The Funeral Profession—Everything You Wanted to Know About the People Who Work There But Too Afraid to Ask

I was born a people person. I've been insatiably curious about what makes people tick for as long as I can remember. It's less about what they do and more about why. What are their thoughts and feelings behind the behavior? Were they born with a particular trait or did it stem from an emotional experience somewhere in childhood? If they could choose a different life path, would they? I love asking questions and listening to their stories.

Since losing my daughter I've often wondered about the men and women who serve the dead. Sounds macabre, and yet I'm curious. Why do people go into the funeral industry? How do they really feel when handling dead bodies? I wanted to know—and so I set my sights on doing a book for funeral directors. Today, I cross that off my bucket list with the release of Through the Eyes of a Funeral Director.

As I do with all my books, I asked the funeral directors 18 questions. This allows me to get to the meat of each story without the superficial fluff.

What I found in their answers was surprising. Shocking, really, but not in a macabre sense. It was quite the opposite actually, and totally unexpected. Today I'm thrilled to satisfy the curiosity of those like me who always wondered about the men and women who serve in the funeral industry.

One of the oldest and most sacred professions in the world, the funeral industry is a different sort of business, and it takes a special sort of person to work there. College educated men and women, each purposely choose a career based around caregiving.

Yes, funeral directors are caregivers at heart. Who knew?

As caregivers, they sacrifice sleep and precious family time to ensure that our need for loving guidance in our darkest hour is met, because death doesn’t always happen during banking hours. By laying loved ones to rest, they offer the living the first steps toward healing without any sort of recognition.

If the funeral industry is based around caregiving, then why do most clients walk away with sticker shock? How can they financially gouge us in our time of need?

When you eat in a restaurant, you pay for the food and the chef who prepared it. When you hire a doctor to tend to your wound, you pay for the care. When you hire a funeral home to help memorialize a loved one, it is no different. Funeral homes have codes to follow, equipment to maintain, staff to pay, and student loans to pay off. They are there around the clock to ensure your every wish is lovingly granted with kid gloves. If you don't pay for services rendered, the funeral equipment loans get behind and staff can't put food on the table.

Death is an inevitable part of life nobody gets to skip. But when you find yourself leaning on a funeral director in your darkest hour, it is comforting to know that he or she chose this career not as a business, but as a calling.

It is a calling that only the finest humanitarians answer.

One they wouldn’t change for the world.

#FuneralDirector #Funeral

Grief in the workplace, a new frontier

Meet my friend, Herb, a 57-year-old financially secure bank executive. In 2008, Herb's wife Michelle died from cancer. Ten days after Michelle's passing, Herb returned to work.

"It was St. Patrick’s Day, March 17. Late that first morning, while seated in my corner office on the second floor of our headquarters in San Antonio, the bank officer walked into my office. As I looked up to greet him, he noticed I had tears in my eyes. Not knowing what to say, he simply turned around and walked out of my office, closing the door behind him."

Herb's office encounter isn't unusual. In fact, most bereaved employees find themselves similarly isolated. But the problem is much larger than employees simply not knowing what to do or say.

Meet Kristen. Kristen is the managing editor of Human Resource Executive magazine. On October 20, 2015, she was at her company's own HR Technology Convention in Las Vegas when she received a phone call from her neighbor.

Earlier that day the neighbor had noticed Kristen's cat roaming outside alone. Jim, Kristen's husband, adored their cat, and the neighbor was concerned as she hadn't seen Jim in a few days. Kristen had talked to Jim on the phone just that morning, but asked her neighbor to check on him just in case. The neighbor agreed, and found Jim's lifeless body in his bed, dead from an apparent heart attack.

In a state of shock, Kristen had to return to her hotel, pack her bags, and catch the next flight home—alone.

"Because I had used up all the time I was entitled to under the Family and Medical Leave Act caring for my father with hospice, I was left with my allotted 3 days of bereavement leave —still the national standard—before returning to the diversion and demands of my job."

Kristen became determined to address the elephant in the room and last September contacted me for an interview about grief in the workplace. We connected on that grief level, a language we both understood, and talked for quite a while. Following our interview, I emailed Kristen some strategies to use in her article.

I had forgotten about my conversation with Kristen until the article was published in Human Resource Executive magazine this past March. Kristen sent me the link.

As I read through Kristen's article, I was surprised to see she highlighted the strategies I had sent her and delighted to see myself cited me as the source. Even more important, I realized I was reading the foundation of a curriculum about handling grief in the workplace.

Over the next 6 months I worked hard to develop the strategies into a full fledged curriculum to be taught from an academia standpoint.

On October 6, 2017, I'm teaching the first Employee Crisis Response Curriculum called Grief in the Workplace at a local college. It outlines step-by-step strategies for HR leaders, managers, administrators, and directors to learn how to respond to an employee's crisis. Further, it offers strategies that minimize disruption and maximize workflow— and along the way improve corporate culture. The class offers 3 solid hours of information and strategies every workplace should have in their procedure manual.

It's important to distinguish that this curriculum isn't about outsourcing the grieving employee to the EAP. It's about employing internal strategies to balance the needs of staff with needs of the shareholders.

Grief isn't limited to a cubicle. When crisis happens to one employee, it affects the whole office.

Which is what this curriculum is all about.

It's about Herb. And Kristen. And the Herbs and Kristens of the world.

"Bereavement in the workplace is still a new frontier."

Yes, it is. But it shouldn't be.

For local companies, click here to find how to register your managers and administrators. Continuing education credits are available for those who need it.

That cool part is that it's all just the beginning. Later next month I'll teach this curriculum around the world via a new global webinar platform to be announced next week. Further, we'll begin training the trainer—people who can teach this curriculum in their own local colleges and corporations.

In today's competitive job marketplace, employees are looking not just at wages and benefit packages. They're looking at corporate culture—how well a corporation takes care of employees. Our curriculum teaches corporations how to do that in times of crisis.

Creating and teaching corporate curriculum is the next step on my journey toward making the world a better place for future generations.

Cheers!