Funeral Words

Predictably Irrational

Curious about why people think the way they do? Curious about learning how to tailor your business offerings and pricing so that everyone is more likely to experience a win-win outcome? Let me recommend Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational as a place to begin.

Ariely, Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT has done hundreds of simple but insightful experiments which identify quirks and blind spots in the way human beings perceive economic outcomes.

This book won't teach you specifically how to rework a General Price List, but for those of you constantly looking for a better way to explain and organize your offerings, Ariely's insights might make a difference. Chapter 1 alone, which shows the impact of packaging in the magazine business, is worth the price of the book.

Check it out.

                 

The Voices of Caregivers

For those of you concerned to know and better understand the lives of caregivers who come to see you at funeral arrangement time, let me suggest a new title released this year called An Uncertain Inheritance: Writers on Caring for Family. According to the New York Times Book Review, this collection of essays covers a wide range of caregiving circumstances and experiences from dealing with autism and depression to alzheimers, cancer and other terminal illnesses.

Caregiving has changed as a role within family and community. The reviewer, Joyce Johnson, puts it this way:

In the past, when families were much larger and life was more often cut short by disease, caregiving was more integrated into normal life. Women were brought up to become the selfless angels of the household, the built-in care system in any emergency. In Victorian novels, the sick and dying are usually surrounded by a great many people — from family members to servants — and there is something ennobling about the process. Great last-minute epiphanies occur, as well as uplifting reconciliations. The personal sacrifice involved in caregiving becomes its own reward.

Today’s caregivers are likely to find themselves peculiarly alone, exiles from the busy, heedless life around them in what the writers in this book variously call “a black hole of time and energy,” a “Black Balloon,” “our own little prison,” “Planet Autism” and “this unfamiliar country with different weathers, different rules.”

This book delves into those gray areas of modern caregiving experience. I have my copy on order and will give you and update when time allows.

                               

Here's a link to the Times review:

New York Times Book Review: An Uncertain Inheritance

The One Minute Manager

Though some funeral homes choose to shrink in the face of cremation's lost revenues. Most of us find we must manage larger and larger groups of people as businesses consolidate in regions like the northeast, or grow huge in size as we see in other parts of the country.

I know I have my hands full developing and refining a workable approach to the staff I have on hand and I realize more and more the need to keep the management process as simple and flexible as possible.

In desperation, I picked up a classic book The One-Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and have begun to put he prescriptions into use. The good news? You can understand this book in a minute. Nothing to memorize, no earthshatteringly weird concepts, but for anyone steeped in the old command and control mindset (and who isn't in funeral service with all these old-guy funeral home owners who perhaps learned a little management in the military 40 years ago, or more likely have no management training whatsoever), you could spend a lifetime learning to adopt and apply these simple and effective concepts.

At the beginning of the book, a statement which sets the tone:

* People Who Feel Good About Themselves -- Produce Good Results *

Such a deceptively simple idea, but like many "simple" concepts, a lifelong challenge if taken to heart.

I have begun my journey of un-learning and re-learning my approach to managing people. As I experience the ups and downs, I will share a bit more as time goes along.

In the mean time, you might want to grab a copy and start your own re-learning process. Even non-managers will find this a valuable philosophy in other parts of life.

                                                

Harvard President Writes Book About Death

Two percent of the United States population died in uniform during the United States Civil War. That's the equivalent of 6 MILLION people dying in today's America, a staggering comparison.

Drew Gilpin Faust, currently the president of Harvard University, has published a critically acclaimed accounting of how those many deaths changed the culture of America and how that collective suffering helped bridge the divide between North and South.

My reading list is already very long, so I don't think I will get to this one any time soon, but follow the link to a review in the New York Times. Any of you interested in the history and cultural significance of death should get this into your library immediately, and maybe one of the associations such as NFDA should invite Ms. Gilpin Faust to speak.

NYTimes.com: This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

                      

Update: I changed my mind and decided to put this book at the top of my reading list today. Here's the central thesis:

“… As they faced horrors that forced them to question their ability to cope, their commitment to the war, even their faith in a righteous God, soldiers and civilians alike struggled to retain their most cherished beliefs, to make them work in the dramatically altered world that war had introduced. Americans had to identify—find, invent, create—the means and mechanisms to manage more than half a million dead: their deaths, their bodies, their loss. How they accomplished this task reshaped their individual lives—and deaths—at the same time that it redefined their nation and their culture. The work of death was Civil War America’s most fundamental and most demanding undertaking.”

I will keep you posted.

Modern Christian Attitudes

This morning as I logged on to Amazon.com looking for some information, I found a new title listed in the "Recommended" section of my Amazon home page.

For those of you trying to understand the underlying causes of shifts in attitude towards funerals in America, you may wish to give this volume a read.

A portion of the Publisher's Weekly review reads as follows:

Mosaics and Busters (the generations that include late teens to early 30-somethings) believe Christians are judgmental, antihomosexual, hypocritical, too political and sheltered. Rather than simply try to do a PR face-lift, Kinnaman looks at ways in which churches' activities actually may have been unchristian and encourages a return to a more biblical Christianity, a faith that not only focuses on holiness but also loves, accepts and works to understand the world around it. It would be possible to get lost in the numbers, but the authors use numerous illustrations from their research and life experiences...

Obviously not a "funeral service" book. Yet for many funeral homes, "as the church goes, so does my business," and the Christian church in America has struggled in many ways.

I have a copy on hold at the book store and will give it my own read as soon as possible. In the mean time, for those with a hands-on nature, follow the link and give it a read of your own.

