bad thing attitude of people spills over and is associated with funeral service more than with any other career or profession on the face of the earth – the clergy don’t come close, and neither does Hospice or hospitals for people today actually view Hospice as someplace to get physically well, and most have always viewed the hospital that way.  Remember most hospitals whisk death people off to the morgue in camouflaged laundry hampers.  Telling is it not?

The association between funeral directors, and what we symbolize – death, and people’s ultimate fear of death will never be broken, it never has been and never will, which fact makes the work of the funeral director a difficult calling to be sure.

I have concluded that one of the reasons that funeral directors have always been praised and lauded in the public’s Gallup Polls is because in the association between the primal fear of death, and deaths 100% predictability common ordinary people actually marvel that there are people out there, you and I, funeral directors, who can foster guidance and positive relationship building when many others turn tail and run.

The anti-funeral people are quick to indict us for being weird, strange, and as one famous funeral critic told me directly to my face “funeral service is in unbelievable bad taste” but the common ordinary people find support, understanding, sensitivity, and compassion when they walk across the threshold of the funeral home, which in and of itself is a powerful symbol for crossing the threshold crossing metaphorically from the world of living to the world of the dead.  Powerful stuff!

POSSIBLY THE MOST HURTFUL CURSE OF BEING A FUNERAL DIRECTOR?

Make no mistake the epidemic of death anxieties and death denials have taken a monumental toll on the psychological world of contemporary funeral service.  Popular culture invariable shows the funeral director (not my personal good friend the local funeral director) but some other unidentified funeral director in a poor light.  I have written on this subject in the past, but I need to repeat that the image in popular culture of the undertaker with wringing hands, the vulture like appearance, and a person who is creepy, morbid and ghoulish is a curse that we contend with and have contended with forever.  Screenwriters in Hollywood almost universally depend on this untrue image, and even the widely popular television program “Six Feet Under” presented the funeral directors as horribly dysfunctional people.

In real life many people literally cringe at the mention of funerals and funeral homes and funeral directors as though by their cringing death would become an unnatural part of the reality of having been born and living life, and that death by their cringing can somehow be avoided and one easy way to do it is to avoid thinking about funerals, funeral homes and funeral directors.  We have all experienced this, have we not?  Yes we have all seen this and experienced this and our reactions many times is one more of pity for the cringing person than of personal embarrassment or regret.  People totally unaware and yes even blissfully unaware that they are well on the road to their own death by the simply ticking of the clock seem just to not understand.  That is truly a pity.

To know, however, that such immature people, such naïve people, such thoughtless people and such unsophisticated people are out there does not change the consequences for the funeral director.  Even to know that these pitiful people represent a possible small portion of the population does not make me as a funeral director, the undeserving victim of their mindless prejudice feel much better.

As a funeral professional I do not want anyone to think of me as being a bad guy or gal – not in any way, and not by anyone.  Funeral directors are not bad people, we know it, everybody who knows us personally knows it, but still it is no fun for funeral directors to know that even a few people in our universe automatically associate us with something unpleasant and therefore conclude that we as human beings are also somehow unpleasant.

I just don’t know many other professions like funeral service, where in some minds the automatic reaction evokes a feeling of creepiness and in my opinion at root even a feeling of revulsion.

Probably the closest profession akin to funeral service in a community is the Coroner’s Office.  Do people look at the County Coroner as creepy?  No they do not.  Even the coroner is different from us, because in our popular culture the coroner has now been elevated by the media to the position of a super crime fighter, a modern day Sherlock Holmes.  It started with “Quincy” and today its legacy is “CSI”, “Autopsy”, “Snapped”, “48 Hours” and the like. Coroners today are invariably portrayed as valued allies with law enforcement officials in crime-fighting, valiant scientists helping to right a criminal wrong, to identify the criminal with tiny microscopic specks of evidence helping to right a grievous wrong and in a heroic manner identify the criminal and hence free the innocent suspect.  I have found it very predictable that no television program which revolves around the dramatic, heroic and yes sexy exploits of the County Coroner ever takes the time or the opportunity to reference the fact that hundreds of County Coroner’s across this country are licensed funeral directors and embalmers.

It appears safe to conclude that funeral directors rank alone among the professions in suffering the unjust opprobrium of a certain irreducible portion of the general population because of our embryonic association with people’s ultimate dread, the king of terrors – death, and my friends I personally think it is unlikely that this reality of being a funeral director will ever change.  We deal with this tension, this curse daily and do an excellent job in doing so.

