FUNERALS FROM THE HEART

Funeral rites are as old as civilization itself. It seems human beings are pre-wired to memorialize loss, and apparently it’s a need ignored at one’s peril.

For the foreseeable future, it appears that for many in the baby boomer generation, the end of life choice will be either a self created ceremony at their church or some other personalized funeral experience, sometimes sans funeral director, or direct disposition. Simply, the choice is often between a quality personalized event or “nothing.”

Arranging a quality individualized funeral event is an entirely different experience than arranging any other end-of life ceremony. And it can be particularly difficult if the arranger is
still working with the old "order taking" mind-set. To be sure fulfilling the family’s wishes is utmost important. However, the ability to make suggestions based upon information acquired in the arrangement is necessary. If the arranger’s suggestions "hit the nail on the head" everything changes. A disinterested family suddenly becomes energized and begins to participate with ideas the arranger triggered with his suggestion.

To keep in step with our fast-paced changing world, arrangement skills should be re-examined
at least every two years. Now, I can just hear choirs of old funeral directors out there saying, “I learned how at my daddy’s knee, and they’ve been good enough all these years, so I’ll just keep using them.” Look no further for the answer to the question of what happened to funeral service.

There is never a need to “sell” families on personalization. Quality personalization doesn’t happen that way. Indeed, there is no payoff for the arranger in declaring his intent before he actually presents his/her personalized concept. The idea of personalization need never come up unless the family brings it up.

The entire matter of personalization evolves from two very quick, unique interviews, one after the other. The initial interview creates a bonding and the second enables the arranger to come to know the deceased and certain highly important non-material facts about him or her.

The arranger is looking for human traits such as compassion, kindness, love, gentleness, forgiveness and a nonjudgmental nature. There are rich stories behind those emotions. The interviews enable the arranger to make very accurate personalized suggestions. Acceptance of the suggestion by the family will depend on the arranger’s creativity and ability at the “art of the presentation” and how accurately the suggestions reflect the deceased.

Creativity can be learned. The very future of funeral service maybe dependent upon our ability to merge facts gathered in the interview into a creative and acceptable event. It is not some thing one is just born with. Creativity is a major focus in Life Appreciation Training. One of the experiences in The Training is learning how one can shift their creativity into overdrive.

Most families that reject funerals are simply saying, “We don’t see value in our understanding of what a funeral is” or “Given that we have such a low sense of value for a funeral, we’re not paying for it.” It’s very important to remember that “no funeral” doesn’t mean the family has no feelings or does not need to memorialize in a manner unique to them. They’re simply saying they see no value in a funeral as they understand it. Would you shell out several thousand dollars for something you didn’t see value in? I doubt it.

The funeral director’s challenge, then, is to discover how to help families respond to their respective unique need to memorialize and how to present a ceremony that connects them
to how they loved the deceased. If one is successful at that process, there will be a funeral and families will have a feeling of being cared for and that they’ve been well served by the funeral home.

The funeral arrangement process as it stands for many funeral homes today is very ritualistic, leaving little room for the kind of flexibility and spontaneity needed to brainstorm out-of the-box ideas about funerals that may not be within traditional community norms.

When we can consistently plan moving, powerful, unique funeral events we will begin to understand the awesome skills we have to keep our businesses on firm ground.

When an arranger begins the arrangement by asking a litany of closed-ended questions it builds a defense between him/her and the family. To be sure the questions need to be asked but withheld until after the ceremony is created. I know there are newspaper deadlines that may make that difficult. But if the arranger can at least delay asking them until the bond (results fast using counseling skills) is made it helps.

All of the questions about vitals are closed ended, as are all of the questions about when, where and how the family wants the funeral. The problem with closed ended questions is that instead of creating openness, they build mistrust. They build mistrust because they are controlling.

Funeral service has an army of baby boomers on its doorstep that, according to all previous experience, will resist even a hint of being controlled. But if the funeral director has been seduced by the premise that he needs to get to it – that is, start making the funeral arrangements – the opportunity to conclude with a quality personalized event is very limited, if not impossible.

THE GREATEST EDUCATIONAL NEEDS IN FUNERAL SERVICE TODAY ARE PROGRAMS THAT HELP ARRANGERS OLD AND YOUNG TO "RETREAD" AND TO LEARN HOW TO KICK THEIR CREATIVITY INTO OVERDRIVE. Please forgive me if my comment seems rather self serving because I am president of Life Appreciation Training and we teach how to accomplish the above. But after over thirty years of teaching funeral directors I truly believe that without retreading and creativity for everyone on staff of a funeral home our future is bleak. And learning to retread and boost personal creativity is not expensive.

