Funeral Words

Curious About MySpace.com?

Do you wonder about MySpace.com the online community for youth and young adults but were afraid to ask? Here's a five minute discussion on the PC Magazine website which may shed a little light.

[Note: This is streaming video. High speed net connection recommended.]

CrankyGeeks discussion of MySpace.com

New Links on the Site

I have started collecting links to websites that specialize in building memorial pages for someone who has died. You will find them in the left-hand column below my photograph under the title "Death and Memorial".

If you know of another site which I should include in this grouping, please let me know. I would like to make this as comprehensive as possible. International sites welcome as well. Leave me a comment with the web address and I will look it up and post it.

Thanks!!!

Grieving on the Web

Follow the link below to a Washington Post article about how people continue to use the web as a resource for grief support and grief expression. If some people do this on their own and find it helpful, I guarantee many more WANT this kind of expression and do not know how to set it up. Funeral service organizations have an opportunity here. Don't miss it!!!

Grief finds community in online memorials.

Quote from article (very important!!!):

While many non-Western cultures build rituals around death that allow a person to grieve over time, in highly individualistic societies, losing a loved one can be isolating, some psychologists say, which may be why some turn to the Web to reach outside their traditional social network.

"When death happens, we're so alone," said George Bonanno, a psychologist at Columbia University. "It would be nice if we had a sense of community, and maybe that's what the Internet provides."

National Strategy Document

The following link will open up the PDF version of the latest Pandemic Influenza Plan issued by the White House yesterday. Do not expect, however, that this document in any way addresses the challenges of mass fatalities on a national basis. I did a quick electronic search of the document and did not find a single reference to the word "funeral", not even in the context of "funeral director".

We should anticipate very limited awareness and/or preparedness by government planners to deal with a dramatic rise in the number of deaths. Should the worst case scenario play itself out, morgue facilities and health departments will find themselves under-staffed (as people stay away from work) and overwhelmed in terms of volume. Evaluate your own community but in my area these facilities struggle along under the best of circumstances. We also need to recognize that with 40% of the workforce out of commission for one reason or another, we may not have anyone to answer the phone and dig graves at the local cemetery. What alternatives need consideration at the local governmental level in order to maintain dignity and operational capacity in trouble times?

Faced head on and documented ahead of time, local paperwork and disposition plans can get the attention they need. It will require focus and creative thinking in order to get it done AND the awareness that NO ONE at the top of government has given funerals (or caskets or death certificates or burial permits or mass graves or anything of the sort) a second thought.

White House Pandemic Flu Plan--May 2006

Hmmm. Bias Against Women???

I pulled the following direct from TomPeters.com. We, just like the jewelry industry have a male dominated, manufacturing dominated, male directed business. Are we, just like the jewelry industry described below, biasing our facility and product decisions away from women, ultimately to our detriment? Women make MOST of the financial decisions in families. Have we courted them properly? Have we designed and developed our offerings to meet an up-to-date female outlook???

I don't think so. Would love to get some comments from the peanut gallery. Anyone willing to chime in?

I had a fantastic time in Orlando addressing the American Gem Society. (I have an open love affair with small businesses and business owners—I like their nerve, among other things.) To my surprise—and delight—the "marketing to women" issue loomed large.

The conventional industry wisdom is that a large fraction of jewelry is bought by men for women; moreover women would prefer their jewelry to be bought for them by men. (My characterization is slightly—ever so slightly—exaggerated.) However, as I probed, expressing some disbelief (I've heard the same sort of story elsewhere—e.g., financial advice, a woman feels better with a male advisor), some intriguing alternate hypotheses emerged—championed by the relatively small share of female jewelry store owners in attendance.

This was my favorite, from a powerful female business owner (I paraphrase, of course): "Yes, Tom, it's doubtless true that a lot of jewelry is bought by men for women. But there's a clear reason: That jewelry is bought for the stores by men. That is, men [male store owners] instinctively buy for their stores the sort of jewelry that other men would buy for women—hence the end result is as reported, male consumers buying jewelry for women. In my store it's a case of a woman—me—buying jewelry that I think other women would buy for themselves! In fact, the large majority of my customers are women making significant purchases for themselves."

Nice! (Made my day.) (And so it goes in a jillion markets, not just jewelry—what I call "the untested 'oh she prefers it that way' hypothesis.")

Tom Peters posted this May 1, 2006.