Todd W. Van Beck conducts a workshop at a funeral directors' conference in Roanoke, Virginia.

Looking at Funeral Service Today & Tomorrow

ICFM: Even with people being so transient, no longer in the community where their parents died and were buried?

No question the transience of the society has affected the activities of death care. I think funeral directors have to set some standards.

A former funeral association executive's story is a case in point. He was this stately, tall, grey-haired, well-spoken, dignified gentleman, the epitome of a funeral director. He looked like one, he talked like one. He and his wife died on the same day and they were both immediately cremated. And I looked at that and thought, "What the hell? What a crock -- you just created scads of problems for the rest of us."

Everyone says, "That's his right." I say, no, that's not his right; I draw the line at that. Because this man lived, breathed and slept funeral service, and when he died he didn't have a funeral. Give me a break. Where's the conviction, where's the belief?

Same thing with the future of funeral service. Funeral directors need to say, "This is not a disposition service, we are not a disposal service, we are a funeral home. And the reason we have the word 'funeral' on our sign is because we believe in the value of ritualistically and ceremoniously saying goodbye."

"Yeh, but we don't want to buy a casket."

"You don't have to buy a thing from us. As a matter of fact, if you're in that situation, we'll take care of you for free. If you're in that situation where money is an object, don't worry about it. But our standard at this funeral home is that nobody is entrusted to our establishment unless we have some type of recognition that this person lived their life."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Well, before we take your mother to crematory or the medical school or to the grave, at 1 o'clock tomorrow afternoon, we're going to have the folks who work here at the funeral home by the hearse, and we will say, 'This is the body of Mary Smith. She was born on February 15, 1910; she died March 4, 2003.' That's the funeral. We've acknowledged that someone has lived and they died."

Unless funeral directors start to move into that medical model of conviction, a professional conviction that the client is not always right, that we've been here for 75 years and we've got standards of our own that we uphold, I think they're going to get what they're getting now, because of the transience of the society. I know a few funeral directors who say to the families, "This is our standard at this mortuary." Families don't say, "Oh, you're just trying to sell us; we're calling somebody else." Most of them eventually say, "Can we come over and be there at 1 o'clock?"

ICFM: You talk a lot about the mission of service.

At Heafeys, I was very fortunate that I accidentally stumbled into a place with funeral directors who had a mission in life. This was not a business; this was a vocation, a calling. This was not profit margins; this was the Lord's work. And I personally still subscribe to that. I think one of the reasons funeral service has entered some of its rocky currents right now is because there is a diminution of the concept of mission. It's almost seen as an old-fashioned notion that you have a mission in life to care for the living and care for the dead, and that nothing is above that mission.

That mission is the guiding moral principal that gets you out of bed in the morning, that leads you to the decisions you make. You find your wealth in fulfillment of your mission, wealth gauged on a higher plane than just how many caskets can we sell, or how many preneed contracts.

I personally think that's where some of the rift comes between cemeterians and funeral directors. I've not heard many cemeterians talk about mission in my career. I've heard them talk of sales quotas, sales incentives, "We'll send you to Hawaii if you make this number." On the funeral side, I have certainly seen more of a mission-oriented approach that, "We're doing the work of the Lord here, and this is very important stuff for how our civilization is measured."

I can certainly understand why the funeral profession is sometimes accused of being too commercial. But maybe the entire American way of life might be judged as too commercial. You can look at the funeral and say, "Oh, I don't like that. It's stupid to have a solid bronze casket for $89,000." Yes, that's probably true. But it's also stupid to buy a platinum gold fountain pen at Tiffany's for $3,000 when a Bic at 69 cents is the same damn thing. So how do you weigh that out? I don't know if I have the answer.

Con Heafey was spit and polish. He viewed funerals as formal, reverential occasions. I'm sure he would not do well today, but there's still a side to me, when I go to these funerals -- particularly for children -- where they're serving candy apples and balloons and there's no lamentation, or the lamentation is camouflaged and the sorrow is abbreviated, and they're caught into the "Entertainment Tonight" type of funeral -- I worry about that. It's such an unproven and untested and at times reckless approach to grieving. My soul worries about that, because I wonder, "When do they lament their dead?"

At one funeral for a child who had died, they released 12 bunny rabbits into the wild, and I thouht, "OK, what's the metaphor there? The bunny is food for the snake? Is that it? Is it reincarnation? Is it the cycle of life? Was the bunny the child's favorite toy? No. Twelve bunnies, one for each year of the child's life? Yeh, that was it. But releasing them into the wild? Domesticated bunnies?" I didn't get it, and when I queried a minister on it, he didn't get it either.

In Con Heafey's world, death was this tremendous mystery, and there was this reverence around the body, and there was lamenting. I almost have the feeling that some of the rosaries and wake services we put on were like the medieval custom of paid mourners to start the crying, to get everybody into the cycle of it.

One of the things a funeral director hears constantly is the sweeping comment, "I just don't know how you do children. I could not deal with a child's death." I've heard that all my career. What they're saying is, "There's something really weird about you. We couldn't do it, we're normal." You run into that constantly, and it's getting worse.

