Death
10 Requests Funeral Homes Should NEVER Hear
The other day someone emailed me and asked, “What are some odd requests that families have asked funeral directors to perform?” Honestly, it seems like every other day we’re asked to do something “odd.” These “odd requests” are a burden that every funeral director has to bear.
And yet, there are some odd requests that are exceptional.
I asked my Confessions of a Funeral Director facebook page a similar question and here are the top ten oddest requests. If you aren’t accustomed to PG-13 topics and are grossed out by anatomy talk, before you get offended it’s probably best that you stop right here and and don’t continue reading this list which is morbid and kinda gross … but, nevertheless, part of the experience of being a funeral director.
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When My Son Confessed to Murder
Today’s guest post is written by Tim Kreider:
I had thought I had found a path to healing and wholeness, but then, in May of 2007, one of my oldest son’s best friends and his parents were murdered in their home. It was a gruesome crime that instilled fear into our home and the entire community. Nothing was stolen. There were no clues and no leads.
Approximately 30 days later my oldest son, who was 16 at the time, was admitted to a local mental health facility because of threats of suicide. I feared the loss of his friend had been too much for him. Unfortunately, this was just the beginning.
During a family counseling session my son confessed to his mother and me that he was the one responsible for the death or his friend and his parents! Thus began the darkest and most devastating period of my life. The wholeness I thought I had obtained was shattered into a life consumed by pain and brokenness. There was a time when I thought I would drown in the wave of despair that washed over me.
Fortunately, I was eventually able to rise above the despair and find my way to healing and wholeness. This doesn’t mean I’m perfect and never have a “bad” day. I’m human. Events and people sometimes chip away at me. I have moments where I feel sad or down. I get angry at things I know shouldn’t bother me. I say things that shouldn’t be said.
But I respond totally differently today. I don’t stay there. The peace and joy I’ve found soon return. I recognize when my past hurt and brokenness rears its ugly head and I now am able to acknowledge it, respond to it and not allow it to derail my day, my relationships, my life and ultimately the joy I’ve found in life.
I believe that if I can do it, everyone can do the same thing. Their lives can be joyful. My intense conviction is that no one needs to be or deserves to be lost in the wasteland of pain and brokenness. If I can help just one person heal and become whole again, then I will have spared one person the continued pain of being hurt and broken. In doing so, I’ll improve not only their life but also the lives of everyone they touch. What a gift to bring to the world.
People ask me how did I do it? How did I find joy? How did I find a way to give myself permission to be happy again?
I wish I had an easy answer. I remember at one point in time asking a therapist, “Just tell me what to do to get better and I’ll do it.” He smiled and told me it doesn’t work that way. Unfortunately, there isn’t a simple 1 -2 -3 step to healing and becoming whole. Each of us needs to find our own path.
We may need to change our view of the world. Is our view negative and angry or do we find the best in a situation and approach each “obstacle” with hope? How do we change our view of the world? Start by filling your mind and environment with positive words, books and people. This may sound harsh, but if it doesn’t lift you up, it tears you down. Remove what tears you down and replace it with what lifts you up. I’ve read many books by self-help gurus and spiritual leaders that reinforced positive and life-altering ways of thinking and approaching life.
I went to counseling, seeing a psychologist and having a safe place to be broken and honest was incredibly valuable. He helped me understand the process I was going through and how events and people in life influenced my attitudes and actions. It enabled me to respond differently and in a healthier fashion.
I realized the incredible liberation of forgiveness – accept God’s forgiveness given to you, no matter what you have done. Forgive yourself for all of the “mistakes” you have ever made. Forgive those who have “wronged” you – parents, siblings, spouses, co workers, leaders, strangers on the street – it doesn’t matter who – forgive – let go of the anger and the pain. It only damages you!
When I was asked to share my passion for healing and wholeness, the task seemed overwhelming to me. Our search for healing and wholeness has been a quest of mankind since the fall of Adam and Eve. There have been lives dedicated to this quest. Volumes and volumes of writings have attempted to show us the way. Jesus came, taught, died and rose to share with us how to become healed and whole. Yet we ALL remain hurt and broken.
Yes, everyone is hurt or broken in some way. You’re broken just like the rest of us. But that’s okay. There is always a way back to healing and wholeness.