Laughing at Death

Just in time for gift giving season, Mort Gerberg, a major cartoon contributor to the New Yorker magazine has brought out a collection of cartoons called Last Laughs: Cartoons About Aging, Retirement...and the Great Beyond.

Amazon desribes the book this way:

Longtime New Yorker cartoonist Mort Gerberg has assembled an all-star cast of gifted and popular greats such as George Booth, Roz Chast, Leo Cullum, Frank Modell, and Jack Ziegler to join him in this exclusive collection confronting, illuminating, and celebrating the inevitabilities of life. Everything from cloning to cryogenics is tackled with humor and pathos. It turns out the Grim Reaper can be funny.

Also included in this book are brief reflections from the contributors that give readers a glimpse into their unique personalities. These artists prove that they are just as funny with the written word as they are with the image. Last Laughs is a must-have for fans of literary cartoons and anyone interested in slightly off-kilter insights about life and death.

Not exactly a text book for grief recovery but certainly an opportunity to laugh in the face of life's transitions.

                          

Grave Matters Redux

I had promised to return with an overview of the book Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial by Mark Harris.

In short, it is a well written book which the general public and the media will tend to reference for years to come. At the same time, it tends to over-demonize the intentions of funeral directors and product companies in the past; to romanticize the process of people burying their own dead in a pre-Civil War agrarian time when people had few alternatives; and it fails to disclose the possible downsides and the real life difficulties which can accompany caring for one's own dead.

Within you will find a detailed accounting of a "traditional" arrangements conference, embalming (right down to the last detail and euphemism) and casketing, though Harris does not spend even a sentence on the funeral itself, choosing to move directly into the environmental impact of a casket in the ground and missing the possibility that these accumulated traditions may still have some emotional purpose for those left behind.

From there he provides seven chapter stories which describe alternatives to current burial/entombment practices. These include: cremation, burial/scattering at sea, memorial reef, home funeral, "a plain pine box", backyard burial, and natural cemetery. Each of these chapters ends with a summary and resource guide with phone numbers and addresses when appropriate.

All in all, people will read this book and those inclined toward change will find a little more support and encouragement in that direction. This should come as no surprise to those of my readers in funeral service, because at least in my funeral homes, consumers have very much shifted beyond the "routinized" "modern" funeral that Harris describes in his opening chapters.

If you would like to purchase a copy, you will find a link here:

Grave Matters

Recent Reading

I have done more reading in the last month than I have done through most of this year. Traumatic events will indeed dull the senses and for the longest while my curiosity had all but dried up.

Anyway, I've just finished a fascinating book called The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. If you want a better philosophical understanding of why we have seen so much market turmoil due to the mortgage crisis and why most of the "experts" keep getting it wrong, Taleb will point you in right direction.

More helpful for us in funeral service, I have just started the book microtrends: the small forces behind tomorrow's big changes by Mark J. Penn (the man who identified and helped name the "soccer moms" of the 1996 presidential campaign).

As always one must keep a pinch of salt handy when reading any book or article but I think this quote from the introduction should get us asking many more questions of our suppliers and industry experts.

"The power of individual choice has never been greater, and the reasons and patterns for those choices never harder to understand and analyze. The skill of microtargeting--identifying small, intense subgroups and communicating with them about their individual needs and wants--has never been more critical in markenting or in political campaigns. The one-size-fits-all approach to the world is dead."

For instance, are we ready for the fact that more and more women will keep individual households in the years to come? This is not because women necessarily want to live alone but because the real ratio in America of straight women to straight men (and yes homosexuality does make a significant difference in the equation) is something like 53% to 47%. Even if you could manage to pair everyone up, you would still end up with several million women on their own. According to Penn, the ratio among African-Americans works out much worse.

Do we know how to get ready for this trend (and many others) or will it take us the usual 15 or 20 years to catch up to social reality???

I think we and our leaders have lots of studying to do!

How the Famous, Rich, and Powerful Really Died

In wandering by the new non-fiction table at my local Barnes & Noble, I happened to notice the following book, a compendium of mostly brief obituaries of the rich and famous called The Portable Obituary. I know some of you like to keep such cause of death trivia at hand and this seems to cover all sorts of interesting people. Take a look.

                  

Don't forget that Kates-Boylston, publisher of the American Funeral Director, also puts out a series of volumes on the funerals of the famous. You can find more by clicking here.      

Next on My Reading List

A friend sent me a review of this book which appeared in the Worcester Telegram newspaper last weekend and I've put it at the top of my "got to get" list of new books. It does not sound like an expose in the Jessica Mitford sense, more to let people know they have options and to also point out the environmental impact which our traditions of burial or cremation can have. Below you will find an overview of the book which appears as part of the Amazon listing.

                  

From Booklist
*Starred Review* In the face of the billion-dollar-a-year funeral industry, former environmental columnist Harris advocates green (i.e., chemical-free) burial, a concept that is gaining momentum among aging baby boomers. His slender tome is chockablock with information on a variety of burial options, the majority of them environmentally friendly. For many, the only options they thought were available involved choosing between a mahogany casket and a brass casket. Through his detailed if grisly explanation of the currently popular embalming and interment process, Harris just may open up entirely new discussions among family members whenever the topic of burial is broached. Indeed, after reading this book, many may find it impossible to make such decisions casually, whether they are planning their own mortal destinies or are engaged in the emotion-wrought decisions incumbent upon the passings of loved ones. They may consider it worse to leave everything in the hands of a funeral-home owner. Including specifics about probable cost, availability, and location regarding a number of green burial options (names and addresses of some sources and providers are given), Harris has created a well-organized, valuable resource for anyone considering the disposition of their own or a loved one's earthly remains. Donna Chavez
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