INTERVIEW OF A FUNERAL DIRECTOR
1. Vocation: What is your job title/position/job description?
Funeral Director/Embalmer. This is the title on the Pennsylvania license. It is possible to be licensed as a trade embalmer in Pennsylvania, but few take this lesser license. If one heads a funeral home, one takes on the title of "supervisor," but still is a "funeral director/embalmer."
2. Do you belong to a union?
No.
3. Describe your physical work environment.
The environment is a large house converted into parlors on the first floor usually with an embalming room and a receiving room in the basement. There are living quarters on the second and third floors, usually for the family and for student interns. The parlors are comfortable rooms. They are climate controlled, carpeted, scrupulously clean and well appointed with furniture, paintings, and objects d'art. The office is also well appointed and neat with a large desk, comfortable visitor chairs, and the usual office equipment of file cabinet, computer, printer, phones, fax machine, paper shredder, and sample caskets. There is no sign of clutter or exposed storage in the office. The embalming room is a small operating room with stainless steel table and the tools of surgery neatly stored but visible. The garage is immaculately clean as are the cars kept there. The embalming room smells of chemicals. The parlors smell of flowers and air fresheners.
4. Please describe a typical day (do you travel, hours you work, etc.)
The director rises around 7:00 and breakfasts outside thehome at a local coffee shop or diner. The director likes to keep a presence in the community and spends much of the morning chatting with friends and merchants while drinking coffee. During the morning hours the director dresses casually, but in subdued colors--grays or blacks. By late morning (10:30-11:00), the director returns to the office to deal with appointments, usually people making "pre-need" arrangements or with the grieved selecting caskets and negotiating ceremony details and prices.
Lunch, when there is time, is taken in the living quarters on the second floor with the family. The afternoons are spent either supervising viewings or doing paperwork (death notices, obituaries, cemetery and church negotiations, death certificates, coroner inquiries, payroll, scheduling, advertising, keeping up with the profession by reading professional journals).
Supper, if time allows, is again taken with the family in the living quarters. The evenings are spent with viewings or paperwork or just relaxing, if the parlors are empty. Usually it is 9:30 or 10:00, however, before the director actually eats supper and relaxes. Of course, on days when there is a body to be picked up and embalmed, all else must be set aside while that work is done, though refrigeration units are available to hold the body until there is time to do the embalming.
A simple embalming takes one to two hours. It takes an additional two to three hours to prepare the body for viewing:dressing, cosmetic repair, hair, and any restorative appearance work. Extraordinary cases of accident or self inflicted gunshot to the head may take up to six or seven hours to do adequate reconstruction.
5. How does your profession affect your ability to live a healthy lifestyle (exercise, sleep, nutrition)?
One is married to the profession and must be prepared to be called at any time during the day or night. Sleeping is seldom uninterrupted. There are a lot of naps. Meals are seldom taken regularly, usually too much eating late at night. Even vacations are rare and seldom taken farther than a day's travel from home.
6. Are there over-the-counter medications, alternative medications that are typically used in your profession (weight loss, tobacco, steroids, etc.)?
Frequent use of aspirin for tension headaches or at the on-set of a cold. Antacids are always in the pocket or purse.
7. What are things that your friends find interesting about your profession (like how often do you shoot your gun if you are a police officer?) What types of questions do you get asked by the public?
"What's the worst thing you have seen?" "What do you do with the blood?" "What do you do with 'too-tall' bodies?"
These questions about the rather ghoulish details of the job are most common. The director seldom answers these directly in detail. Rather the director gives general answers like: "A self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head will take the head off"; "we make them fit"; "we dispose of it according to the legal guidelines."
8. How did you become interested in your profession?
It was in the family. As children we worked in the funeral environment and became comfortable in it.
9. What do you like most about your profession?
Most of the time you feel that you are bringing comfort to people at a time in their lives when they need it most--not the bodies, but the mourners. It is satisfying to have people say that their loved one looks just the way they remember them, the way he or she would have wanted, that the handling of all the details made this much easier for them. There is a great amount of human satisfaction in the work,and it is a kind of immediate gratification.
