Funeral Director Daily
Thursday night into Friday morning brought Minnesota’s first snowfall of the 2021-2022 winter season. It was light, but created slippery conditions outside that forced me onto an indoor treadmill run on Friday morning. My 2 1/2 mile daily run is punctuated by the fact that I have a lot of stamina. . . just not…
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Last March a public service announcement (PSA) created by the International Cemetery, Cremation, and Funeral Association (ICCFA) Education Foundation began airing. In early November the association announced that the PSA campaign has been one of the best in media history by, according to Nielsen TV research, being broadcast 7,955 times and viewed by an approximate…
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The numbers 11-11-11 have always been significant when I think of November 11. Yesterday was that day that we now refer to as Veteran’s Day in America or is referred to as Remembrance Day in Canada. Those numbers, 11-11-11, refer to the day and time that the cease fire that ended World War I in…
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Back in about 1990 I made funeral arrangements for a 55-year old who died of a sudden heart attack. His widowed wife eventually talked to me about an idea for our funeral home which was based on the premise of what we now call “Aftercare”. At that time our funeral home did not have a…
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Service Corporation International (SCI), the largest provider of funeral services in North America, recently released their 3rd Quarter 2021 results and following that company executives answered questions from stock analysts about the company and death care in general. You can read a complete transcript of that commentary here. If you are not interested in reading…
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As a funeral director every so often I was asked by a person or family to help with an anatomical bequest of a person who wanted to donate their body for medical research. I’m located between Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Grand Forks, North Dakota, where the medical schools for those respective states are located. There was…
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I recently read this article from The Irish Catholic where Joseph Behan of Hibernian Funerals explained that Covid-19 has changed many things about death care in Ireland. For instance, he told of the “Tell us Once” format where instead of notifying the post office, the credit union, your bank and others of your death there…
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It’s Friday. How about we take a couple of minutes to think about how death, dying, grief, and funerals deal with what is always termed as “Closure”. Are you aware of how often we use the term? What does it mean? Do our client families desire this? I bring up the subject because this past…
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The World Series has been played for the past two weeks and I’m a baseball fan. . . and former little league coach. I’m “Old School” and don’t particularly like the “data-driven” strategy decisions used in today’s game of baseball. I like the past when you watched a hitter’s feet move to determine if they…
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My wife, Angie, came home from the grocery store on Monday morning and showed me a bag of Honeycrisp apples that priced out at over $18. . . Now, I don’t buy the groceries, but I could tell from her reaction that this was a high price for these apples. So, I think we know…
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