Dale-Time

So maybe my last few posts didn’t sit too well with some funeral directors. I get that. I may have pushed against the core beliefs of what much of the funeral industry professes these days. That the preparation and display of a dead body is vitally important to the grief process. That’s what we are taught in mortuary school. That’s what the NFDA traveling road show, “Good Death, Good Grief, Good Funerals”, with authors Thomas Long and Thomas Lynch is trying to preach to the public. That’s what we assume to be true since after all, we (the funeral industry) have been doing this successfully for 100 years. So we can’t be wrong, can we?

No, you aren’t wrong, completely. Just misguided. Society is not made up of people who all act and think the same. Dozens of different cultures, traditions, emotions, and norms exist. Where many funeral directors  are wrong is in assuming that there is just one “right” way to do things. That there are either/or answers to everything. Either you do things this way or you’re in trouble.

As a fourth generation funeral director much of what I learned was passed down from the generations before. Get things done now because you might get 3 new calls tonight. Put the flags on the right hand side of the cars so you can open the doors for the ladies at the cemetery. Tilt the head to the right so people can see the face. Don’t pre-judge people. Make sure the casket is centered on the church truck. And dozens of other tricks of the trade.

My father and grandfather were compassionate and treated people with care. They had a wonderful talent of mixing in humor at just the right time to make people feel very comfortable. I like to think I learned some of that from them.  They ran great funerals. The whole crew performed like a well oiled machine.

But as I reflect back on things they said, I don’t remember them ever talking about grief. Ever.

Our job was to make things happen. Our job was make things look good. Our job was to do things for people so they didn’t have to think about the details. And when we did all of those things it allowed the people to be with their family and friends and share stories. And that is what’s important. Because when people gather together and share the stories it heals their hearts.

So if the rest of the funeral industry wants to spend all their time and money trying to convince people that they need to do things like we used to do them because it will help them with their grief recovery, go right ahead.

But I’m going to spend my time watching what people are doing and listening to what they say. Then I’m going to invest my resources into providing the products and services that they are asking for. So when they say “Just cremate me and then throw a party” I can say to them “That’s great. I know just how to help you with all the details of that party. Let me show you what I can do for you.”

I’m Dale Clock. Thanks for listening.

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I think that funeral homes should stay out of the grief business.

For the last 20 years many funeral homes have been providing Grief support and education to the families that call on them. They have been doing this as a value added service in the hopes that if they could educate the public about the value that traditional funeral service has towards healthy grief recovery then people will choose more traditional services (ones that include public visitation and viewing of the body). But much to the funeral home’s dismay, this is not working. People continue to move away from traditional funeral services to less viewing, less visitation, do-it-yourself memorial services or doing nothing at all. So why is this happening?

Two Basic Reasons.

1. Because the public has already been educated by 50 years of attending traditional funeral services. And what a growing percentage of the public has learned is that they don’t like traditional funerals and they don’t get enough value from them to justify the cost.

2. Greater acceptance by our society of cremation with no public viewing caused a greater demand for cremation which created a greater supply of crematories which continues to grow the acceptance of cremation in our society. It’s straight forward supply and demand economics.

In other words “When society allowed folks to choose something other than traditional funeral services,  they did.”

I do not think that most people need or even desire to view a dead body unless it is someone they have a close relationship with. I do believe it is good for family to see the body, at some point, because it definitely brings reality to the fact that death has occurred and it does help them work through the initial shock of the loss. But the general public and the majority of folks that come to visitations and services, don’t “need” to see the body.

Yet Funeral Service continues to focus on the public viewing of the dead body and the pomp and circumstances of a traditional funeral service as essential to healthy grief recovery.

This is the logic flow. (here is my computer programming background coming out) If healthy grief recovery requires viewing the dead body and Traditional Funeral Services involves public viewing of the dead body and Traditional Funeral services are sacred, solemn, serious and contemplative events, Then healthy grief recovery needs to include public viewing of the body at a serious Traditional Funeral Service, or Else there will be no healthy grief recovery.

The initial statement is just not true. Viewing is not “Required” for healthy recovery. It can help, it can be desired and it can be part of your traditions. But it is not “required”. Millions of people, who don’t view a body, recover from the loss of a loved one just fine. And when funeral service “Tells” people under the guise of educating the public that they must view the body “or else” the public gets offended. Funeral service is telling people who don’t want to view that they are “Wrong”. The results of this has been a growing movement away from traditional funeral services because a growing number of people don’t want to be told what to do.

What the public wants is for funeral service to listen to them and help them do what they are asking for. And every single person in funeral services has heard it again and again.

“Just bury me in the back yard or cremated me and then have a party”.

