Biography
- Part 3
 Todd W. Van Beck, left, and Patrick R. Downey, CCE, look "back to the future" at the 1998 ICFA Convention & Exposition, which they co-chaired. Looking at Funeral Service Today & Tomorrow ICFM: Did you find in your first job that mortuary school had prepared you well for what you encountered?Mortuary school didn't prepare me for what I was going to find as a funeral director. I don't think any collegiate experience could do that, and I don't think that it should. I think the experience of going to medical school, law school, mortuary school, seminary, what have you, is an academic exercise so you have minimal competency -- minimal competency -- as to what you're talking about. When you graduate, you've accomplished nothing other than being given a learner's permit. There are things you can't teach in school, things that come with time. What mortuary school did for me was, first of all, establish relationships. I found I like talking to and being in the company of learned people. It also proved to me that I had it, that I could master chemistry and microbiology. When I got the diploma from mortuary school, it was a rite of passage from my negative experience as a loser to someone who had bitten off a chunk of life by moving to Boston and survived and prospered. One of the greatest trends today, a trend I think is going to improve funeral service, is the massive and energetic entry of women into mortuary school and funeral service. It's the most positive thing that's happened to funeral service since they invented the electronic embalming machine. ICFM: Why? Number one, I believe the economy of the funeral has hit its saturation point. I believe you're going to see $65,000, $70,000 funerals here and there, now and then, with a solid bronze, plutonium, whatever casket. But I think the average person who's got $15,000 of insurance money will put in $8,000 to $10,000 on a funeral. I think that's fair. The average funeral even now is just $6,000. People spend a hell of a lot more on weddings than they ever do on funerals, I can tell you that. Everybody's bitching that they can't find any funeral directors, that nobody's going into funeral service today. Well, how come? "It's because the mortuary schools aren't doing their job." The mortuary schools! I'll tell you what it is. It's hard to sell funeral service as an option. People come to funeral service through a family who owns a funeral home, or they're born to do it as I was, or they've had an experience with death. You come to it. You don't go, "Oh, jeez, let's see, I could be a beautician, I could be a respiratory therapist -- or I could be an embalmer!" Participating in job fairs is a waste of time. You've got respiratory therapy, dental hygiene, funeral service, welding, whatever. Dental hygiene: "How much can you make a year?" "$35,000." "Oh, that's not too bad to start out with." Respiratory therapy: "How much do you make a year?" "$42,000 a year." "Starting out?" "Yeh." "Whoa, that's pretty good." Welder: "How much do you start out at?" "$25 an hour." Funeral service: "How much do you start out at?" "$21,000." "Well, that sucks!" But you only have to be available 24/7. Yeh. You take vacation when we tell you to, blah, blah, blah. I have great concern that funeral home owners are not going to, by and large, cough up the extra $20,000 it's going to take to attract men and women into funeral service. But I think that when Jean Doe's last kid graduates from high school and she's looking for a second career and her husband is making $135,000 a year at Prudential, if she goes to mortuary school she will be satisfied with a $22,000 a year salary. Now, I don't think it's fair, but I think it's what's going to happen, because it's already happening. Second thing, regardless of the pay scale and the chauvinism that exists in funeral service, women perform just as well as funeral directors as men do. If you look at the very nature of funeral service, and you talk in Jungian terms of the anima and the animas, funeral service is much more feminine in its worldly environment than masculine. Machoism has little room in funeral service. That's why there are so many gay funeral directors, because they are more in touch with their feminine side. Just look at the nature of the work: You have to set up flowers, you have to know how to do hair, you have to be able to put on cosmetics, dress people in beautiful clothing, you have to be able to listen very nicely to people, you have to be naturally kind to people. Those are all historically characteristics of the feminine side of our nature. I applaud it, and as a matter of fact, my recruitment strategy for the mortuary school is we're going after women. I'm going to set up a program where I'm going to convince Jean, who's looking for a second career, that this is where she ought to go. It will keep funeral home owners happy, because they're not going to cough up this $50,000 a year salary, and it will keep Jean happy because she's got now a mission in her life. And women seem to stay in it longer than men do. I think that's all good. And eventually, I think what's going to happen is that all these folks who are tight with the money are going to leave and the Jean Does of the world will emerge as the managers and potential owners of these funeral homes. Then you're going to see, I think, a change in the salaries and the attitude toward service, if the women and the men who are in touch with