However in closing these thoughts let us take faith in the blessings of being a funeral director.  No matter what, this is a wonderful career and a great profession.  We all have our cross to bear – no one is understood and appreciated by everybody all the time.  I don’t think we can do much about changing the world’s attitudes towards their primal fear of death, but we can as funeral directors not walk straight into predictably lost credibility and dignity the way Richard Nixon did in 1973 when he proclaimed, “I am not a crook.”  A funeral director would certainly suffer a similar reaction by even bothering to say that he or she is not creepy.  We have to play to the winners, and take the high road.  Remember people like funeral directors, well not everyone, but in my mind the winners do.

I had a dream some years ago which I thought was somewhat ironic about some people’s automatic reaction to funeral directors as somehow being bad people, creepy people, weird people.  In my dream I was already in heaven (yes I made it friends) and I saw people who had while on earth laughed at funeral directors and accused them of all sorts of ills and chills and of being  in “unbelievably bad taste”, and of being composed of really odd and strange people.  But now interestingly in my dream, in heaven the slights, and insults, the cruel remarks were being righted.  I stood in heaven and saw one funeral directors after another being fitted with their wings and the anti-funeral director group, the people who made all the jokes these souls who on earth did not like us or funerals one by one came up to the newly winged funeral directors to apologize for how terribly they had misjudged us while on earth, and here is the final blessing; every funeral director graciously forgave them, one by one.

The plane ran down the runway at about 6:30 p.m. I left the Epply Airfield in Omaha, for the two and a half hour flight back to my world.  I had spent a long weekend visiting my hometown in Iowa to celebrate by father’s 80 something birthday.  Iowa in October is a tray of sensations which is brazenly forced upon a person.  The climate is changing in dramatic ways, the greens of the summer are turning quickly into the golden and browns of harvest season, and everywhere one travels the ancient activity of bringing in the crops is present.  Morning, noon and night the farmers swing back and forth with their large impressive machines and take from mother earth more than enough food stuffs to feed the world.  Growing up in the agrarian world is much like being a member of the Masonic Lodge, if you have not been admitted as a member and are an outsider the entire proceedings are a secret and a mystery.  I have never encountered a city person who understood the secret handshake of the farmer.

One of the outcomes of my return visits to my home state is that I take the time to drive throughout the countryside.  I always visit certain places which hold exclusive memories for just me – no one else cares about or knows of these places, and that is just fine, for to explain their significance takes way too much time, and is really no bodies business except mine.  These spots are mine and no one can pollute them or fiddle with them, or destroy them, and hence my return visits back home to Iowa are not just a duty call to family, or a business purpose, or even a reunion, they are today primarily a spiritual renewal, they are a place and occasion to jump start my attitude, to renew the very visceral makeup of my DNA by sights, sound, sensations from a thousand and one stimuli.  I am always sad when I leave for I never can totally shake off my haunting feelings concerning the would of, could of, should of, about my life. Questions like; What if I had? Why did I do that? Why didn’t I do this? I should have done this? I should have said that?  It is always an unsettling feeling when the plane takes off leaves the ground which I first set foot upon, and which also helped set the foundation of my life.

June of 1970 was a great time in my life.  This was a brief period in my life when everything seemed to come together.  It was great!  I had just graduated from High School the month before, I had a gorgeous girl friend who lived in Omaha, and I was working for the prestigious Heafey & Heafey Mortuary at 3522 Farnam Street on what was then called mortuary row, called that due to the fact that the majority of all the Omaha funeral homes were located within a eight block radius of this historic street.  Everything was wonderful.  It was so wonderful that my boss used to allow me to borrow the lead car to take my “city chick” out on the town in downtown Omaha.  That fall I was enrolled in college and then I was going to go on to Mortuary College in Boston, and then I was going to eventually own my own chain of funeral homes in Southwestern Iowa.  As I saw things, the sky was the limit.  That’s how I saw things back then.

Was I ever happy to shake off High School in Avoca!  With all candor and honesty I must say that I was a terrible student and I know of only two teachers in my entire career as a student at the AvoHa High School who liked me.  The rest I well remember viewed me as a complete loser.  When I walked across the stage in the old gym at the school to get my diploma at first I was surprised I got one and then I remember looking out at the crowd of teachers and thought “Thank God I am rid of them!”  “They never took the time to get to know me and understand me!”  It was a real self pity fest which I enjoyed then and still enjoy today.  While I was standing in line waiting to get my diploma I was talking to a fellow student by the name of Tom Sewing.  Tom and I always stood next to each other because in high school they followed a penal type of organization structure whereby students were always lined up alphabetically, even in fire drills!  Someone yelled SEWING – S – Sewing, yes Tom was where he should be.  There were no T’s or U’s, in our school, but there was one V – VAN BECK someone yelled, VAN BECK, IS VAN BECK HERE? I was day dreaming and talking with Sewing. After more Van Beck calls, and some rolled eye balls from faculty I finally raised my hand.  They all looked disgusted with me and I tried to read their lips and I think I caught something like “What a loser!” and “Did you ever have him (meaning me) in class?”   Tom and I chummed around all throughout our time in school together.  Tom’s parents were formally connected to the Underwood, Iowa community but at this time his father Marvin worked a farm southwest of our town, they were RLDS and were mighty fine people.  Tom also had a beautiful little sister, two years younger named Renae.  I used to do odd jobs for the old man who owned the farm where the Sewing’s lived and when I had completed my farm work I would go to visit the Sewing’s.  I really liked them all, for they seemed to always laugh at my stupid stories, jokes or remarks, and they let me play their small little electronic organ.  I made terrible mistakes in playing but the Sewing’s always clapped and told me how great I was.  It was great!