*****
Leaving Westboro Baptist Church
Fred Phelps died. A couple days ago, we learned that the founder of the Westboro Baptist Church – infamous for its hate filled rhetoric and base propaganda tactics – was dying; a fact that produced a number of us to reflect on Phelps’ life and feel some sense of satisfaction knowing that it was coming to an end.
Today, March 20th, 2014 he died. And news spread quickly. Social media sites like Facebook started to fill with vitriolic messages such as these (which I pulled from the feed on my Confessions of a Funeral Director Facebook page):
“Good riddance.”
“Finally. Just wish his church would burn down now.”
“This scumbag needs to rot in hell along with his whole family!!!”
I know the mental anguish that the WBC has caused grieving families. A couple years ago a childhood friend was killed in Iraq. His family entrusted his funeral service to us and it wasn’t long until we heard the rumor that the WBC was planning to picket his funeral.
As funeral directors, we wondered how people could be filled with such hatred and insensitivity so as cause compounded anguish to a family that lost their son, brother and fiancé at an age all too young.
Thankfully – despite the rumors that the WBC would picket the funeral – Brandon’s funeral was NOT one of the more than the supposed 53,000 events that Fred Phelps and his cult disturbed.
And yet, I can’t help but ask, “Isn’t this hatred that we feel towards him all too similar to the hate speech he stood for?”
We’re All Members
I’m not going to try and pull the old bait-and-switch and tell you that all of us are just as bad as Fred Phelps and his hate rhetoric. Neither you nor me have picked the funerals of fallen soldiers, protested the funerals of the children killed in the Sandy Hook shootings or held signs damning the LGBTQ community to hell.
Rather, I hope to point out the value of “I-Thou” relationships and reject the “I-It” objectification so embraced by Fred Phelps and his crew.
This leap from “person” to “object” is the one Westboro has made to justify their public, insensitive and often irrational protests of everything from pop concerts, to shuttle launches, to memorials for military deaths. But it’s the same leap that all too many of us make when it comes to judging others. We lose touch with the person we’re ready to stone and instead turn them into an “it” that represents a reprehensible and immoral idea or action.
On a larger scale, it’s the leap made when the people of Africa become slaves; when homosexuals become detestable; when women and children become sex slaves; when celebrities like Lindsey Lohan or Justin Beiber or Miley Cyrus become an object lesson on stupidity for the masses.
True, we make our own comparisons so we can uphold morality, proving to ourselves and those we influence that we all reap what we sow. We go above and beyond to avoid praising clearly unacceptable behavior in our Facebook statuses and our lunch break conversations. We eagerly pull down the celebrity cult to show the splattered blood of America’s gods.
But in the end, by turning a person like Fred Phelps into an object lesson or an object of our hatred we cross into the dangerous territory that’s traversed by Westboro time and time again. How can we be critical of a person like Fred Phelps, however awful his actions, while still being sensitive to those involved?
Seeing Person
As a funeral director, I daily tread ground that’s been hallowed by tears that represent the sacrifice of love and death. The casket is handpicked by the family, the body dressed with clothes that present the deceased at their best, the casket interior is strewn with pictures and tokens of remembrance, flowers are placed above and around the deceased. All who attend the viewing are dressed appropriately, with solemn faces and hearts. Grief is holy, and I’m privileged to enter the sanctuary—to enter the story.
Recently, we buried two young teenagers who were killed when one of them lost control of the car he was recklessly driving. He not only killed himself and two others, but marred the lives of all they left behind, who will live out the rest of their lives with the instability that tragic deaths inevitably cause.
We all too easily could think: “Those stupid kids got what they had coming to them when they were horsing around, driving like they were invincible. Let this be a lesson to you kids to be responsible.” You can say stuff like that when you don’t see the tears; when you don’t see capillaries that have ruptured around the father’s eyes from weeping, or the haggard, hollow look on the mother’s face as she sees the body that used to house the life and love of her now dead child.
These are people. Not object lessons. Not objects for hatred. Even the individual members of Westboro, with all their startling missteps, are people.
That’s what we miss when something becomes publicized or scandalized. We miss the humanity, we miss the story that brings color, texture, dimension and heart to the person. We see the lesson, the hatred, the “I’ll never be that guy”, and forget the life.