10. What do you dislike most about your profession?
The most annoying aspect of the profession is the fact that you are always on call. This affects sleeping, family time, and especially limits vacationing. You never can walk away from the job. This is especially true for the small, family owned funeral home. Those who work for corporate funeral homes can walk away from the job because there are others to cover for them, but even at that level the Director in charge feels the responsibility to be accessible to clients when called upon.
11. Educational Background
12. High School
13. Vocational School or College
14. Graduate School or Special Training
Most funeral directors/embalmers have college degrees, but a college degree is not required. Now an Associates Degree is required, but some of the older directors have only a High School diploma.
Beyond the Associates Degree, one year of Mortuary College is required followed by a one year internship in a licensed funeral home. Continuing education is required in many states, but not in Pennsylvania. Still, most funeral directors continue to take courses or attend seminars in conjunction with either their professional organizations or the coroner's office.
15. How does one obtain a job in your profession?
Most go into family established businesses. If someone gets licensed without a pre-established tie, that person may apply for work with coroners' offices or with larger corporate funeral establishments. Work with these large corporations, however, is frequently unsatisfying since they use the young licensed funeral directors more as part of their sales force to sell pre-need agreements than to work in the actual embalming and funeralarrangements. Many quit and simply go into sales or they become free lance embalmers on call to help out when a funeralhome is overwhelmed by a number of cases at the same time.
16. What previous positions have you held since you started this profession?
Sales and retail. Young funeral directors frequently have second jobs in sales with large corporations (Kellogg, Heinz, Xerox). They call it working for benefits. Most small funeral homes do not pay benefits, as most are family operated small businesses.
17. Can you get promoted? If so, to what position and how?
One cannot be promoted easily. One can gain seniority and move up to become the supervisor of a funeral home, but there are not promotions within the ranks of funeral director. One can be a trade embalmer, but cannot move up without the additional funeral director license. Once a funeral director, there is no upward mobility, though there can be more money if the establishment does more business. Only when the incumbent supervisor retires or moves on can one become a supervisor.
18. What are the “perks” of your job?
There are not many perks with the job except the little known one of parking. There is a courtesy among funeral directors that if one calls ahead to a fellow director in the neighborhood of destination, the local funeral director will allow the visiting funeral director to park on his or her premises. So, if one is going to a sold out sporting event and knows that there will be little parking and very expensive parking at that, one calls a funeral director in the neighborhood and secures courtesy parking. It's a little perk, but it works both locally and nationally.
Other perks are neighborhood courtesies like free coffee and special services from local small businesses, especially florists.
19. How do you get paid (contract, per mile, per hour, etc.) How can you make more money?
The director is paid based on the number of funerals the home has per year. The small funeral home director averages an annual income of $44,000 per year. That is a national average. High volumefuneral home directors in urban areas do much better. In an urban area the average is about $75,000 annually.
20. What is the most stressful part of your job?
Every funeral is a small ceremony with little advance planning; so, logistics become the main stress. Coordinating all aspects of the ceremony within a three to five day window demands total cooperation from dozens of sources: printing and press, doctors and coroners, florists, cemetery officials, grave diggers, casket sales people and suppliers, clergy and sextons, drivers, and hearse rental people. And the list goes on. Any non-cooperative person in this network can cause huge stress--a driver who does not show up, a hearse that breaks down, a cemetery that can't get a grave open on time.
21. What emotional problems are common in people in your profession?
Stress is the main problem. There is little depression. Funeral directors, unlike doctors and nurses, do not deal with dying. They deal with the dead. They are surprisingly free of the sadness of life being lost. They see themselves as offering consolation, and they seldom fear death. They see it as the end of a natural cycle and as something in which there can be great dignity.
22. What type of physical activity is required in your position?
There is a lot of heavy lifting involved in the job. The removal of bodies from homes with narrow stairways is hard on the back and legs. There is also a great deal of standing involved in the daily work.
23. What things happen that really make you angry?
The answer was "not much." The failure of anyone upon whom the funeral director depends, of course, makes the director angry, but primarily the most common sources of anger are doctors who are very lackadaisical about signing death certificates or careless in filling them out. This can delay a burial or even cause an exhumation which costs the director both in money and time.
The other source of anger is the employee who oversteps bounds and begins to order people about as though the employee is the director. The director wants people to do their job in a timely and dignified manner and not to exceed their role.
