Businesses thrive and survive by making money. Meeting financial projections and turning a profit are cornerstones on which successful businesses are built. But, what happens when you’re in the business of death? How do you balance the needs of your company with the needs of families who are living their worst nightmare and just experienced a loss so deep they can’t breathe?
I recently lost my mom to a very sudden death. As anyone who has been through something similar knows, the severity of a sudden loss like this is brutally traumatic regardless of your age. And, the last thing in the world you want to worry about is how, when and where you’re going to bury or cremate the body of a person you just saw two days ago.
For me, one of the most shocking realizations during this experience was becoming soberly aware of the insensitivity and lack of compassion permeating the employees of my local funeral homes. When did it become acceptable to sit down with a family of recent loss and blatantly take advantage of their emotional vulnerability, lack of financial funds and desperate need to simply get this over with?
I couldn’t believe my ears when the employee of a well-known, large funeral service in my hometown turned to my father, my two sisters and myself and said, “I’m a salesperson with certain numbers to meet and you can understand that I have to start with the most expensive headstone and then work my way down to the cheaper ones.”
No, we can’t fathom how she is thinking about meeting her sales projections when our emotions are so raw that it still feels like a sick joke was just played on our family. In fact, my helplessly sarcastic sister ended the discussion with, “before you go on, you should know that you’re at Neiman Marcus when you should be at Wal-Mart.” Shortly afterward, we left and felt even worse.
Ricki Lake recently wrote, produced and starred in the documentary, “The Business of Being Born,” all about the issue of choosing profit over people as it relates to giving birth. As a personal fan of her work and sharing a passion on the topic, I couldn’t help but feel a distinctly similar frustration toward the “business of dying.”
It’s clear that this is a tough business, but I have to believe there are right and wrong ways to do it. After our horrible experience with the unnamed service, we found a smaller, local, family-owned business to properly bury our mom. It is not an exaggeration that my sister and I both began to cry tears of happiness when we sat down with the director.
Not only was he infused with natural compassion, he was genuinely vested in taking care of my family, respected the fact that we needed to do this on a low-cost budget, and most importantly, we had an unspoken understanding that despite this being the last place on Earth we wanted to be, we were here and we needed his help to move on. From that moment, he took over the arrangements and allowed us to go home and grieve.
In the end, it was a beautiful, intimate and perfectly suited funeral ceremony to celebrate my mom. Growing up, she always advised us to go with our gut when it comes to people, and I know she would have adored the funeral director and the way he and his family “do business.”
To those of you who have lost a loved one and are in a similar situation, I implore you to speak with others to get a recommendation before even visiting a funeral home. It will save you an abundance of unnecessary frustration, sadness and even anger, and allow you to focus on the hardest but most necessary part – your grief.
Denise Day lives in Littleton. EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
