I have just decided that the keyboard/screen/chair configuration here at work is the most ergonomically debilitating system that has ever been conceived. I patiently await back-pain.
So what’s new? I am into the fifth day of my seventeen-day run here. I am covering for a colleague that has chosen to better himself by attending a conference on pre-need sales. This conference should not hurt him in any way. It is the stuff of my personal nightmares but, as they say, to each his own. I have come to the conclusion that (and this does not really have anything to do with my colleagues sales predilections) I do not feel comfortable “earning” commissions on anything that I could “sell” as an undertaker. If I don’t actually do it, then it isn’t my money. I would imagine that I lose a lot of revenue for the company by sending the families directly to the monument company but darn it, if I am not cutting the stone and etching the dates and names into it, why should I get a sniff of that money? I am here to serve and the best way for me to accomplish this task is to make sure that these steps are easiest and most beneficial to the family. The monument company has a showroom, has the artists on site that will create the marker, has the lower cost to the family. Why should I get in the way for a few extra dollars?
I feel the same way about urns. I consistently tell families, (while we are looking at said urns) that they could EASILY go and find something out in the “real world” that would fulfill their cremated remain storage needs. I tell them that while I do have a very broad selection of urnerary (I just made that word up) merchandise, our selection could be considered “a bit pricey” or rather “a tad marked up”. The reason we have ANY of our merchandise is (in my humble opinion) is out of convenience, and where else are you going to go to buy a casket? Convenience is how we stay alive in this business. It is much more convenient for me to go the nursing home/morgue/mile marker 10 to scoop up your loved ones remains than it is for you to go and undertake such as task. It is much more convenient, (and legal) for me to preserve your loved ones remains by way of ancient embalming techniques passed down from great Egyptian priests than it is for you to pack them in an ice-bed and hope that nothing decides to “bloom” from within. It’s certainly more convenient for me to use my crematory to reduce your loved ones body to ashes than it would be for you to smear them with clarified butter, pile a cord of pine upon them and hit them with a Zippo. My existence comes down to being a more convenient option.
ALTHOUGH, I will have to say, with great zeal, that my existence goes beyond the idea that I make it “easier” for people. No one else has logged the time in experience or the time in philosophical wrangling that I have when it comes to the ritualization of events. I know what works and I know what works better. I typically understand, from a relatively short “interview”, what a family should benefit from and how to execute the process. Yes, much of my job is phone work, i.e. ministers, cemeteries, vocalists, churches, caterers, etc. And much of my job is “arranging” things, i.e. flowers, bodies, obituaries, seating, parking, etc. But mostly, (I believe, and again with great zeal) my job is to help people feel a smidge better about the fact that they are going to be sad for a while. I exist as a middleman between the time their loved one was alive and the time that they no longer are. I can be trusted as an individual that can “undertake” a small part of your burden. I can direct you towards a path that will hopefully help you to begin understanding what it means to live in a world physically without the one you loved. At least I can try to anyway.
I’ll digress a bit. I talk about convenience and I think I need to make something a bit clearer here. I DO believe, (apparently with zeal) that if people could did the things that I conveniently do for them in a “time of need”, that we would be better off as a society. I have noticed that whenever a family invests themselves deeper into the funeralization ritual, they always come out of it feeling like it was much more meaningful. Simple acts like making a picture board for the service acts as an outlet for a family member to vent the feelings they may have had about their loved one. Certainly any time someone gets up and eulogizes during the ceremony, they will always feel as if they helped “send off” the deceased in their mind, even if it was the hardest and most painful thing they had ever undertaken. When a family allows themselves to simply “show up” at their loved one’s service, I consistently question how much good this really does for them. It pays my bills but I am not so sure it will pay them in the long run. As long as morticians allow families to take this “easy way out” morticians will slowly but surely sap any benefit the families could accrue from the experience. By letting that happen, people will find less and less value in the service itself and eventually, quit doing it at all. Now that doesn’t mean I won’t be needed, I will always be more convenient to use for such miserable tasks I outlined in great detail, (and hopefully with zeal) above. But what we run the risk of, is becoming desensitized, (and by desensitized I mean becoming less sensitive to) to our needs as thinking, loving, irrational, half-beasts. If we can simply start throwing people away without properly figuring out how and why we loved them and expressing such things in a meaningful manner, what will we become? I don’t think I know that answer. I absolutely believe that if families took care of their own dead, in much the same ways that I do it for them now, we WOULD be better off in ways of understanding each other. We would know how much we loved people and take them much less for granted if we all undertook what I choose to undertake for you. I would love the trade off too. A more healthy society and I get a good nights sleep. I would happily go on unemployment if we could learn to love each other better. Maybe I would have more time to write.