Tom Sewing was the envy of the entire AvoHa High School.  He did not have a girl friend, he did not have money, he did not have great athletic power, he did not have an acne free face – none of these trophies of a teenager, he had something else, something much, much better – Tom had a car!  Tom Sewing had a Barracuda, an honest to God 1960 something Barracuda and he drove that machine with top notch skill and speed.  He could spin the wheels and burn rubber; he could pop that clutch and he could whip that machine around and turn it on a dime.  Students lined up to get rides. I meekly suggested that he charge a 25 cent fee to the poor kids and a 50 cent fee to the rich kids for a ride in his impressive car. I also out of the goodness of my heart kindly offered to help him by collecting the money for him and then I would split the profits 60/40 with him at the end of the day. I would take a paltry 60% of the cash for marketing and financial handling charges.  Tom firmly declined my offer, and happily our friendship survived his rejection.   Tom Sewing was just a nice, uncomplicated 18 years old that night when we received our High School diplomas.

Tom’s little sister Renea was just a sweetheart.  She had the most beautiful smile, was a talented student, and excelled in athletics.  I could tease her and she was always a good sport.  Also she like to ride on the back of Tom’s other vehicle – a motorcycle – and the two of them would fly like the wind on the back roads of Southwestern Iowa.  Tom liked to go fast. What 18 year old doesn’t?

My fathers birthday dinner was held on a Saturday night in October of 2005 at a well know landmark restaurant in Omaha known as Johnny’s Café.  Our family has patronized this eating and drinking establishment for many years.  On Sunday after the party my brother flew back to Houston, and I was scheduled to stay one more day and fly back to Atlanta on Monday afternoon.  About five o’clock Sunday afternoon I decided to take a ride around the places of my boyhood so I could refresh my spirit before I left the next day.

I decided to drive into Council Bluffs and then planned to continue into Omaha for my memory tour and dinner.  As I was driving alone down Highway 6 I entered the town of Underwood.  Suddenly a feeling came over me which I have learned to pay attention to over the years.  The feeling is always the same.  It is a feeling of great peace, sadness, reverence yearning for something.  It is a pleasantly haunting type of experience and happens all simultaneously.  I now felt this familiar feeling, this significant feeling overwhelm me – it was just about 5:30 p.m. the sun was setting, the sky colors were spectacular and the farmers were still in the fields working.

God I wish I could remember the exact date when the phone call came in, but I cannot recall it exactly. I am confident, however that my gorgeous girl friend in Omaha called me in the late afternoon.  I was working and living at the Heafey & Heafey Mortuary and was in my apartment above the carriage house when I answered the phone.  “Todd?”  “Yes.”  “It’s Patty.”  “Yes, I know.”  “What’s up?”  “I don’t know how to tell you this.”  “What?”  “What’s wrong?”  “Todd, oh, its terrible news, Tom Sewing and his sister were killed this afternoon in an accident.” I stood in my apartment stunned, no body else there but me, I got the news all alone. “Both of them?” “Yes.” “Are you sure?” “Yes, my Aunt Georgia just called and said that I should let you know before you saw it on the news.”  “Both?”  “Are you sure?” I repeated the questions.

It was truly a beautiful June day, that day when Patty called me to inform me of Tom and his sister Renea’s accident and deaths.  I remember it distinctly because Heafey’s had conducted a funeral that morning for a priest out at the Dowd Chapel on Boy’s Town campus and Msgr. Wegner had commented on the beauty of the day. When Patty called I had just finished washing the funeral coach because we had another large funeral service the next morning.

Tom and Renea must have thought it a beautiful day also and of course it was summer, Tom had just graduated and Renea had the entire summer off.  As best as I was ever able to piece the story together Tom and his little sister took off on the motorcycle sometime before noon.  They were traveling up a town road in Minden, Iowa and were just crossing Interstate 80 when a truck pulled out in front of them.  The collision was horrendous and while I remember my two young friends were taken into Council Bluffs to the hospital the trip proved futile and in time both were pronounced dead.

