Funeral Words

Perinatal Hospice Programs

Until reading this article the other day, I had not heard of hospice programs which specialize in caring for newborns with known terminal illnesses. Prenatal screenings have become much more accurate and comprehensive such that more often families know ahead of time about a critical birth defect or other malady. These programs like more traditional hospice programs, seek to support families through the end of life process after birth.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23682263/from/ET/

There is a national organization which you can find here:

http://www.perinatalhospice.org/

This link will take you to a listing of currently operating perinatal programs:

http://www.perinatalhospice.org/Perinatal_hospices.html

Online Degree Completion

I have meant to post this information for several weeks and keep forgetting. The New England Institute at Mount Ida College in Newton, MA has rolled out the very first online bachelors degree program in the United States. Looking quickly it entails 2 courses per semester over four years taken completely online plus three "academic residencies" which amount to an orietation session at the beginning of the program, a mid-program summer session after the second year of course work and then a wrap-up program at the end which includes participation in commencement. This summer's orientation begins on July 19th. Time to get those applications started!

For further information, application forms and all the rest, follow the link:

NEI Mount Ida Online Bachelor's Degree

Virtual Vietnam Wall

Yesterday I read about a virtual or online version of the Vietnam Wall. Please note this site is not government sponsored site and people must explicitly request that a name appear on the site, but it looks interesting and worth knowing about.

http://www.virtualwall.org/

The phrase of the day...WWW-MD

There’s a famous saying in Sunday School circles, “What would Jesus do?” abbreviated “WWJD”. People wear those initials on bracelets and charms as a reminder to think before they act, seeking better answers to life’s challenges in the teachings of Jesus. Well I think I’m going to adopt a new phrase for myself when dealing with salesmen, “What would Wal-Mart do?” or “WWW-MD”.

Recently a salesman presented me with a new register book concept in late prototype stage. [Note: I will not mention the company’s name because the product and pricing may well change before final release.] Full color, beautifully designed, organized so that families could add special “chapters” or theme pages designed to capture special attributes of the person remembered in the book (for instance, patriotic, special holidays, special vacations, marriage, 20 in all). Very comprehensive and again, very beautifully designed. However, the pricing is dramatically higher than what I pay today.

Here’s a portion of what the salesman wrote to me yesterday in response to my questions about pricing [Note: the numbers here are for illustration purposes only]:

“As for your mark up and what it costs a family?  Well that's relative.  You can buy a book for $20.00 and triple it and make $40.00 or you can buy a book for $40.00 and double it and still make $40.00.  The difference is about $20.00 to a family.  However, they get a much better value with the latter because they're getting dollar for dollar value for the additional $20.00 netting 50 cents in merchandise per $1.00 spent as opposed to 33 cents per dollar spent on the cheaper book.”

On the surface that sounds “reasonable”, but let’s turn this around and ask the “WWW-MD” question. Would Wal-Mart accept the idea that their costs would DOUBLE on a product and in the process they would make no additional money? No, they would not, so why in the world should I accept this form of cockeyed salesmanship? I shouldn’t and neither should you.

Doubling the company’s cost of register books (or any item for that matter) while seeing no improvement in profitability means your company has ended up losing money. At the very least you have to carry an inventory, so instead of tying up $2,500.00 in books you tie up $5,000.00 in books. This doesn’t sound like a lot but if you let that happen over and over again in a number of product areas, service prices have to go up in order to cover the cost of that money now “invested” in paper goods and lost to the operation of the business.

It is TOTALLY UNREASONABLE for vendors to come to our places of business and try to feed us this line of nonsense. Adding value means that EVERYONE—including the funeral home—gets to benefit. The family gets a better product, the funeral home adds profitability and the vendor gets to make money, a good old fashioned “win-win-win”. This other nonsense of the vendor makes more, the family gets more and the funeral home sees no benefit has got to stop. This only drives up service fees to cover the lost profitability and worst of all, that puts more and more financial pressure on those in our communities least able to afford funerals. That’s just bad business all the way around.

So start asking the “WWW-MD” question and see if that doesn’t change your perspective on how you care for your business, always remembering that a well run business has more, not less, to give to the families served.

Are Memorial Societies Obsolete?

You have heard me mention Rob Heppel before. He runs the website FuneralFuturist.com and ran that extensive online interview of me after the Baby Boomer article came out.

