Dying for a “wow experience”?

Sorry to have missed it, but last week, Boston hosted the National Funeral Directors Association convention. Damn!

George Clark owns a North Carolina company called Funeral Home Gifts. Here’s their online pitch:

Personalized gifts that celebrate a life well lived

CREATE A WOW EXPERIENCE THAT YOUR
FAMILIES WILL REMEMBER FOREVER

HEIRLOOM QUALITY BEREAVEMENT PRODUCTS

Delivered Overnight

In terms of staying on message, Clark is a marketing manager’s dream. The proof? Here’s what he had to say when he was interviewed on the convention floor:

“If you’re a funeral director, you’ve got only a couple of days to create a wow experience,” Clark said. “These guys have to be on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, ready at a moment’s notice to throw a party for 300 people that’s the most special party that celebrates somebody’s life. What we do is help the funeral director answer the question: How do I celebrate a life overnight?” (Source: Boston Globe)

The bolding in mine, but wow, just wow. Admittedly, I received a lot of compliments on the memorial service I had for my husband – done without any assistance from a funeral parlor – but I didn’t feel compelled to celebrate Jim’s life overnight. I took a month – ample time to line up a Unitarian church that would also let me have an after-party on prem, hire a caterer, meet the organist who happened to specialize in Irish music, and print out the words and music to “The Parting Glass” for the Unitarian minister trainee who just happened to have had a past life as a singer in touring company musicals, etc. It was a pretty good memorial service, if I do say so myself. But I had never thought of a funeral as being a “wow experience,” and wouldn’t have used those words to describe Jim’s “do.” Nor would I use it describe any funeral or memorial service I’ve ever gone to.

Most of them have been more traditional than “wow”, and the experience was typically some combination of sad and bittersweet.

The last funeral I attended was for my mother’s closest friend. It was held in the church of my childhood, the ancestral parish of my father’s family, and the place where both my parents, and my grandmother, were buried out of. My mother’s friend Ethel was in her 90’s, so her passing wasn’t weeping and wailing sad-sad. And yet it was still sad, and absolutely bittersweet. Nothing “wow” about it. Sure, it was an experience. But it wasn’t an experience.

But these days, everything has to be both a “wow” and and “experience.”

And, I guess, a “wow experience” is always enhanced when there’s a gift involved.

Of course, the gifts that Funeral Home Gifts offers aren’t party favors. They’re one-offs. Personalized urns, keepsake pillows, memorial blankets.

Somewhere around here, I have a memorial blanket, sent to me a month after my husband died by the funeral parlor that took care of the removal, the notice, the legal stuff, the cremation. It was not, thankfully, one of these pictorial memorial blankets. I’m sure that there are people who are very happy to have one of these. To each their own. But me? I wasn’t even interested in the relatively tasteful and subdued blanket I did receive – a cream-colored throw with Jim’s birth and death dates on it. But it was something of a “wow experience” when I opened the package up. (Do I even have to say that I blogged about it at the time?)

Anyway, the funeral biz ain’t what it used to be.

Not that it hasn’t changed before.

My parents both spoke of the at-home wakes they’d been growing up. Typically, my mother’s stories were grim: the wake of a woman who’d died in childbirth, laid out on her bed, holding her baby. (My mother wasn’t even 10 when she was hauled to this event. A “wow experience” if ever.) My father’s stories, on the other hand, were about the raucous fun he and the other kids had at the at home wakes. Kids got to stay up late, watch their elders in the jar, and do things like crawl under the casket and push it up so that the body appeared to be moving.

It wasn’t all hilarity for my father, of course. His father died when he was 11, and while my father and his sibs sat at the kitchen table, one of the O’Connor Brothers from O’Connor Brothers Funeral Parlor emptied the blood out of my grandfather’s corpse and ported it, basin-full at a time, to the bathroom that was just off the kitchen to flush it down the toilet.

But back in the days of my early wake and funeral-going, if you were a Catholic, there was a two-day wake (2-4 p.m., 7-9 p.m.) in a funeral parlor, followed the next day by the funeral. Which was followed by the burial. Which was followed by some sort of gathering back at some family member’s house or at a restaurant.

Now even Catholic’s don’t have two-day wakes. They have one four-hour “viewing”, or just an hour before the funeral as wake time.

And as more and more people leave the neighborhoods, churches, and traditions they grew up with, there’s a lot more latitude.

Speaking of O’Connor Brothers, another fellow, Bob Biggins, interviewed for the Globe article credited Frank O’Connor of O’Connor Brothers (one of the sons of the founding brothers, I believe) fame with his decision to become a funeral director.

Biggins, of the funeral home in Rockland, found his calling as a 12-year-old boy grieving his grandmother, Ella, who was bedridden by crippling arthritis in her final years.

Frank O’Connor of O’Connor Brothers Funeral Home in Worcester handled her funeral, and in the process, charted a career path for Biggins, who recalled his grandmother as looking “better in the casket than I had seen her in 10 years.”

“Frank answered every single call, every question that I had. He really helped my family out,” Biggins said. “I was just intrigued by the whole process, but I was more so comforted by his caregiving.”

Well, that Frank O’Connor was a friend of my father’s. Not besties, but they’d grown up in the same ‘hood. And my father, who lived in that ‘hood his entire life, went to plenty of wakes and funerals at O’Connor Brothers, where most of the wakes and funerals of parishioners were held. And that “’better in a casket’” bit? How many times did I hear someone comment on what a “good job” Frank did with the late lamented. At my father’s wake, folks kept coming up to us kids and mentioning just how good my father looked. Me? I thought he looked awful, like Galen in Planet of the Apes. But who was I to argue with some guy who’d probably horsed around with my father at those at-home wakes of yore.

In any event, Frank O’Connor didn’t inspire me to open a funeral parlor.

I must content myself to provide “wow experiences” in other formats.

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A funereal, Irish whisper shout out to my sister Trish, who spotted this article (and the O’Connor Brothers shout out).