It’s time we started listening and helping folks do just that. And stop trying to tell them what to do.

In my next post I’ll talk about how I think funeral service should do that.

I’m Dale Clock. Thanks for listening.

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I think that over the last 20 years the funeral business has drifted away from their true purpose toward the business of grief. This move was typically justified by the altruistic reason of educating then public, but there was always an underlying financial reason for the move too. (you know what they say “follow the money”) Let me review a little history to show how this movement started.

The funeral business can be essentially divided into two parts. 1. The transportation, preparation, and final disposition of the dead body. 2. The planning, coordination, supervision and production of Events associated with the death of someone.

For the first 100 years of the funeral business in America those two parts were interconnected. That’s because our society and culture almost always had the dead body present at those events. Funeral homes focused on serving the family by doing a great job of preparing the body and then handling all the details of the events; the visitation, funeral, procession, burial, and even providing chairs and stuff for the gathering afterwards. We also sold products (caskets and vaults) necessary for those events. Grief recovery and emotional support were provided by family, friends and church.

On the financial side in the beginning we (funeral homes) charged people one price for everything we did and the products we provided. Over time people started to equate the price of the funeral with the Casket itself. Changes in laws and business practices eventually caused funeral homes to start charging for individual items of service, facilities, equipment and merchandise. But the funeral homes still heavily relied on the sale of the merchandise for income instead of adequately charging people for the true cost of providing the services and facilities for the events that we handled.

Then came along the late 1960’s and, like all of American society, the funeral business started to change. Cremation started to become more acceptable which brought about events without a body present. People started moving away from organized religion and customs. Books were written on the stages of grief and the high cost of funerals in America. The Hospice movement started to take hold.

By the 1980’s the comfortable routine (and income) of the funeral business, which really hadn’t changed in over 75 years, was rapidly going away. Merchandise sales were declining. People were having gatherings on their own or skipping them all together. Viewing the body wasn’t important to many people. This all started causing financial challenges at the funeral homes.  Many funeral directors just wanted things to go back to the way they were, instead of accepting that attitudes had changed and they needed to adapt to the new way of things.

At the same time several authors and other folks started to focus on the aspects of grief and loss. These authors and companies were very supportive of what traditional funerals provided towards, what they deemed as, healthy grief recovery. So naturally, a very symbiotic relationship formed between the grief folks and the funeral industry. Funeral Homes figured if they could only educate the public about the healthy psychological effects that funerals had on people, then the public would hopefully return to more traditional ways or at least use the funeral home that focused more on grief care (aftercare)  than the funeral homes that didn’t. Plus the grief folks were more than happy to provide seminars, printed materials and other services (for a fee) to help the funeral homes do this.

So hundreds of funeral homes around the country started Aftercare Programs, Holiday Memorial Services, Grief Support groups, newsletters and a plethora of other activities to show their care and concern for the mental well being of the communities they serve. As a whole, Funeral Homes did this because they truly are caring folks by nature, but they also hoped it would help their business to grow and continue. I know this to be true because I did all of this with the best of intentions. And so did several other area funeral homes. And then the churches did the same, and the Hospitals and the local Hospice organizations. Now people can get grief support, education and classes from a dozen different groups in my area.

With all this grief education going on you would think that the public would be choosing traditional funeral service more. But the opposite is happening. Cremation is the rule now instead of the exception. Public viewing of the body happens much less. Many people are having services and gatherings at their homes, restaurants, VFW’s and clubs without involving the funeral home staff. Minimal (low priced) Cremation businesses are cropping up all over the country.

So why didn’t this work? Why are people continuing to move away from traditional services? In my next blog I’ll give you some of my thoughts on why this happened and where I think funeral homes should go now.

I’m Dale Clock.  Thanks for listening.

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As a Funeral Director, is it my job to tell people how to grieve? Is it my job to educate people about the stages of grief, the need for grieving, the different types of grief, or the dangers of not acknowledging one’s grief? Is that why people should call me when a death occurs? Is that what people pay me for, emotional counseling?

These are questions that I have been asking myself lately. And the answer I keep coming up with is …….

NO!

I’m in the Funeral Business, not the Grief Business.

What I do does help people deal with the emotional loss of a loved one. But the focus of my job is not the actual emotional recovery of those people, but facilitating the events that contribute to that recovery.

People pay me to put on events. That’s what I do. That’s what Funeral Homes have always done. The emotional healing that occurs is a by-product of the event itself. It’s the gathering of people and the sharing of stories that heals the heart.