And I say to them -- and I do it with great bravado, "If your child dies, you're going to want me on your team, because I can handle it. Yeh, you're right, you guys can't handle it, so you're going to want me around." And they look at me almost begrudgingly, because they know I'm right. They've never thought about you the same way they would a surgeon, or the clergy. "I can help you; I'm not going to fold because a kid got hit by a bus. It doesn't mean I'm crazy or callous or cruel. It just means I have the skill and I'm here to help you."

I think there are thousands of people running around pretending the death rate's not 100 percent. They have the mental attitude that death has nothing of value to teach them. But the more you learn about death -- and your own death -- the more you learn about life and learn an urgency to live life, because tomorrow might not be another day.

It amazes me, we've got more books and more support groups on coping with death than we've ever had in the history of the human experience, yet we've got more death illiteracy out there than ever before. I do seminars, and I have to build the case so gently and so gingerly to the lay audience and even with the clergy.

Besides the dead body, funeral directors are the closest symbol of what people are trying to get away from. When I do my clergy seminar -- this is the language of the church, this shouldn't be difficult -- I ask them to name symbols of death. They'll list gravestone, hearse, casket, flowers, cross. None of them says corpse. A freshman in Psych 101 can figure out why they don't mention the dead body. Because it's them; it's their own flesh.

People need to embrace the idea of facing their own mortality. When I've seen people embrace that, it immediately begins to take the petty irritations that most of us draw ourselves down with and puts them into better perspective. "I'm alive, this isn't the end of the world." And without that introspection, without that discernment, I'll tell you, people will come up with the wackiest damn ideas.

I was in San Diego doing a clergy seminar, talking to these men and women about shepherding the people who turn to them for help with a philosophy of death. How do you gently bring people to an awareness of their own mortality? What does that mean to them, and how do they use that meaning to enhance their lives, to enhance their relationships with other people?

One of the ministers became very agitated, and at the break he came over and said to me, "We're failing people. We're doing balloons and bunnies at funerals, we're not giving people any substance, and that's exactly what they're looking for. They're searching for substance, and in the absence of giving them information that has a fairly proven track record of having some healthiness to it, they're making their own up."

"We had it happen right here last month," he said. And I said, "Yes, you did." There were people whose philosophy of death was, "Jesus is coming on the tail of Hale-Bopp comet on a UFO and we've got to commit mass suicide so we can go with Jesus." That's a philosophy of death. Are there better ones? I think so. But you need to think it out, have some guidance.

We are in a dark age when it comes to death literacy. We are going backwards on it. I know I sound firm and righteous on this, but I believe we not only can't handle physical death in a mature fashion, we now are to a point in our culture where we can't handle physical aging in a mature fashion. And if you can't age well, you sure as hell can't die well.

We've got our cemeteries to the point that they look like golf courses. Why is that? "Because it's easier for the lawn mower." Really? Is that really why you can't even see the monuments now? Or is it because a monument is a symbol of death and even cemeterians don't like to look at them?

The hospitals -- you don't die in a hospital, you "expire," and the body is taken downstairs, and the undertaker goes by the garbage bin to remove your body. We've made death invisible, we have made it absolutely the enemy to fight, and we will work against it years before it's even supposed to happen.

Everybody wants to do the grief stuff, to be the grief psychologist -- that's sexy. You can set up your support group and heal people. But not the dead body stuff, the corpse.

My point is, the funeral home is the last visible bastion that truly attests to the community that when you're dead, you're dead as a doornail. That's where dead people are taken. It's the corpse stuff. It's the raw data of life. It's the greatest mystery. I love talking to people about the afterlife, and I'm always humbled by it, because when I listen to these people of great conviction, I know in my heart they don't know anymore about it than I do. Nobody knows.

I used to look at the prep room, and I'd see these dead bodies and think, "Wow. What a humbling experience. Here I am alive and my blood's flowing, and 10 inches from me is a guy who an hour ago was just as alive as I am, and now I'm embalming him." Because I found when I was humble around dead people, and reverential around them, then I was always humble and reverential around the living.

When you lose your mission in funeral service, when you lose that ideal, it's easy to descend into greed, because there's a s**tload of money to make in the funeral business if you don't watch it.

ICFM: That's an interesting way to put it.

You bet. Careful, watchful funeral directors will battle and juggle that their entire careers. And they'll always find that wealth comes to them in many forms, not just money. Because what the wise, careful funeral director knows and will tell you to this day, if you combine grief and greed, you are in a collision with good vs. bad. I believe it's written in the stars by some deity: You do not combine human misery and grief with greed.

I think the lawyers are finding that out, I think the HMOs are finding that out, I think the pharmaceutical companies are finding that out. I think they're all finding out that you cannot take human illness and hammer people into the ground because they can't pay for medical care.

How do you feel about industry critics?

I believe that Jessica Mitford's legacy is terrible. What that woman succeeded in doing was not bringing about the Funeral Rule or cremation -- that stuff was going to come anyway. But she took the self-esteem and the gentleness and kindness of a lot of people who truly went into this profession to help people, and she just beat the hell out of our self-esteem nonstop for 35 years: "You people are crooks. You people are crooks. I'm going to show you."

