Biography
- Part 2
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Learning the Business of
Life and Death VAN BECK: I went to work for a funeral home in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The funeral home also was the headquarters for the county coroner's office, which in Wyoming still to this day is an elected office. You don't have to be a doctor to be the coroner; anybody can do it - it's like running for sheriff. In Wyoming, the funeral directors always ran for coroner. It was a wild, wild experience. There's one way to be born, but there's a million and one ways to die. If your imagination can conceive of it, it's probably happened, when it comes to death. ICFM: In your online Newsweek interview about the HBO series "Six Feet Under," you said you didn't find the deaths portrayed in the opening scenes far-fetched. VAN BECK: Oh, absolutely not! There was one case where the wife was 93, and I walked in that house and the odor, it was - her husband had been dead for a month. He'd been dead in her bed a month, and she didn't know it. She couldn't smell the odors. She didn't understand why he didn't get up and make her coffee. We had a suicide once where the kid shot himself and then they found out later his brother had killed himself the year before, and for Christmas, the father had given the younger son the rifle the older kid had shot himself with. Well, what kind of message is that? We had a case one time where a man and his girlfriend got all tooted up on cocaine. They had a 3-year-old who was raising hell, so they chained the kid to a radiator and went to see a movie. Before they left, they turned the thermostat up to its highest setting. The kid was baked when they got back. I'm all for this "God is good" concept, and "The world's a beautiful place," but there's another side to the world. I knew early on that evil truly existed, and I saw it in the funeral business on a number of occasions. We lived in Cheyenne a year and a half. I had a chance to buy two funeral homes in eastern Iowa, so I did that and had some success, I guess. I loved sitting down and talking to the families about how they were feeling and what we could do to help them. I did better analyzing and writing about and teaching some of the other aspects of it. I bought my first funeral homes when I was 23 years old, in 1975, and had them for seven years. During that time, Dr. Jackson came out to Iowa on a couple of occasions and gave some seminars and sort of planted the idea that I ought to look at doing something at a national level. In the midst of that, in 1982, my wife left me, leaving me a single parent to our 3-year-old son, Thomas. ICFM: Did going through that change your view of funeral service? VAN BECK: I think every loss experience I've had in my life has helped me as a human being, and if I improve myself as a human being, then I automatically am more productive as a funeral director. My wife's exit meant not only that I had to wrestle with my own self-esteem - you go through the feeling that you"re a troll and all that - I also made a conscious decision that as best I could, if I was going to make a mistake, I would do it on the side of kindness and forgiveness and being nonjudgmental, rather than on the side of mendacity and meanness and judgment of people. So it taught me a sense of wisdom about relating to people. I think it also taught me not to put all my eggs in one basket, and to be very careful about who I really open up to. I used to think that I'd just open up to everybody, tell them my whole damn story, and what I found was, there are people out there who when they find out your buttons and they get ticked at you, they'll start pushing 'em. And the only way for that not to happen is for you not to play all your cards. ICFM: How was it being a single parent? VAN BECK: I'd like to say I did the best I could with him, but there were times I was so damn aggravated with him I wanted to throw him out the window. So I look at him and think, "Did I do the best I could with him?" He's a good young man. He's in Cincinnati; he works three jobs. Subjects he's interested in, he's very much like me - he doesn't learn them, he commands them. But, he's like I am - there are only three or four subjects I qualify on, and with anything else it's, "Jeez, you got me." He's very attractive - got his looks from his mother, there's no doubt about that. And he has a charming way about him. Always was a funny kid, always was humorous and would say things just out of the blue. I remember one time we went down to Shillitos to buy him tennis shoes when he was maybe 3 1/2. This old lady clerk who'd been there for a million years brings out these two pairs of tennis shoes, both $19.95. One is blue and one red. I say to him, "Tom, just choose. It doesn't make any difference which one you take, they're the same price." He goes, "Oh, daddy, I don't know." I say, "Well, which ones do you like?" He hems and haws, and hems and haws, and the clerk is standing there staring at us. Finally Tom looks at me and goes, "Well, I think I'll take those [very bad word] over there." That old lady gave me this look like, "By god, I'm calling Social Services!" He always did that kind of stuff - never a dull moment. And I guess I was happy to have raised him by myself. I certainly found that it was different - I didn't know any other man who was a single parent in those days. While I was raising him, I also went to seminary. From '82 to '87, I went to Mount St. Mary's Seminary and got a master's degree. ICFM: Were you intending to enter the ministry? VAN BECK: No, I was intending to improve my skills as a funeral director. I determined that the mortuary education was OK, but if I wanted to get more in depth in the world of death and loss - not grief, I think I've got that down - but death, I had to go to another level, and that was seminary. I went five years at night and got a master's degree, and it's been very helpful, it's given me a lot of credibility with the clergy. When I do a seminar, they don't really know sometimes what to do with a funeral director who's gone to seminary. I haven't run into many clergy who have gone to mortuary school. ICFM: What did you learn about death at the seminary? VAN BECK: I learned the theology of death. I learned what that particular approach had to say about it. It was a Catholic seminary. I'm not Catholic, but it was the only seminary in Cincinnati and I needed a master's. I think the seminary experience got me to a point that I knew that I was doing the Lord's work. I had identified my ministry at 5 years old: funeral service. In seminary it clicked as to why I admired Albert Schweitzer so much and became his disciple. My ministry's not as dramatic as his by any stretch of the imagination, but I often thought there was something beyond the drama of his story that always attracted me to him, and not just because he was a scholar and a prolific writer. Then when I was in seminary I began to understand. Schweitzer said that everyone can create their own Lambarene, which was the name of his hospital in Gabon. I first thought, "I'm not a doctor, how can I create a Lambarene?" And then I began to understand that what he meant was my career is a Lambarene. The lives I touch and the lives that touch me create a Lambarene, a place where kindness is superior to meanness, and goodness is superior to bad things. In seminary I came to a good awareness that my ministry was funeral service, that we're all called to ministry. I'd been doing it but didn't know it. They labeled it for me. And quite frankly, after what happened with the Loewen Group, if it hadn't been for that faith that I was doing something bigger than myself and my view of funeral service as ministerial, I really don't know if I would have survived that. ICFM: When did you go to work for Loewen? VAN BECK: In '87, I moved to New York to run a mortuary school, Hudson Valley Community College. Then in '91, I got a job at Loewen and I was with them until '99, almost 10 years, and it was a ride. When I joined them, they had 100 funeral homes in the United States and 60 funeral homes in Canada, and when I left they had 1,000 funeral homes in the United States and 100 funeral homes in Canada.  Van Beck teaching ICFM: You were doing education? Training? VAN BECK: I was doing it all. We had it structured so that everybody kind of did everything. But I was in training, education. It could have been, and it should have been, and it would have been, a great, great enterprise, had the mission of funeral service not been ignored. But it eventually became ignored. It eventually moved from a position of talking about clients and communities almost to the attitude of, "Jeez, you know, wouldn't this be a great company if we didn't have all these damn funerals to do?" And that was the death knell. No one took responsibility for it, and there are episodes in my career I'm not particularly proud of, and I'll tell you what they are. There were meetings I went to that as a funeral director, I knew damn good and well in my soul that their decisions were sending families down the primrose path, and I kept quiet. It's probably one of the most shameful moments of my career. I was sitting there remembering the struggle of getting recognized, and there I was in board rooms in Manhattan with stock analysts from Salomon Smith Barney, and we're talking budgets of $500 million revenue. There were times that I knew I should have stood up, I should have jumped, I should have pouted, I should have stomped, I should have done anything to get their attention, even if they'd thrown my ass out. But I decided to take the easy road, and I kept my mouth shut. So everybody has a vested interest in the collapse of that company, because there were those of us who knew better who didn't speak up. I learned that when those who know better are silent, then you've left the road open to the ones who don't know better, and they're blissfully chugging down the road thinking they're going to die wealthy people. I tell you, it's amazing to me no one took their life over what happened with Loewen, people who had taken their funeral home equity in stock, and judas priest, stock went down to almost nothing. I fell into a three-year depression over the damn thing. I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy what happened at Loewen. Part 2, Continued
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