Rescinding Our Membership
There is no excuse for inhumanity committed by humans. But when we allow ourselves to see person, justice becomes the extension of love, rather than objectification and worship of law. When we see person, justice finds purity, impartiality and action.
When we see person, we begin to leave Westboro Baptist Church.
It is not our place to see others as reasons for God’s judgment and catalysts for our weekday sermons. It is not about separation of sin and sinner, nor a combination of the two. It is about a willingness to lose our fixation on “the other” as an object, and a realization that “the other” is just as real and human as you or me—whether they’re behind bars, beside a picket sign or six feet under the ground.
Grief Online: The Dos and Don’ts of Internet Etiquette
Today’s guest post is written by Dr. Candi K. Cann
Everyone seems to be online these days, and even if you are not on much, odds are that you have a Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr or Instagram account. With so much of our socializing done virtually, it is no surprise that we are grieving and mourning the deaths of our loved ones online too.
Here are a few Dos and Don’ts for grieving online.
• Don’t announce the death of someone online unless you are sure that the family, friends and anyone that should know about the death, knows already.
The most recent example of this was Wall Street Journal’s breaking news tweet on Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death. Both the death and the details of how he died were tweeted before his family was aware that he had died.
• Once everyone knows about the death, it is okay to post details about the funeral, wake, celebration of life ceremony online so that everyone knows, but please don’t create an Evite for it.
Evites are great for invitations — they are convenient and quick, but they shouldn’t be used in this case for three reasons:
1) They depend on the regular checking of email, and since funerals and memorials are generally held somewhat quickly, those invited may not get the email in time.
2) Evites sometimes land in the invitee’s junk folder, which means they won’t receive them, and funerals and memorials are meant to be open to anyone the deceased knew.
3) Evites are only for those that receive an invitation.
• If someone is posting a picture of themselves with the deceased, they are doing so to let you know they are grieving, so don’t write snarky comments on that picture.
Don’t do it. Just don’t. It isn’t the right time or place.
• If a family decides to leave a Facebook page active, a Twitter feed open, or an Instagram account on so that you can write comments, post messages, etc., please think about your audience.
Yes, we know you were Tom’s last serious girlfriend before his marriage, and probably the reason he finally got his act together to be able to commit to his wife and have children, but that doesn’t mean you should post old love letters or pictures to his webpage. His wife and all the rest of his family just won’t find it appropriate, and it might make their grief worse.
And yes, your position as ex-girlfriend means that you have a right to grieve, and that there is really no place for you to do so, but you will need to stick to your group of girlfriends, or maybe on your own private social media. While the Internet is awesome for giving everyone a voice, sometimes we need to think about our audience.
• Don’t write negative things about the dead.
Yes, your neighbor was a jerk, but if you didn’t say it to his face before he died, then it’s too late now. If you did, then he already knows how you feel, and there’s just no point in making his family and friends feel worse.
• Along those lines, don’t say anything negative about the living posting about the dead.
Yes, we are all getting tired of Katie’s sappy (and badly written, I might add) poems that she keeps writing and posting to her deceased best friend’s page, but please don’t say anything. Remember the old adage — if you can’t say anything nice, then don’t say anything at all? Well, remember it. Or at least, if you must say something that’s not nice, then say it to a close friend who has never met Katie. That way you can be sure Katie won’t find out.
And last, but not least, those funeral selfies.
• If you insist on taking a funeral selfie, try to keep the dead out of the pictures.
There’s a reason some people don’t go to wakes or funerals — they simply don’t know what to do with that open casket. Or maybe they want their last memory of Grandma to be a living one. If you must take a funeral selfie, please make sure there are no glimpses of Grandma in her casket. It’s bad enough we have to see pictures of your cute cat five times a day, we really don’t want to see your dead grandmother before we’ve even had our morning coffee.
*****
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Candi K. Cann received both her A.M. and Ph.D. in Comparative Religion from Harvard University, and her research focuses on death and dying, and the impact of remembering (and forgetting) in shaping how lives are recalled, remembered and celebrated. An avid reader, traveler, and lover of poetry, her passions are spending time with her family and friends and living well.
You can follow Candi on Twitter and pre-order her upcoming book, Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-First Century.
What to Look for When You Hire a Funeral Director
© 2012 Dita Margarita, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio
Today, many families live in transience. Jobs and wanderlust have us town hopping.