The next several days were full of activities.  I was asked to assist in conducting the funeral and remember that I had the honor of driving the funeral coach in which Renea’s body rested.  The funeral was held in the sanctuary of Trinity Lutheran Church simply because it was the largest building in our town of a religious nature.  The school gym was larger and available, but the Sewings’ were religious people so to church we went.

Tom and Renae Sewing were buried side by side on the Sewing plot where at least two generations of the family rested in the H.D. Fisher Cemetery outside of Underwood, Iowa.  I left the cemetery at around 5:30 p.m. with an empty funeral coach, drove back to Avoca, parked the vehicle at the local funeral home, drove into Omaha that evening to see college friends and drown my sorrows and for thirty-five years I had not stepped foot in the H. D. Fisher Cemetery until the day after my father’s 80 something birthday.

5:30 p.m. October, 2005 Sunday afternoon and my overwhelming feeling has got a vice grip on me.  As the car inched down the main street of Underwood I could see the evergreen trees which mark and identify the H. D. Fisher cemetery to the west.  I turned to car to the right and started down a gravel road.  I came to a four corner and stopped.  A woman jogger ran by me sweating, I smiled and waved, she just waved.  I have never seen a happy jogger in my life.  I turned to the left and went up and down two hills and vales and finally stopped on top of the third hill.  I got out of the car and stood there for a moment.  It reminded me of playing “King of the Mountain” as a child.  I could see for miles and miles.  The farmers were working the land to my right and left, and my front and back.  One farmer drove by on his John Deere and waved to me. Everybody in Iowa waves at each other.  I waved back.  The farmer’s expression and wave told me that he knew that I was not some tourist.  The farmer, I could tell, knew that I had a connection to the place.

A warm autumn breeze was my companion as I entered the gates of the cemetery.  It did not take long to locate Tom and Renea’s graves.  They are side by side, they share one gray granite upright headstone with different birthdates, but the same death dates.  I stood by their graves and I felt like I was floating.  I studied the stone carefully and the same thought began to radiate throughout my mind, body and soul.  “God Almighty is life a precious gift!”  Again and again, “God Almighty is life a precious gift!”  1970 was chiseled twice on that headstone.  1970, thirty-five years ago! Then I began to take stock of my life and felt humbled and grateful in the presence of the earthly symbol of my dear friend’s lives which were taken at such a young age, that I have been alive throughout this thirty-five year span of time. What a blessing!

I felt puny and embarrassed in recalling my reactions and responses to certain episodes in my life which I thought were unfair or unwarranted and which caused me stress and unhappiness.  I felt ashamed to recall times in my life when I was not able to appreciate and/or to be thankful for everything life threw at me, for the truth is that all the times I thought life was picking on me I was alive, living life, breathing, experiencing – while my young friends Tom and Renae now right here in front of me were all this time laying together in the grave.  I looked out at the farmers and thought how many crops had been planted, how many winters, summers, autumns and falls had changed the scenery of this grave yard, and my young friends have been lying together in the grave all this time, while I was so blessed and fortunate to be alive to experience, to be present, to contribute, to try make a difference in this crazy world.

I thought about all my failures and successes.  Someone else got my gorgeous girlfriend from Omaha, someone else in Omaha got the chain of funeral homes I planned for in Southwestern Iowa, and someone else, it seems, has always done better that me.  However I have a wonderful son, I have a great career which I never imagined would happen, I have many friends and associates worldwide, I have a great church home, I have my health, I have traveled the world over, I came from really good people, I have a great education, I have lived life, and my parents are still my parents, they are not known or referred to as bereaved parents who witnessed their children being buried before they were. There is nothing more difficult than for parents to bury their children.  A wise Rabbi from Boston, Earl Grollman once told me when your parents die you have lost your past, when your spouse dies you have lost your present, but when your children dies you have lost your future.  Standing in front of Thomas and Renea Sewings gravestone in Underwood, Iowa I was humbled to the core, and said a prayer of thanksgiving for my good fortunes in life.  It was a great comfort to let this experience in a cemetery soak into the core of my spirit.  Funny I have thought about the Sewings consistently for thirty-five years, and only when I entered the gates of the gentle pastoral scene of their resting place on top of a country hill in Western Iowa did the Holy Spirit move me to a re-awakening concerning a genuine appreciation of the precious gift of life.