Well Rob appeared on a Seattle, WA NPR radio station last week with a pair of consumer advocates. You will find some of his commetary on the experience, including his suggestion that Memorial Societies have become obsolete at the following link.

http://www.funeralfuturist.com/funeral-costs-what-i-didnt-get-to-say/

I also chimed in with a response to one commentator's economic "reasoning" and his accusation that funeral homes were somehow "colluding" on prices.

Check it out.

Beach Memorial

They call this "Arlington West", a war memorial/protest located on the beach in Santa Monica California.

Follow the link to see more photos and information about the organization behind this project.

http://www.arlingtonwestsantamonica.org/

Here's a video story about Arlington West now appearing on the New York Times website.

NYTimes.com: Arlington West Video

A Million More...

...deaths per year that is, over the next 15 to 20 years. Let me say that again 1 million more deaths per year in this country than we deal with right now and that's assuming for calculation purposes that the population remains about the same size over that time. The population is expected to grow (at least moderately) as well.

Going into the holiday weekend, I don't have time to start a major posting but I now have a PDF version of the American Funeral Director article I wrote for the January 2008 issue. This begins to spell out some of the issues.

Give it a read and get me some feedback. I need to write a follow-up piece which looks at the mortality changes on a more regional basis (some areas will see moderate growth, others--explosive) and I would want to address anything about this article which is unclear or incomplete.

Thanks.

Download where_are_the_boomers.pdf

Funeral Limousine Tragedy

Click on the continue link below to view the aftermath of a funeral limousine accident. According to the email I received, this vehicle had gone out on a family pickup before a funeral and a pickup truck coming from the other direction tried to pass a slow moving vehicle and ended up side-swiping the limo and killing an eight year old passenger.

Just another reminder that no matter how carefully we operate our vehicles, we still have to function in a world filled with other drivers. At the very least, make sure any children who ride in funeral vehicles have a proper car seat. You never know when something like this may strike.

UPDATE:

Follow the link to a few more details about this accident.

Soldier Charged in Death of Girl

UPDATE 2:

Strangely enough, a funeral limousine slammed into a tree in Boston a couple of days ago. No fatalities.

http://bostonherald.com/news/regional/general/view.bg?articleid=1082197

Contradictions in Grieving

I made note of the new book An Uncertain Inheritance in a previous posting where an editor named Nell Casey has collected a variety of stories penned by professional writers about their individual experiences of caregiving. Not all of these stories involve end of life situations, in fact one of the best comes from the point of view of the challenge of someone receiving care from loved ones during a bout of deep clinical depression.

I have not finished yet, but I would like to pass along a short quote from one of the essays. This captures some of complexity involved with grieving. We must always keep this in mind when working with families. Death means lots of different things to people and sometimes grief brings not just sadness but guilt and frustration to the surface. You never know what you will find.

From the essay entitled, "The Baby" by Anne Landsman:

"I was stunned at how bereft I felt, even though there were so many miles separating my father and myself [she in New York, he having died in South Africa], so many years of distance, so much childhood hurt. I felt cold all the time, as if I was about to get sick. I began to understand the animal nature of grief, the mourning of dogs, apes, elephants. The loss of my father was huge, as if someone had taken off a limb. Not only had I lost him, the idosyncratic, lovable rascal that he was, I had also lost a fantasy. When he was alive, there was always the hope that he would turn one day into a real father, the benign, openhearted father I dreamed of having. Now that dream was gone too."

An amazing insight, take it and use it in your own practice of funeral service.

Peace,

BT

Watch those cash-advance rules of thumb

I spent some time reviewing my company's financials this afternoon and it surprised me to see how much our newspaper cash advance line has jumped in the last year--almost 29% (or $43,000 for a company our size)!

We have seen several of our local papers switch over to paid obituaries in the last year or so and as a result families must pay substantially more to post funeral information.

Anyway, this got me thinking I should write a simple reminder to all of you to double check those cash advance rules of thumb. We all have them, quick mental guides on how much an obituary will cost based upon the amount of family information in the record. This allows us to provide a reasonable estimate on the "Statement of Goods and Services". Still those rules of thumb get out of date from time to time and all the more so these days with the cost of many goods and services on the rise.

So check those bills more closely and make sure your arranging directors have current costs in mind when they sit with their families. An unnoticed newspaper short-fall of $20 or $30 dollars can add up quickly if it happens too often and at least in states like Massachusetts, cash-advance items have literally no margin for error.

In a time of slimming margins, every dollar counts. Don't just write off those mistakes. Fix them! That will make funerals just a tiny bit less expensive for everyone else.

Have a fabulous day!