It used to be that generation after generation lived and died in the same area, but that’s no longer the case. It used to be that families had almost a family-type bond with their local funeral director. Now, families have a closer relationship with their local Wal-Mart.
Transience is fun, until someone dies. Whereas generations before would call a funeral director that they personally knew, you now have to entrust your loved one to a complete stranger. So, you play mortician roulette and hope that the funeral director you happen to pick doesn’t end up making mom look like a Picasso painting.
Hopefully, you’re in a position where you already know a good funeral director. But, if you – like many others – don’t know ANY local funeral directors, here’s a list of characteristics that you should look for when picking one.
One. Federal Trade Commission Compliance
Per “The Funeral Rule” [1], funeral home are required to give you their “general price list” (GPL) upon request. This helps you if you’re shopping around and it helps the funeral industry appear honest. If a funeral home doesn’t have or can’t procure a “general price list” (GPL), this is an immediate red flag.
Two. Word of Mouth.
Traditional advertising doesn’t always work for funeral homes. Who wants to see the name of a funeral home on the back of their son’s T-Ball uniform?
We attempt to make up for our lack of advertising opportunities by investing in civic and community events and organizations. As we all know, trust isn’t bought, it’s earned over years and years of consistent professionalism, compassion and bacon gifting. This trust creates a reputation and funeral homes — like all businesses — guard our reputations with tenacity because we know that our best advertisement comes by word of mouth.
A good funeral home / director will have good reviews from your friends and family. Head in the direction of good reviews, you’ll probably find a good funeral director.
Three. Good Listeners.
We may not have Oprah’s skillz, but we should be pretty good.
Four. Pricing.
There is often a HUGE cost difference from one funeral home to the next, while the value isn’t much different.
About a year ago, a husband and wife died about four months apart. The wife knew us so we buried her and the husband knew the funeral home in a neighboring town, so they buried him. They both had the same funeral, same casket, vault, etc. The family called us to let us know that the other funeral home charged $3,000 more. Same value, different cost.
A good funeral home will have fair market pricing. Find the market value by calling around to different funeral homes. Ask for the GPL. The less expensive funeral homes are often less expensive for a reason … and that reason is usually a good one. Remember, cost doesn’t always equal value.
Five. Respectful.
Good funeral directors don’t have to share your beliefs, your lifestyle, your culture, but they should know how to communicate respect for all that is you. Although you can’t expect us to play Nickelback at a funeral. That’s asking too much.
Six. No Pressure Sales
If you EVER feel pressure from a funeral home or funeral director to buy something more expensive — or something you don’t want — FIRE THEM! Seriously, just fire them. Walk out if you need to. The fact is that your mind is already clouded by grief and the last thing you need in your life is something trying to squeeze money out of you … because they will. You just experienced a death in your life. You need people who love you, NOT people who want to exploit you.
Good funeral directors NEVER exploit.
Seven. Good funeral directors aren’t self-important.
They understand this time is about the deceased and you. I’ve met too many self-important funeral directors who have had their ego inflated by one too many compliments from the choir. Stay away from them.
Eight. The Extra Mile.
We aren’t slaves, but we are servants. And we should be willing to walk the extra mile to personalize a funeral to your wishes. Unless, of course, that extra mile involves a nudist themed funeral. Then no. Just no. No.
Nine. Direction.
If you loved one didn’t preplan their funeral, you might not know what to do. A good funeral director will give you good direction. She will help you feel confident in your choices and decisions.
Ten. Unicorns.
Good funeral homes have a unicorn. Great funeral homes have a blessing of unicorns.
[1] The Funeral Rule requires providers of funeral goods and services to give consumers itemized lists of funeral goods and services that not only state price and descriptions, but also contain specific disclosures. The “General Price List” (GPL) must list all prices for funeral goods and services offered by the funeral provider, although separate price lists may be developed for caskets and outer burial containers. The GPL must contain four disclosures:
- the consumer has the right to select only the goods and services desired;
- embalming is not always required by local law;
- alternative containers are available for direct cremations; and
- the only fee which a consumer can be required to pay is a non-declinable basic services fee.
The rule enables consumers to select and purchase only the goods and services they want, except for those which may be required by law and a basic services fee. Also, funeral providers must seek authorization before performing some services, such as embalming.
