Don’t worry, I’m going to write a post about the ways the funeral industry has succeeded.  But for now, here are ten ways we’ve failed. One.  Disconnected from Community This is where things start to go horribly wrong. If you don’t have a personal investment in the community, if you don’t love the customers you […]

    I wrote this blog post four years ago.  The photo I used in that post had wee little Jeremiah resting on my chest.  Four years later, and Jeremiah occasionally comes to the funeral home “to help dead people”.  Times have changed — for one, my hairdresser now trims my eyebrows — but these […]

One.  Can I ask you a weird question? THERE ARE NO WEIRD QUESTIONS.  Dying, death and death care are clouded in a sense of mystery.  After our loved ones die, they’re whisked away by the hospital staff, or by a funeral director.  Once at the funeral home, the body is either transformed through embalming or […]

Over the course of my career as a funeral director, there have been a handful of times when I’ve had to call on my friends to help me with a removal.  All but one of my friends have answered my call with a, “Yes, I’ll help you.”  Driving to the deceased’s home provided me with just […]

Answers.com recently unpublished an article entitled “10 Terrifying Things About Funeral Homes You Didn’t Know”.  Although I appreciate attempts to talk about death and funerals (and I do appreciate the fact that they took the article down), the sensationalized “answers” in the article, which I put in quotation boxes, are much more concerned about garnering […]