Closed-ended questions are best used when a specific piece of information is required, but they can damage a relationship unless a bonded relationship with the family was developed first. Good communicators develop the habit of asking open-ended questions. An example: “What was the cause of death?” is closed-ended and requires the respondent to talk about only what is asked of him. “Do you feel like telling me a little about what happened?” is an open-ended question that allows the respondent some latitude to respond in the way they feel most comfortable.

Attempting to personalize a funeral using dated skills and procedures is like leaving a message for a tailor, telling him your height and weight, and asking him to make you a great suit you can wear for all occasions. But the tailor doesn’t know you; he doesn’t know what your occasions are. If he were a good tailor, he would call back and tell you about the many things he needs to
know to make you a great suit. So, you would go see him, and to your amazement, he would discover that one of your arms is slightly longer than the other or that you have certain bulges that would disappear if the suit were cut to accommodate them. You would discuss your
use of the suit, cloth, style and so on, and then he would make an appointment for you to have another consultation within a week or so.

Over time, just about everything about the funeral arrangement conference has been examined. Years ago, funeral directors went to the house to make arrangements, which to this day remains the single best location. The office with a desk followed, creating a barrier between the funeral director and the family. In the early 1980s, many funeral directors, recognizing the problem, set up a table at which everyone – family and funeral director – could sit. Today, some hardy souls come to the arrangement conference with just a clipboard and pen and others with a computer. We have examined everything, but we have never questioned the premise: that our primary function is to make funeral arrangements or final disposition plans. What if that isn’t the right premise? What if our challenge has a goal that is far nobler? What if our primary challenge was to bond with the family? No funeral talk, no casket talk, no decisions to be acted upon in the future, no vitals – but just engage in the communication that creates bonding. That’s the funeral director’s job, and when it’s accomplished, everything changes. Facial muscles soften, shoulders come down and the conversation begins to come more from the heart. If one speaks from the heart, others hear from the heart. After building a relationship with the family, it’s time to begin the process of developing a relationship with the deceased. We begin to attempt to know the deceased through the family’s experience of him or her. And now, because the family has an experience with the arranger built on trust, they feel safe and are ready to talk from the heart. In addition to becoming familiar with the loved one’s traits of compassion, kindness, love, gentleness and forgiveness, for example, we’d also like to hear about his or her victories and defeats, passions, goals and perhaps even personal tragedies, the ones that molded him or her into the person they were. I would want each family member to describe their loved one because I want to see their faces as they do so. I want to know how his or her love affected them. You can just feel how this conversation would be difficult – most likely impossible – without having bonded.

As this conversation weaves its way through the deceased’s life, his or her profile begins to emerge. The funeral director’s goal is to tell the loved one’s story at the funeral, not in words since words are just symbols of symbols and thus twice removed from any real communication, but by demonstration of what others loved about him or her. Traditional funerals use words and so do most personalized funerals, but personalized funerals also obtain their beauty and effectiveness from demonstrating. The adage “A picture is worth a thousand words” is applicable; one can compare personalization to traditional funerals as television to radio. It’s easy to throw funeral props and a video at a family and call the funeral personalized. It’s just that it’s not, really. Sadly, that has become the current version of a cookie-cutter funeral.

In more than 35 years of developing funerals like I’ve described, I’ve never had to “sell” services and merchandise to bereaved families. There’s something odious about using that tactic, as well hidden as that agenda may be. Once the funeral concept is accurately described to the family based on the data collected, the difference is so completely emotionally satisfying that the choice is obvious. If you get it right describing to the family an experience that so clearly reflects the love given and received, your ceremonies will trump direct disposition, doing it on their own at their church and any other alternative.

Then we will have a funeral that will last another 200 years and none of them will be the same.

Bill Bates is president and founder of Life Appreciation Training. Since the company’s establishment in 1974, Bates has been a leading figure in the movement to personalize funeral practices. He can be reached at 772-584-3867, via email at billbates@lifeappreciation.com or online at www.lifeappreciation.com

THE FUNERAL ARRANGER UNIVERSAL LEARNING CURVE

By Bill Bates

Many of us in funeral service believe that if funeral service is not to be completely consumed with direct cremation and "no funeral" request, a grass roots effort to begin to make every funeral a powerful and moving experience for our clients is necessary. Dry and uninteresting funerals in which families go away saying, "never again" hurt all of us, not just the firm that produces them.

Every funeral director in America, Canada and Australia (including me) whether we are consciously aware of it or not is involved in a vital "learning curve", moving from traditional funeral arranger to what I call "personalization specialists." There are three main stages of development in this particular educational experience. All funeral arrangers fall into one of the three stages. Discovering where you are will help define the direction you may want to grow toward.

As you know, making personalized funeral arrangements is a larger challenge than the making of traditional funeral arrangements. It requires good bonding skills, creativity and risk taking.