Tom and Renae were physically stopped in life during youth.  They never experienced the joys of children, the pride of a career, or even advanced education.  However they also never experienced the torments and toils of aging, of getting old.  They never experienced the frustrations of seeing health pass, of seeing energy wane.  Both Tom and Renae had bright quick brains which were, even at their young ages, the center of a thousand subtleties of thought and deed, they both had great hearts and they were both growing into adults capable of seeking truth and creating beauty.  But on one June day death was upon them in an instant and no one could stop the life changing intrusion of the pesky Grim Reaper – it just seems he is everywhere. As a funeral director I have learned a few lessons about life; here is one of them:  Death wins.

When I was walking back to the car one of the farmers was fiddling with his tractor.  I stopped and asked how the crops were looking this year.  “It’s another bumper crop!” he responded with a great big grin.  I said to him, “It must be great to see life grow and blossom year after year?”  He responded, “Yea, I guess it’s the Lord’s work.”  I was now standing in the middle of the road I looked left to Tom and Renae’s gravestone, and right to my new farmer friend who was working the land in order to create new life in the spring. At that moment I remembered visiting the Sewings on their farm and seeing the light stream across the corn fields.  I remember playing with Tom and Renae and they were so joyous, running madly over the lawn in front of the farm house, laughing, calling, yelling, and panting for breath.  What energy, what spirit and what happiness!  What did we then care about death? As I walked back to the car I looked one last time at my farmer friend.  Ah, yes the work of the Lord, no more true words have ever been spoken. The car turned to the left and then to the right back onto the highway.  It was time for a nice cocktail or two or three, and a wonderful Omaha steak.  Then something struck me as a type of finality and closure for this life affirming experience.  I was not thinking about Tom and Renea in the grave or about my farmer friend across the road harvesting the old and planning to create new life in the spring.  A strange connection struck my fancy as I thought of the insects which make their homes both in the graveyards and fields across the globe.  I thought how in the midst of life and death, in the midst of creation and destruction the simple murmur of insects is constantly calling to their mates, this unseen to the human eye, yet creates a powerful life force just the same which is God given, that we see this same force also in human beings when lover’s pass through eager and lowered eyes also thinking themselves unseen, a noble madness courses calling to their mates through clasped hands and touching lips.  I thought as the sun finally settled behind the magnificent panorama of the western Iowa sky and as the diligent farmers kept up their vigil of work that the other lesson this funeral director has learned is this; Life wins.

“Without participation in rituals or the appropriation of the elements which it mediates, the human person faces psychological conflict, personality impairment, and estrangement from the inner self and outer society. Correspondingly, hollow or weak rituals will threaten the ability of the “pseudo-species” to incorporate new members and maintain a stable existence in the flow of history. Neither individuals nor communities can survive psychologically without ritual.”

Erik Erickson

Well that is a mouth full, is it not? Of course Erickson is correct and his statement has powerful implications to the funeral service profession, because without overstating the case if the rituals of the funeral are dropped or vanish then the activities of the funeral profession revert quickly to being that of body disposers, which is a terrible unattractive possibility. Funerals and rituals go hand in hand; they always have and hopefully always will. With this ritualistic water mark in mind let us examine the DNA of the impact of death rituals on the human being.

Research in archaeology and anthropology over the last years has continued to illuminate on the meaning and value of rites, rituals and ceremonies. It now has become clear that our historic ancestors had acquired deep insights into their emotions and the needs which these emotions produce in the experience of living and finding meaning to life. With a primitive spontaneous form of wisdom they developed the ritualistic processes which could meet those needs.

This has led many who are interested in such work to a new and more meaningful exploration of the nature and meaning of rituals of various sorts, and for our purposes the funeral ritual in particular. This type of inquiry has made it possible for us to identify ritual activities as basic therapeutic resources for meeting the various dramatic, traumatic, and life altering crisis which are a constant companion for every human being of earth. In fact, most rituals are precisely built around the potentially dramatic and traumatic events or life changing circumstances that are a part of normal living.

It seems that primitive humans with a deep and basically choice less respect for their feelings sought ways of venting them when the circumstances of life placed those feelings under great stress. This type of folk wisdom seemed well on its way to being lost when psychologists and other personality experts like Geoffrey Gore, Erik Erickson, Rollo May and Lawrence Abt began to study these rites, rituals and ceremonies in depth and discovered that they may be the most valid and easily accessible resources available to dealing with crisis in human experience.

Years ago I read Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. In this book Toffler pointed out that the old or ancient ways of doing things have a value that has too often been lost in the hurry and “keep up with the Jones’” approach to modern life. When 25% of California move out and 25% of California’s population moves in during one calendar year, when cell phones create over connection, when instant gratification is not only expected but demanded, it becomes quite obvious that many old ways of doing things will be and have been pulled up by the roots and tossed aside as humanity races from one phantom to another.

