Regulations

Is Jessica Mitford’s “The American Way of Death” still relevant

By Funeral Director Daily / January 23, 2024 /

    2023 marked the 60th anniversary of Jessica Mitford’s book related to the customs of American funerals, “The American Way of Death“.  If you are much younger than I am you probably don’t even remember it or have never heard of the book.   It is my opinion that funeral directors and funeral homes…

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Opioid deaths just keep on coming

By Funeral Director Daily / January 22, 2024 /

    It’s difficult to know exactly this early into 2024 if 2023 was a year in which opioid deaths continued to climb or if the United States is starting to make progress in its fight to limit these number of deaths.   However, every funeral director in the country has probably had to deal…

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Protecting the dead from the living

By Funeral Director Daily / January 18, 2024 /

    According to this recent article from Bloomberg Law there are laws in Illinois, Texas, and Washington that already provide living residents with specific biometric privacy rights.  According to the same article, Florida will be looking at instituting those rights to the deceased when their legislative members meet in 2024.   The same article…

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Don’t let politics get in your way

By Funeral Director Daily / January 15, 2024 /

    Maybe you’ve been living under a rock and have not heard multiple and multiple times from media and social media that today is the Iowa Caucuses. . . .the first step in whittling up the candidates that will lead to the upcoming 11-month process in selecting our next President.  So, brace yourself for…

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What embalmers have seen — Pre- and Post- Pandemic

By Funeral Director Daily / January 12, 2024 /

    My wife and I happened to be staying on Waikiki Beach in Honolulu, Hawaii, on the date of the Chinese New Year in 2020. . . that date was January 25, 2020.  I remember it vividly because as we came back to the hotel from dinner the Chinese New Year party was starting…

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Pierce Colleges appoint new President and CEO

By Funeral Director Daily / January 5, 2024 /

  Pierce Colleges of Funeral Services (PMC) announced via a press release on January 2, 2024, that Joseph Finocchiaro has been named the President and CEO of the three campus system.  Finocchiaro has most recently been serving as President of the Dallas Institute of Mortuary Science and will continue in that role as well as…

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Another crematory battle. . . this one is different

By Funeral Director Daily / January 4, 2024 /

Just a couple of days ago Funeral Director Daily brought you an article about a group or residents who live in a neighborhood where a crematory is being built.  As many times happens these days, those neighbors are opposed to the establishment of a crematory in their neighborhood.   That friction seems to happen a…

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Texas crematory coming under fire

By Funeral Director Daily / January 2, 2024 /

    A permitted crematory under construction in the Dallas, Texas, suburb of Frisco is coming under scrutiny by neighbors who are not happy with it being located in a residential neighborhood.  However, according to this article “Frisco City officials insist that the crematorium’s approval predates the nearby neighborhood development, with plans available publicly since…

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Building a new cemetery is not as easy as Row 1, Row 2, and Row 3 anymore

By Funeral Director Daily / December 29, 2023 /

  I’m old enough to remember that one of the earliest cries for increased cremation was that cemeteries will soon take up too much space in America.  A rebuttal to that thought back in the 1980’s was always the quote “. . .if everyone in America died today we could bury them in 1/3 the…

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The real story of the the movie, “The Burial”

By Funeral Director Daily / December 28, 2023 /

  One of the interesting stories of 2023 in the Death Care business was the release of a full-length Hollywood production of the movie “The Burial” released in October by Amazon Studios.  It was a story in Death Care simply because it is not every day that you see our profession covered in this way…

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