their pastoral, feminine side, continue to be attracted to funeral service. I believe that's a fairly accurate prophesy. Of course, in history, most prophesies have one thing in common -- they've all been wrong. What do you think funeral directors need to do to stay relevant? I think they need to determine who they are. Are they grief counselors or are they event planners? Are they marketers or are they ministers? And I'm not so sure the title is as important as the activity. Quite candidly, sometimes I think we ought to just go back to the term "undertaker" and strip away these pretentions. I'll give you a couple things I think need to happen. We need to have a licensing, credentialed structure for cemeterians. If Noble, Georgia, taught us anything, it's that cremationists, cemeterians, funeral directors and anybody who deals with the actual body needs to have monitoring, accountability and a system of communication, and they need to be trained. They need to be educated. On the funeral side, I think we have to push for a minimum of a bachelor's degree in mortuary science; I just believe that with all my heart. Not a bachelor of arts in English or history, but in mortuary science. And if we have to take a hit on employment, well, we're taking a hit already. We shouldn't reduce requirements, which is what's now in the hopper. I don't think everybody should get to be a funeral director, just as not everybody should get to be a priest or a rabbi. What do you think cemeteries and funeral homes should concentrate on? Personalization and getting families to not view cremation as final disposition? Yes, of course I agree with that. I vote for anything that will help the family. I believe the intention with personalization is honorable and good, but I think it could be more sophisticated than it is. I want to sound like an old undertaker here. All the credible studies done about bereavement care and the work of the funeral home have clearly identified through the study of hundreds of bereaved people -- I've read nothing to the contrary -- that seeing the dead, prepared body is the most therapeutic aspect of the funeral. It is the crowning achievement of the funeral home because it establishes the most basic premise of healthy bereavement, which is the reality of the death. Personalization? How much more personal can you get than looking at the dead body of your husband, or looking at the dead body of your son or daughter? So I have to adhere still to the preparation of the body, the beautification of the dead, as being where the substance of the psychology of healthy mourning starts, because without confronting the reality of death, the theories are all pretty conclusive that the bereavement journey is significantly slowed down. Now, I love the picture boards, the memorial tables. I think they're very good -- who can argue with them? I think they take a lot of creativity and time, and that's all good. We need time and creativity in funerals. There are too many abbreviated funerals, too many one-hour visitations before the funeral -- risky behavior. But I am concerned about the frequency with which these items are used, and I sometimes wonder if we are mixing memorialization with marketing too much. "I'm going to memorialize my dead husband by having his name engraved on a little water fountain." "I'm going to personalize this funeral by having wind chimes with his name on it." I worry that our personalization is done with a "thing" more than with an experience. I don't think anybody's come up with a replacement for the moment of truth when a bereaved family comes in and for the first time they see their husband and he's not breathing, he's not talking, he's not walking, he's not seeing, he's not hearing, he doesn't get hungry and he doesn't have to go to the bathroom. He is significantly different than he was last night at the hospital. But just because he's dead doesn't mean he's not human. I've got to tell you, it pangs me when I see us moving away from that almost indescribable moment when families confront the reality of death. When I was in mortuary school, Dr. Erich Lindemann, who did the famous Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire study, came to speak. He was about 95 then, and he was asked, "What is the most significant work a funeral home does?" And he looked at us and said, "You don't know? It's when families establish the reality of death. That's it. That's what you're there for. To get it into their brains that their husband is dead. The ceremony and the ritual all work with that idea, but seeing is believing." And I think the key to a career in funeral service is not academic excellence, it's the sense of character you have as a human being. The key is the mission you are set upon. Funeral service is not Harvard, it is Hometown, USA, Jones Funeral Home who's buried grandpa and grandma and Aunt Frieda and Uncle Henry. They don't give a damn whether you went to college. They care that the bodies look nice and the guys and gals at the funeral home are nice to them. There's that conduit between the local funeral director and the relationships he or she builds. And I don't have any fear about it, all this doom and gloom stuff about the profession. As far as funeral service goes, I truly think that the best years of it are around the corner, because of what's in the funeral director's heart. Coming up in Part 3, Continued
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