Patterns of behavior which have been handed down from generation to generation have implicit in their structure a meaning that can be understood and acted upon by people who are in stress. Those who surround them can also appreciate the role they play in the acting out processes, and this makes it easy for them to enter into the therapeutic activity without even realizing what they are doing.

So what have the student’s of rites, rituals and ceremonies discovered to be the ingredients of this economical healing process that is implicit in acting out behaviors? It appears that acting out behaviors and activities have four common ingredients that are significant and which particularly apply to the funeral ritual. There is first meaning; second message; third group support; and four total involvements.

Let’s examine each of the four. The meaning of a ritual is often not implicit in what is being observed. Rather the meaning is something that is learned and acquired both directly and indirectly. If one were to depend entirely on rational examination of the ritual process one would find that not my help would be forthcoming in the way of understanding. If we were to watch a group of people filing past a casket, praying at a funeral or attending a Funeral Mass, we would find it difficult to make any sense of what we were observing. In fact much of it would seem quite stupid. Think this out logically for a moment. A bunch of grown-up people walking in silence staring at a dead person who cannot communicate could seem senseless. But for people who understand the symbolism of the dead body, the history of the relationship to the deceased, these people can and do enter into the ritual process with great depth of meaning, and hence the funeral can be one of the more meaningful moments in ritual acting out activities.

Much of our life is made up of little rituals that are so integral a part of everyday activities that we do not begin to realize their origin or appreciate their meaning. For instance when we meet a stranger and are introduced one of the first things we do is extend an open palm for a handshake and say “How do you do?” Can you think of a more meaningless question? “What do you do?” perhaps or, “Where do you come from?” “How do you do?” How do you do what? Do whom? However in reality the meaningless question has been filled with meaning as the proper opening remark in a human encounter and so we accept it not for its exact meaning but rather in its implicit meaning.

Those who are skilled at understanding human behavior can start with a simple handshake and begin to add insight and meaning almost immediately. The limp handshake means one thing and the firm handshake another. The clammy handshake says something quite different from the dry palm. The warm and cordial greeting is expressed in one way and the reserved and hostile approach shows up as clearly in ways that are just as easily interpreted by the person who has had some practice.

Some rituals seem quite unreasonable and yet they are so socially meaningful that they are a valued part of life. Imagine three hundred thousand fans gathered at the Indianapolis Speedway to watch drivers risk life and limb by going around a track hour after hour and going at such speeds that the observers only get to see the race cars for a few second. Imagine tennis fans watching as sweating people bat a ball back and forth over a net endlessly for hour after hour after hour. Imagine eleven husky bruisers assembled in battle array to assault eleven other representatives of institutions of higher learning slamming into each other hour after hour chasing an awkward looking ball and for what purpose? Well not to establish intellectual superiority but rather to move that piece of awkward looking inflated animal hide around a carefully manicured stadium for a couple of hours or so. Nonrational? Irrational? Illogical? Of course, but the meaning is not in the reason but in the acquired sense of what is important in the ritualized acting out of the event.

This acquired meaning can be used for fun and fames or it can be employed, as in funeral rituals, for important therapeutic processes such as the acting out of the deep emotions that come with acute grief and the death of an important person in any individual’s life. What at first seems like an absurd process (viewing dead people, lining cars up which move extremely slowly, etc.) may just be the most important form of emotional release that is available to the bereaved and distressed persons. I have for a long, long time felt that critics of funeral activities have missed this point entirely. Lawrence Abt indicates that these rituals give people a chance to act out feelings that are too deep to put into words, and that the absence or diminution of the rituals creates the repression of the emotion of grief. When looked at in this light the apparently meaningless ritual begins to take on a new perspective and quite a different value.

The meaning of rituals is acquired out of a need to cope with the deeper feelings of life. Here probably more so than in most conditions of human communication, the medium is the message. In other words when words fail people implements rituals. The ritual process tells something important to those who are initiated into the social significance of rituals. This is not difficult to see in the least. When one rides past a church and sees many decorated cars, limousines and a woman in a long white flowing gown and men standing around with their hands in their pockets in formal black attire, no one has to identify that the ritual going on is a wedding. Everyone knows that and part of the message is that there is almost universal acceptance of the nature and meaning of the ritual event.
Similarly a long row of black cars following a special car filled with flowers and another special type of motor coach carrying a casket tells everyone that someone has died and that what is going on is a funeral, a special ancient ritual designed to help meet the needs of those who are in acute grief. The message is acted out in such a way that there is instant recognition of the process. Part of the importance of the ritual acting is that there is a minimum need for explanation and those who choose may participate with understanding that is acquired by an all encompassing process that needs no words to interpret it.