Just recently I read an article that quoted a student in mortuary school who stated “Our job is to lead people through the grief process. So, you have to have compassion, you have to really care.” That’s a pretty typical statement from people in the funeral service. The words caring and compassion are over used in hundreds of funeral home advertisements. Yes, it’s important to provide folks with compassionate care. But I think that the focus on the grief process and recovery, which has found it’s way into funeral service over the last 20 years, has taken us (funeral homes) away from what we have always been really good at; directing funerals (in other words – putting on events).

In my next entry I’ll talk about how I think funeral homes got into the grief business and why I think they need to get out of it to survive.

I’m Dale Clock. Thanks for listening

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A friend of mine who writes for the funeral industry is doing an article on how things have changed in the office at the funeral home. He asked me what I thought about the changes, what’s working, what’s not and what do I think is coming down the road in the future. So here are a few thoughts.

I am a systems guy. From my engineering degree, to my days in the Navy, to my being a devoted fan of Michael Gerber, the author of the E-Myth, I am a firm believer that if the system is in place and you train people to work in the system, things will work better. And there is no more important place to have good systems than in the office. Many of the systems that we use in our office at the funeral home were put in place decades ago and we still use the same basic structure today. The way we number our cases, the information we gather and the forms we use look very similar to the ones we used nearly 100 years ago. Yes, we gather additional information (fields) and store  it in different places (electronic files, pdf’s) but the process hasn’t changed a whole lot.

It’s all about access to information. The office has typically been the place where the information is stored and organized. And to get at that information you had to go to the office or talk to somebody who was there. Now with computers and the internet we can have access to that information anywhere we are. We also have access to much more information. And more information can be a good thing and a bad thing. Having too much information (showing 150 caskets on a kiosk, all with interchangeable corner pieces and cap panels) can be overwhelming. But if it is organized so people can narrow down their choices easily it can increase customer satisfaction.

What has been a big improvement for funeral directors is to have much more expansive lists of things available to them during the arrangement conference. By just clicking on a file folder on a monitor you can get church lists, florists, singers, phone numbers, pictures of merchandise, pre-arrangements, etc. The ability to quickly compose obituaries for proof reading is a big plus too.

For many years I have been trying to get a presentation program that works during the arrangement conference. As a manager with multiple directors talking to families, it’s my desire to make sure that there is a consistent delivery of information to each family. I always felt that if I could get a program on a screen that could help the directors deliver that information it would help. I looked at all of the programs developed by the casket companies first. As expected, they were always product oriented. Then I looked at the funeral data management programs. Those tended to be busy screens asking for too much information. Then we joined Life Story and we used their Today Presentation for a number of years. It had great information and graphic design but it didn’t flow the way we were used to talking to our families. And the program didn’t allow us to tweak it without going through the designers which always seemed to take forever because of the back and forth communications.

So last year I designed a program in PowerPoint. It wasn’t that hard to do. I have some basic knowledge of the program. The most important feature to designing this is the “hyperlink” control. It allows you specify a word, or graphic or box on the screen that when clicked on will take you to another page. My program allows my directors to use as little or as much of the program as they are comfortable with and what is needed for each individual family. It also includes all of our merchandise and packages. It has worked well so far and I can make changes to when ever I need to. It’s still a work in progress and I could use someone with a better eye for graphic design to clean it up for me.

What I haven’t developed yet is a way to use this technology to better show what it is we (the funeral home & staff) do and what we can provide. I believe that with the use of video and short slideshows/commercials (2 minutes or less) we can easily show families the options and possibilities along with showing just what the funeral home does behind the scenes and why they should consider using us for all of their “gathering/funeral/memorial service/celebration” needs.

I also believe that once these short “info-mercials” are done they could be shown on lobby video screens, kiosks, online and also put on to DVD’s that can be given to people during pre-arrangements and in any info packets.

The other part of the office that has changed dramatically is the production of printed material. When I first started in funeral service  we had one register book, one memorial folder with the 23^rd psalm on it and took everything to the printer where it was type set. Now we have custom books and folders and color printers and scanners and web pages and slide shows and videos. So many different options it can make you head spin. For us, we have taken much of this work out of the office and created a whole separate job description. We also created a whole separate location in the building where all the print/video production is done. Yet for some smaller funeral homes this is probably still done in the main office which just adds to the list of things the secretary/office person has to do.

The amount of “stuff” that the office will be responsible for will only continue to grow. Doing things digitally instead of in person will continue to grow; death certificates, billing and payments, body identification and tracking, video conferencing during the funeral arrangements, video recording and broadcasting of the service. Online obituaries will eventually eliminate the printed version.

So as I stated above, it’s all about access to information. The funeral home office will continue to be in charge of getting, storing and distributing that information. The technology they use to do that is changing which allows the office to work with more information than they ever have before. It’s the same job just more stuff.

I’m Dale Clock. Thanks for listening.

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