Grief and Bereavement — Funeral Directors need to lead the education of such in society

July 16, 2025/Business/

In the past month part of my thoughts have been at the intersection of “Education and Grief”. And, it has brought me to a way of thinking that maybe the two thoughts need to go together.

You see, during my time as a Board Member of the University of Minnesota I worked to try to get a student-led initiative about having a class on “Financial Literacy” become part of the base, required core of curriculum courses that every student needed to graduate. It came from a foundation in which students told me, and I’m paraphrasing here, “The University does a great job preparing us to go out in the world and make a great living, but nobody tells us how to manage the income that we earn”.

I came to the conclusion that if we taught students about taxes, interest, mortgages, automobile payments, savings plans, and more we would have a society not only where citizens were more apt to make wise financial decisions but people would be much more aware of how the votes they cast in elections affect their purchasing power and financial future.

I recently made a call to the Provost (the position in charge of the academic side of the college) who was in her last week on the job. I had helped hire her and got to know her when I was the Chair of the (Academic) Mission Committee for two years. I had asked her how Financial Literacy had fared in the new curriculum proposals and she let me know that the entire proposal had been voted down by faculty. . . . So, my Financial Literacy ideas for students were back to square zero.

On to grief. . . . As many of you might know, in roughly the last month the past Speaker of the House in Minnesota, Rep. Melissa Hortman, was assasinated. I can’t say I was a friend of the Speaker or that I even knew her well. However, University of Minnesota Board Members are selected by the legislature and getting known by them helps one’s chances for success.

I remember encountering Rep. Hortman in a stairwell at the State Office Building. I wanted to get an appointment with her to push my candidacy and she said something like the following to me, “No need, I’ve read your bio and heard from others. . . I’ll be voting for you”. . . and, she ended up doing so.

So, while we probably didn’t have the same political ideals I can say she was honest, forthright, and ethical in her short discussion with me. When I heard of the assasination news that moment in the stairwell immediately came back to me and shook me to the soul.

Recently a letter to the editor on the grief of the Hortman assasination was printed in the Minnesota Star and Tribune. The writer said, “I am grieving a country that has become numb to cruelty. A nation where the capacity to care is treated as a partisan liability. Where empathy is mocked, where decency is dismissed as weakness and where powerful. . .are met not with respect but with violence.”

So, here I am — at the intersection of education and grief. It’s not a position unique to me and former President of the National Association of Funeral Directors (NAFD) in Great Britain, John Adams, finds himself at the same spot. I had the opportunity to sit down with Mr. Adams at the United States NFDA convention in Baltimore in 2022 and learn more about his goals.

One of those goals is to unite education and grief by making a course on Death, Dying, and Bereavement a required course in the British National Curriculum. To that end he has already had an audience with King Charles and last December addressed the Members of Parliament on the subject where he received very positive responses. Here’s the latest update on what is happening with his initiative.

Back to Financial Literacy — I won’t give up on my quest to get more people to understand the value of knowing finances and the ramifications in one’s life on how they manage their finances. Matter of fact, I think in the world we live in there should be a lot more room to learn the “soft sciences” like bereavement and/or financial literacy.

Maybe if we can help with that education our communities can understand the value of empathy and grieve with compassion when we lose our friends and neighbors. . . . And, maybe like John Adams in Great Britain funeral directors, who exhibit that “capacity to care” can lead the way.

Related –– “Death-A Changing Industry” podcast hosted by John Adams. This episode is titled “What my children taught me about Grieving”

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