The reason rituals carry the type of message they do is that people would have difficulty putting their thoughts and feelings into words unless there were forms of ritualized expression that helped to say it for them. Most human being are not orators or poets and when involved with drama/trauma events if put on the spot are speechless. The more emotional stress surrounding a human event the most people have difficulty putting their thoughts and feelings into words. Hence ritualized behavior is a safety net of sorts; the ritualized behavior comes in handy because it makes it easier to become a part of a supportive group without the responsibility of saying or doing something profound. The funeral ritual then becomes a time for acting out the feelings that may be difficult if not impossible to put into words. Someone else comes with the words.

All my career people who have participated in a funeral ritual but did not utter one word have reported to me what a one in a life time experience the service was, how much better they felt, and that they had great peace of mind; and the person simply sat throughout the entire acting our process, but felt absolute involvement in a very dramatic way with the proceeding. Such is the possibilities of the funeral ritual.

Funeral rituals are usually, or should be, rich in symbolism. In the symbolic forms of expression a variety of nonverbal ways of expressing feelings come into action. The wedding used special attire, special music, special decorations and special settings and special words. Funeral rituals use the same nonverbal expressions. The varied language forms that are the function of art add to the meaning of mere words the special significance that would be attributed to the event.

Every culture from the primitive to the most sophisticated seems to use these forms or ritualized expression to surround important events in life.

The ritual process is vitally important to group life, especially when there are life crises. The ritual gives an opportunity for expressing the feelings of the group in some organized and acceptable way. Everyone senses the meaning and message of the event and in effect finds it an easy way of joining in and saying “Those are me beliefs too.”

A form of social insurance exists in group rituals. When those with special needs are supported by the group, they are impelled at other times to return the support. For instance, those who attend a funeral ritual or wake are saying to the immediately bereaved, “You were doing this for me a few years ago when my emotional need was great. Now I am coming to your support when you need me.” But more than that is said, for indirectly the communication says that, “I am the living evidence that it is possible to meet grief and move through it. Although it may seem unbearable at the time, there is a healing process that comes slowly and I verify it for you because I have survived and may be stronger because of my experience.”

The funeral ritual also creates the atmosphere within which it is proper and valid to express the appropriate emotions of the event. When emotions are repressed they ultimately find detours that may be a threat to a person’s health. When they are expressed in adequate form the release may have important therapeutic value. So the group support at a funeral provides what may not be available in any other way.

The funeral ritual also provides a form of total involvement that is important for working through the powerful emotions of grief. To try to cope with strong feelings through a limited process such as intellectualization, rationalization or sterilization of the event may do more harm than good for the denial of feelings may lead to their repression and adverse forms of acting out or rather worse acting in. Much illness apparently can be traced to the unwise handling of the feelings by various forms of denial.

The funeral ritual affirms feelings and encourages the total expression of the person to what is happening in life. So my funeral rituals center about physical, mental, emotional and spirituals forms of some type of religious expression.

Interestingly enough, funeral rituals center about muscle activity which provide a way of involving the body in emotional expression. This is important for it gives nature a chance to act out the feelings through the normal forms of coping with excess glandular secretion. Most funeral rituals involve movement, a social form of muscle activity that is appropriate for the event.

Funeral rituals also have an emotional setting and provide a variety of emotional stimuli that makes it possible to express the feelings that are close to the surface but may be blocked by restraints and apprehensions. To unblock the impacted feelings may be the most important immediate task for those who are caught up in grief so overwhelming that it paralyzes the more normal modes of expression.

Often times the funeral ritual is entrusted to the religious institutions which gives an intellectual and spiritual perspective to what has happened. It uses philosophical and theological insight to fit the individual event into human history and our need for understanding both the meaning and the message that is implicit in the event of death.

After all that has been written in this article the main topic is the link the funeral ritual and practices to symbols of the collective unconscious as related to bereavement care. So we will start at the beginning. The oldest known evidence of ritual activity in the history of the human experience is the remnants of a funeral/burial ritual conducted in ancient Persia (today northern Iraq) sixty thousand years ago. Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of an ancient burial ground in the Shanidar cave. Here they found seven human remains carefully covered with the shoulder blades of elk, placed in the fetal position, surrounded with food stuffs. Also there were found in concentrated little piles what proved to be the flower pollen from twelve different flowers which were placed around each dead body as tributes. All in all this discovered reflected the basic constituents of the funeral ritual of today, in other words dealing with loss through ritual and verification of ideas that give perspective to individual death in some type of cosmic context.

Through the sixty thousand intervening years there has been a constant need for verification of the value of life and a need to confront openly and honestly the impact of physical death. Phillippe Aries has described these processes in the History of Christendom and shows how the attitude toward life is reflected in the practices that are employed at the time of death. When life had been highly valued, the funeral ritual gave significance to the person who had died and surrounded the funeral ritual with dignity, meaning and time. When life had lost its social significance the funeral rituals were reduced or eliminated altogether as was witnessed in the barbarities of the Nazi prison camps concerning a reverential care of the dead.

