Regulations
Imagine it is lunch time at the funeral home you work at when you get a call from the hospital two miles away that you need to immediately bring the best casket you have to the hospital. And, by the way, it is for the President of the United States. That’s the call that Vernon…
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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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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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If you have been a funeral director for any length of time a family member of a cremation disposition has approached you about their idea of scattering the cremated remains at a certain location. Most of the time the question has been asked in relation to a public park, a church yard, a lake, or…
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I’ve told you before that I get a lot of ideas for articles simply by seeing what is going on in “current events” and then trying to hypothesize how those current events will affect the death care industry. I’m writing this column on Thursday, October 14, and during my workout this morning with the television…
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The funeral profession has long had its critics. Those of us in the profession have to understand that and know that from time to time we are going to be broadsided by those critics’ calls for change. Recently this article entitled “How ‘Big Funeral’ made the afterlife so expensive” was published in Wired. It’s a…
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I’ve been around the death care business for a long time and I’m certain that I didn’t always make the correct decision in the many hundreds of decisions that I had to make every month. However, I can tell you that I always wanted to “Do the Right Thing.” And, the times when I realized…
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This is the week that Congress should act on the Biden Administration’s key piece of legislation, the $3.5 trillion “Human Infrastructure” bill. Regardless of what happens or how you feel about that bill, I thought it would be interesting to look back on how death care has fared from the other two large social bills…
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According to this article from U.S. News & World Report, the process of natural organic reduction or what is commonly referred by many consumers as “human composting” is now available in the state of Colorado. Legalized by the state over a year ago with a September 7, 2021, legal start date, at least one death…
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I think we have all seen it, but have we ever looked at the statistics and questioned what has happened. The “it” I’m talking about is women in the workplace over the years and the correlation of “Where have all the Men gone”? In the death care business we have seen the rise of the…
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