first post with silly ads

Who am I to think that google ads won't bother you? Why shouldn't I try? Luckily no one ever reads this anyway and has become mostly an excuse for me to wonk merrily along in my own private cyber confessional.

It has been a long time since my last confession...

We are a funeral home that still shows full caskets. we have a room that allows one to peruse the boxes, kick the tires, open and close the lids, (with help from me please, THOSE HINGES WILL BEND IF YOU ARE NOT A PROFESSIONAL SUCH AS I!), touch the fabric, etc. I like those caskets in all of their glory. It is my "reality room". Nothing brings it home like 25 or so open mawed-wood-steel or cardboard caskets screaming "A DEATH HAS OCCURED!". It helps me do my job of bringing a sense of "why we are really here".

However, caskets are large and when you bring 25 or so of them into a room you tend to take up a whole bunch of room. SO, we at ______ - ________ Funeral Chapel are inching slowly (and I do mean inching!) towards selling caskets out of a book. yes a book. you may ask "why would you subject the public to something so simple and sinister as a mere catalog of wares?" I would answer you, "good sir/madam, for the sake of the reception. " we need a room to put people in so that they can get to work on the best part of the funeral experience, the meal. Nothing allows people to better understand what they just went through/are going through then a gathering of friends and family and food. It is a most excellent way to put things into perspective.

Along with this remodel will come the "tearing out of the pews". we will replace them with cushy chairs that we can set up/tear down depending on the needs of the service. I think I might even get my new sound system out of this deal (If I am a good boy).

All of these things are an excellent first step for us into the new millennium of funeral service. we need to re-create what it means to be "funeral directors" and part of that is understanding that we are SO MUCH more than funeral directors. We are "the keepers of the ritual" and always have been. What is happening around us is that the rituals are changing and we need to stay on top of that. We need to offer people a safe place to grieve, that is what we have done since the inception of the "funeral home" in the early 1900's in America. It has been very easy for us to latch on to the "mode" set forth by early pioneers in the "death-care industry" but very hard for us to submit to changes in that mode. People care less and less about caskets and embalming and long processions and laminated obituaries. They care less and less for organ music, for viewing corpses, for limousines carrying pallbearers. And it is interesting, these aforementioned things have traditionally acted as our rituals on grieving and caring for our dead. I do not want to lose what these traditions have done for us, I just want to make sure that they still work. I think that the American psyche is growing beyond what we offer, and by growing beyond these rituals, they simply lose their value, and that is dangerous to my profession, as well as to the grieving American psyche.

"the industry" has RAILED against the coming tide of cremation. Why? Because "the industry" is so completely afraid of change. They have been able to simply ride along on the coattails of traditional funeral service and hoped that people would simply continue to buy into it.

The curtain is falling and funeral directors need to understand that.