don't shoot the messenger

Or: why funeral directors aren’t your enemy.

Disclaimer: For six years I worked in funeral service, first in communications for the national association for funeral directors and then later for its foundation. I entered my employment with little knowledge of who or what funeral directors are beyond my limited personal experiences. I left with a deep and profound respect for the caliber of individual called (yes, called) to this profession and for the greater funeral service community. It was an experience that forever changed me.

Which is why I get so, so angry when I see pieces like the most recent one in Money Magazine, which you can find here. It’s the same old tired story, which is frustrating in and of itself. Funeral services cost money, quelle surprise. They always have. Some cost a lot of money. Most don’t. We live in a society where everything costs money, and I fail to understand the disconnect over why it is that those who work in funeral service should be denied the right to be compensated for their time and talents. Hospice costs money. Doctors? They cost a lot of money. But we don’t question these things. The average cost of a funeral is less than one pays for pretty much any new car. It’s less than some of my friends have paid for sound systems in their houses. Why are we up in arms over paying $10,000 to bury, you know, our parents, but don’t blink at wedding costs that are now averaging $27,000? That says more about who we are as a people than it does what funeral homes charge to cover their services.

We live in an increasingly transient society, and the relationships that used to be the natural extension of living in community are in many cases tenuous at best. One of the direct results of this is that in many communities the local family-owned funeral home is largely an unknown quantity. Where everyone used to know who to go to in their time of need, many families now have no ties in the community to help direct them to the best resources, and because we live in a culture where so many of us put off thinking about death until the last possible minute, we haven’t taken the time to do the research ourselves.

But here’s the thing: the responsibility for all that is on our shoulders. Death can come when you least expect it, yes, absolutely, but death is always coming. There is no other end to our stories. So to ignore the mechanics of that process and then rely on a complete stranger and our own grief to make weighty decisions which we may second guess once we’ve moved out of those initial stages demands some level of personal accountability from the decision-maker. But all that aside? The “fleecing of the grieving,” or however it’s phrased in whatever iteration of this tired old story is making the rounds today simply doesn’t happen with the frequency the media wants us to believe it does.

In the six years I worked for those working in funeral service I learned so much about death and dying and the people who hold our hands as we walk our loved ones through that last journey. They are compassionate, committed people who believe in what they’re doing or they wouldn’t be doing it. The hours are long, the demands both physical and mental are significant, and the pay? Honestly, it’s not that great. More often than not they go out of their way to help families have a meaningful last goodbye, no matter what the budget is. There’s no price tag for that kind of experience, and there’s no way to quantify the power of those moments.

But we are scared to death of dying, and so we continue to cast aspersions on those whose chosen work requires they embrace it. For all the time I worked for them, I can count on one hand the negative experiences I encountered, but they are, after all, human, and no one’s perfect. (See also, they weren’t NFDA members.)

You want my practical advice for how to handle end-of-life decision-making? Don’t wait ‘til the end of your life to make those decisions. I’m not telling you to plan out your funeral or pay for it advance. But get to know your local funeral directors, and understand the full picture of what it is they can do for you. Understand that there will be costs involved and, if you can, put aside some money for the same. Talk to the people you love broadly about your wishes, but leave the details up to them. It’s how they will remember you, after all.

These are good and honest people, working in a profession that gets so little respect given the enormity of the work they do every day and every night. They walk with the dead and they carry the living through what is arguably the most painful of transitions. They help husbands bury their wives, mothers bury their sons. Old men and baby girls and what the rest of us push away and leave to nightmares they tenderly care for and serve because it is what they are called to do.

Yes, I’m biased, but any reasonable person that takes the broader view should be, too. God bless them, for all they do that we cannot. I get it, I do, a lot of our anger and fear about death and dying ends up on the shoulders of those who work with it. So let’s write stories about that issue. Let’s talk about that and acknowledge that our discomfort is about so much more than money. It’s time we moved beyond that. There are real and beautiful and powerful stories to be told about funeral service. Scratch the surface, that’s all it takes to find them.