If the funeral ritual is an index of cultural attitudes it is important for us to assess the trends of our day in relationship to the acting out processes incident to the death of an individuals. Two trends are evident in out day. One would reduce or eliminate the funeral rituals and clearly reflect the secularized and materialistic mood of the day. The other would build on the discoveries of researchers and therapists which clearly indicate the need (more magnified today than ever) to manage wisely the deep feelings of grief and to use the possibilities contained in the ancient wisdom of funeral rituals for that purpose.

Over a thirty eight year career I have seen time and again the funeral ritual serving as the wise foundation to deal with grief. I have mapped our eight steps of funeral ritual activities which tend to follow the lived rituals of the death experience. These eight steps make it possible for the best insights of research to be implemented in a way that can give group support, aid in confronting reality through funeral rituals and also provide the emotional climate needed to express deep feelings.

The eight steps involve first, a death. Work with missing-in-action relatives indicates that it is difficult if not impossible to start the healthful process of mourning without verification of the death of the individuals who is supposed to be mourned. To start a funeral ritual without evidence of death is as difficult to manage as waiting endlessly for the verification that would seem to warrant the working through of the deep feelings.

Second is the process of notification of all who have a relationship to the deceased so that they may share in the funeral ritual and experience its therapeutic benefits. This is why obituaries are to vitally important to the significantly bereaved – it is their community cry for help, it is their way of saying to the community “Look what has happened to me!”

Third would be the confrontation with reality. This according to Dr. Erich Lindemann is the most important part of the psychology of the funeral ritual because confronting reality, and by only confronting reality are the barriers of denial broken with the result that more effectively than anything else this starts the true work of mourning. This is the moment of truth, no games, seeing is believing should it be in a private setting like the funeral home where conversation and expression of feelings can be encouraged without embarrassment.

Fourth is the support of the sustaining community, the family, friends, and colleagues. Here they share in the confronting of reality and thereby confirm it. They held to create the climate where real feelings are expressed rather than denied. If anything is a larger than life experience death would take first place.

Fifth is the funeral ritual in a formal sense where eyes are turned away from the physical remains so that spiritual resources can be verified and used as a resource for moving beyond the past into the future where the rest of life must lived. This is a special time for education concerning the spiritual nature of all life and the value of spiritual resources which acknowledge that life is more than simply a biological event. These special moments can help all persons to confront the reality of death and its meaning for those still alive. It can give a chance to do anticipatory grief work, at the same time that it is helping others do some of the unfinished grief work. The funeral ritual is a testimony to the value of life in the spirit. It also affirms that a life has been lived, valued, recognized and given up and in so doing enhances the value of all life. This is the time to embrace the cosmos and to begin to move beyond grief’s negativity. The funeral ritual starts this process of eventually transcending the pain of human loss.

Sixth is the final disposition of the physical remains. The earth burial or cremation completes the process of dealing with the physical aspects of death, but at the same time it verifies the hard fact that life continues and it this continuance we find the possibility for growth a hundred fold. When cremation is chosen it should not be a device to eliminate the therapeutic value of the funeral ritual but should whenever possible is used as an alternative to burial in the earth. It would have its logical place at this point in the funeral ritual and would be used instead of burial only and not as an alternative to the wisdom of the funeral ritual itself.

Seventh would be some form of ritualistic reentry for those who are acutely bereaved. This could be a return home for some form of group sharing, or perhaps a return to religious and/or philosophical activities which create new meaning in the process of the bereaved reinventing themselves. Perhaps it would involve special recognition on special anniversary dates, or special times at the cemetery. In effect it is an effort to stay with the acutely bereaved rather than an apparent abandonment of them at the time of the disposition of the dead human remains.

Eighth is continued connective with the bereaved in a professional sense. This goes to the core of funeral home aftercare programs, church bereavement support groups, and individual counseling of the bereaved. Remember as professional care givers in the death environment our choice is not whether or not we are going to counsel the bereaved, the only choice we have is whether or not our counseling will be wise, careful and helpful. This is to help the person do some of the important work in the process of long term mourning that can never be completely done in the funeral ritual. Here the sensitive professional or concerned friend can stay with the bereaved until it is clear that they have moved back in the direction of life, to the mainstream of life, rather than to remain caught up in the whirlpool of their grief.

When one considers the psychological movement that is basic to the wise management of acute grief it becomes clear that the funeral ritual acting out process is probably the most available, economical and most valid form of psychological and spiritual intervention that can be provided to the bereaved.