Freud talked about "identification with the aggressor." It's when somebody is telling you what's wrong with you and they tell you enough times that you start to believe it, you identify with them. I think the strength of my seminars is I liberate funeral directors from the aggressor. I'll stand up and say that Mitford didn't always know what she was talking about, and that her information was oftentimes exaggerated and tainted.

I think funeral directors are very uncomfortable suggesting things to families. I think their self-esteem is just beat up. Look at the trade magazines, and I say this with all due respect. Where's the good news? Even in our own press!

The Gallup Poll results for the past 13 years ranking professions -- we're No. 8 out of the top 10. We're with the engineers, pharmacists, clergy, teachers. Why wasn't that on the front page of your magazine? Why wasn't that the banner headline? I'm sitting there as a funeral director thinking, "This is wonderful stuff. This validates everything we tell each other, that the people love us."

What bothers me is that in our own bloody ranks we perpetuate the bad news. Make an issue devoted to just that, the Gallup Poll results.

I'm going to come up with a newsletter called, "The Good News About Funeral Service," and I'm going to do a "Chicken Soup for the Soul" series for funeral directors on the great stuff that goes on in funeral homes, and funeral directors are going to read it with relish, because they know that's their world.

But on the bigger picture, I think -- and I know this is not going to go over well, but I believe we need to merge.

ICFM: You mean the trade associations?

Yes. I know, "Gee whiz, if we merge NFDA and ICFA, who's going to be the editor of the magazine?" I understand all that stuff, but on the issues that confront ICFA or the NFDA, No. 1, how can they be that different, and No. 2, how can the positions on the issues be that different?

I think you have got to look at the mission and the purposes of all these organizations, not just ICFA and NFDA. Look at NSM, OGR, the African-American funeral directors, the Jewish funeral directors, the Catholic cemetery group and say, "Wait a minute, these are 19th century organizational models. These organizations were started in the 1800s."

I go to one association convention, and I look at the continuing ed program, and it's the same damn program that another assocition is putting on. How can the issues be that different? Everybody's talking about Noble, Georgia. Everybody's talking about the FTC.

On the Funeral Rule, cemeterians know good and well they should be accountable to the public in disclosures every bit as much as the funeral homes, but they've dug their heels in on that thing. I'm for the family, the consumer; I think the Funeral Rule makes a lot of sense. The funeral directors have had to deal with this stuff for years, and the only thing the Funeral Rule accomplished is to increase the cost of a funeral.

The minute ICFA said they did not want to be under the Federal Trade Commission, I knew the funeral directors in this country were going to go sideways. "You think you're better than we are. And we can tell you all the complaints come against the cemeteries. And we're under the damn rule." I heard that from everybody.

Here's my thought. As long as the ICFA says this and the NFDA says that, we're spitting in the wind, because we're working against each other, and the families don't care. It's not even an issue for them.

I look at the Wirthlin Study and I think to myself, here's Deming's No. 1 rule in management: You start with the customer. What do they know? What do they want? What do they expect? And according to the Wirthlin study, Archie and Edith Bunker see no difference between funeral directors and cemeterians.

Archie and Edith Bunker do not see any difference between us, and look at the amount of money and time and energy we spend on our territories. And everywhere you go, funeral directors are buying cemeteries, and cemeterians are buying funeral homes.

I'd like see a summit meeting of all the groups and padlock them all in a conference room that has no telephones and no windows and the agenda for the meeting is this: None of us are leaving until we amalgamate these organizations. None of us are going home until we walk out with a treaty that we now have one executive director, we've got one staff of communications. Move it all to Washington, D.C., where the action is. And instead of you've got a lobbyist and we've got a lobbyist, we're going to hire some hotshot lobbying firm in downtown Washington, D.C., for a godawful retainer a year and tell them, 'By god, you better make sure we are taken care of.'"

What if the Federal Trade Commission stood up and said, "You know what, we've gotten all these complaints from people about attorneys, so the legal profession is going to come under the FTC rule on disclosures." What do you think would happen? Do you think that would have a snowball's chance in hell of passing? That American Bar Association would be down on those people so fast.

ICFM: Is there anything else you'd like to say about your own career or the future of funeral service?

I've tried to tell you the good and the not so good of my life and career. It hasn't all been a piece of cake. Sometimes it's been like pushing a wet noodle up a hill.

I'm happy for the blessings that I've been given, and my fervent hope is that my work has somehow contributed to the betterment of this profession, and I say this with a pure heart, that that's the satisfaction of it.

I believe the future of funeral service is going to be exactly what funeral directors make of it. They wield a tremendous amount of influence in their communities, and I believe the Gallup Poll numbers prove that they wield it in good stead, or they wouldn't be ranked up there that long. I think when all is said and done, the strength of the profession is the local funeral home, the local cemetery.

I don't have all the answers, but I think together we do. That's why I always look for unity in things, try to see the common foundations. And I look forward to the future with hope.