Within the last month a reader commented on one of our postings with the comment, “The process is always greater than the product”.  I recently went through an automobile purchase for my 20 year old and can argue that I don’t really believe that statement to be true all the time.  In this case, I believe we ended up with a product that we all like — him for sporty-ness, mom and I for safety and reliability — but the process of buying a car was not much fun at all.  However, to the readers comment, the process, including many discussions with my son, did get us to the product  —- so you could also make his argument that the process was greater than the product.

The reader’s comment, to be fair,  really came in the discussion of funeral/cremation arrangements.  I thought of it yesterday after posting the article about cremation pricing and what seems to be a budding competitive price war in metropolitan markets for direct cremation consumers.  Thinking back to my funeral service education and the psychology involved in the mind of a mourning consumer, I had to ask, “With the low price we are giving the mourning consumer a “product” but are they missing out on the “process”?

My guess is the funeral industry will soon have apps where consumers can see the pricing for services – especially minimal services like direct cremation – with a click of a button on their smart phones.  The mourning consumer will be able to select a funeral home, see the prices, and sign the authorization forms remotely so the funeral/cremation provider can go about his duties of caring for the deceased.  The mourning consumer will then pick up the ashes from a location within a week (or have them sent via registered mail) and go about his life.

Seems pretty simple and hassle free doesn’t it.  The consumer has the product (the urn with the ashes of his loved one), but the process he has went thru to get the end product is nothing like we were taught in Mortuary Psychology that the mourning consumer is expected to need to fight, understand, and eventually accept, the realities of loss.

From my position on the board of a Big Ten university, I know that about 30% of college freshmen are entering college with a diagnosed mental health issue.  The number is growing so fast that counselors and “student coaches” are drivers of our personnel budgets.  And, as I’ve thought many times, the students entering Big Ten universities are “smart” kids.  I wonder what is the mental health condition of 18 year olds in society in general.  I’ve also thought, what in the growing up “process” have these students missed that the students of my generation captured?

So, as we move into more price-point decisions and less service to the mourning public as funeral directors, we owe it to society to find a way to include the mourning consumer family in the “process”.  No doubt will arrangements be less personal, but we have to have a way for people to be involved — even in the lowest cost cases.  Not to do so will cause a greater risk to the emotionally well-being of our society.