24. What other professions do you work with, and how do they affect your job (make your job easier or harder)?
There are many. The funeral director is careful to keep good relations with the whole community, particularly the various churches in the area, all of the florists, the hearse rental people and their drivers, the coroner's office, and the cemeteries. The cooperation of all these people is necessary, and the funeral director must be friendly and cooperative with them all. Keeping these relationships healthy is much of the work: be friendly, be known, tip when appropriate.
25. What “health risk” behaviors are common in your profession? (tobacco, alcohol, specific drugs, sex, stress, marital or family discord, etc.)
Back injuries and knee injuries are common from carrying heavy weights in awkward situations. Stress creates a climate of smoking. Seeing people who have died from lung cancer who did not smoke and old people who died at 96 despite smoking for years makes the director skeptical about the positive value of the anti smoking campaigns. Poor eating and sleeping habits.
26. How does your vocation affect the personal life of you or people you know?
The job, because it is always with the director, can affect family life. Usually the family lives above the funeral home. This limits home entertaining and can cause the children to be embarrassed. Friends are not always comfortable going to a party when there are corpses downstairs, and children are more often hushed in their own home than they are at friends'.
There is also a need to keep a very respectable image in the community, and this creates a tension. Despite these things, things which can put a strain on relationships, the families of funeral directors stay intact and form close bonds.
27. What activities an/or hobbies do people in your profession like to do?
Sundays are family days! Male directors like to golf, usually once during the week and every Saturday, with friends not business associates. The women like to go out to dinner outside their neighborhood and to go to clubs and sporting events. The women in this field are, by and large, younger than the men. In 1977, there were three women in the graduating class of the Mortuary College (.085%); in 2004, there were fourteen women (40%). These younger women have different social interests than the older men.
28. Are there any items of clothing, or props that someone portraying a person in your profession would use consistently? (Hats, keys, stuff you’d keep in your pockets or bags, day planners, work boots, particular “costume,” or types of clothing…)
In both of my interviews, both interviewees called my attention to the fact that it was morning and they were dressed casually. But they were both in black. The man wore blackslacks and a black golf shirt; the woman wore gray casual slacks with a black and gray tee shirt. As much of a stereotype as it may seem, these people wear subdued colors. Their business dress is the black suit. Hair is cut short for men; women wear the "anchor woman hair style." They always carry a beeper or a cell phone. They are always on call.
29. If a person in your position were to get fired, what would they most likely have done to justify the termination and what would the steps involve? Do lay-offs happen in your occupation?
People in the family business don't get fired. Lack of business may force a lay off or force the taking of a second job. For those working for a Funeral Home corporation, failure to make sales quotas would be grounds for being fired, but most in that situation quit before being fired. Of course, public scandal of any kind could force even a family member to take a leave of absence for awhile. There would be no appeal.
30.During all of these questions, listen for “jargon” used by the interviewee…words they use that are “lingo” specific to their profession. Ask them to define those words if it is not clear to you.
There is not much jargon used. When dealing with the public, funeral directors use euphemisms for the bodies with which they deal. Among themselves, they are more blunt, but they are not irreverent. They are masters of diplomacy.
If they fear that a customer's dead mother was a very heavy woman and that they might need help getting her downstairs from her place of death, they will not ask if she was heavy. They will say instead, "I may be misremembering, but your mother was a little woman, wasn't she?"
Let the grieved one say, "Oh no, Mom was about 180 pounds."
31. Stories
There was the Catholic family who were unhappy with the way the seating was arranged in the church and began squabbling within the church asto who should have been in the front pews. After the service, the squabbling turned into fisticuffs outside the church, and the funeral director stood up on the roof of the hearse and shouted full voice to get them to stop. He ordered them all into their cars and made them sit for five minutes to cool off before he'd take the cortege to the cemetery.
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The funeral director was very concerned about any offensive odor in the establishment and made liberal use of a spray room freshener, even spraying the room where the flowers were. Having sprayed heavily in the morning so that the room would be fresh for the afternoon viewing, the director returned about an hour before the doors were to be opened to the public and found all of the flowers wilted and dead.
A florist friend came and replaced them all. Saying she did not know what had happened, the director offered to pay the florist. The florist declined payment, but looked archly at the director and said, "Don't use that air freshener again." Caught, she felt about six inches tall.