Most of us enter the learning curve by attempting to use the same skill set we have always used to arrange traditional funerals. If you have been doing that for awhile you have already discovered its limitations. However, where as the end result is far less then a real personalized funeral it's an important beginning. These funerals most often resemble what I call "remolded traditional funerals." Remolded traditional funerals look like regular funerals with the added addition of picture boards and personalized casket panels. Unfortunately they frequently become standard, replacing one bad commercial idea of one size fits all that the consumer is rejecting in droves with another. Many of our colleagues get stuck at this level of learning thinking it’s as far as they need to go. But other more creative funeral arrangers use it to catch a glimpse of as yet unknown possibilities and continue in their learning.

The next level begins with the funeral director making suggestions which require certain risk taking but will be the beginning stages in which things like hobbies, careers, avocations and some participation is included in the ceremony. Our study of working funeral arrangers in the US, sadly demonstrate that most of us do not make creative ceremony suggestions, content to take an easier softer way out by taking orders from families. But, if you find yourself at this stage of the evolutionary process you’re probably finding more interest and excitement in your work, improved revenue and client satisfaction.

Personally I stayed at this stage for a very long time. I remember feeling incomplete about the personalized ceremonies I arranged but could not visualize what the next evolution could possible be. But gradually many of the families I served begin to demonstrate to me what my next step could be. Even though my funerals were consistently creative many lacked the important "wow" moment I was looking for. Most of the time when we were able to create a "wow" moment in the ceremony, I admit it was more by accident then intentional. I started to pay attention to exactly what it was that moved families. Even though my families appreciated the many funeral props and other personalization "add on's" they didn't address the heart of the matter. I begin to notice that when we were able to accurately demonstrate what others loved about the deceased every one was touched by it, including me and my staff. But, doing that was difficult and most of the time seemed impossible. It required a more intimate connection with the family to make the kind of discoveries needed then we were doing. And frankly we didn't know how to do that. Many times it just happened leaving me questioning how it had happened. As I begin to pay attention to how we interviewed families that resulted in that kind of intimacy an entirely new arrangement system begin to evolve which swung open the door to the most exciting discovery of my entire career and the “next and new phase”.

But the third and so far as we know final phase takes study, experience, effort and commitment. However, this is the stage at which your consistent personalization ceremonies have become significant in attracting new calls for your firm. This final stage is one in which the funeral arranger has acquired an entirely different skill set then required for traditional funeral arranging. In this stage the funeral arranger has become skilled at the use of interpersonal skills for client bonding, adept at risk taking and creating concepts that demonstrate the “non material” things of life into the ceremony. It takes practice and creativity to be able to express love, compassion, understanding, commitment, giving and all that we value about being human. But it is the ability to demonstrate what others loved about the deceased that creates the all important "wow" moment. Wow moment experiences are generally very simple; they almost never present any additional cost to perform and rarely resemble any gone before.

Here are a few simple examples:

At a very, very traditional funeral for a man who spent most of his adult life at the horse race track in a variety of jobs he loved the organist surprised everyone by pulling all of the stops out of the pipe organ and playing "post time" very loudly instead of the normal prelude. Part of the "wow" factor impact was the surprise of the song following the somber traditional funeral format.

The” lit up" look on the faces of the audience was one of recognition and happiness. It instantly created community with in the audience which was lacking prior to the experience.
The widow of a sixty year marriage confided to the funeral director that she and her husband always held hands and said the Lords prayer together at the end of each day. At the conclusion of the funeral the funeral director escorted her to the casket and placed her hand on her deceased husband and the entire congregation said the Lords prayer together. In order for the funeral director to acquire this simple, beautiful and important piece of information a trusting relationship between himself and his client had to be established. A relationship in which the client felt valued enough by the funeral director that she would volunteer very private and intimate information. But that alone is not enough, the funeral directors ability to create a funeral concept and obtaining client permission to put it into play all required new and practiced skills.

Following the committal service for a man known for his love of fine teas from around the world the funeral director gave each funeral attendee a tea bag with the deceased name on it requesting they use it in his memory.

For the president of a car club who always told his friends to "make some noise" as they left his house following their Saturday get together the funeral coach driver followed by 25 - 30 hot rods diverted to the house on the way to the cemetery and stopped in front and squealed and fished tailed the funeral coach, "making some noise" followed by each hot rode as they saluted their fallen comrade by stopping and "making some noise."

These are very simple ideas but contributed powerfully because they so completely captured and demonstrated an aspect of what others loved about the deceased. They were framed in a larger context representing the deceased to complete the demonstration.

Personalized funerals tell a story by demonstration. The comparison to a traditional funeral is one of television to radio.

Bill Bates is president and founder of Life Appreciation Training Seminars. Since the origins of Life Appreciation Training in 1974 he has been the leading figure in the movement to personalize funeral practices in America, Canada and Australia. He can be reached at BillBates@lifeappreciaton.com or 1-772-584-3867.
www.LifeAppreciation.com