The Good Funeral Guide

The Natural Death Handbook, Fifth Edition

A thoroughly updated and revised edition of the Natural Death Centre‘s celebrated handbook. Now presented alongside a new collection of essays on death, dying and funeral practices by doctors, historians, authors, poets, theologians and artists including Richard Barnett, David Jay Brown, Dr Sheila Cassidy, Charles Cowling, Bill Drummond, Stephen Grasso, Maggi Hambling, Graham Harvey, Gary Lachman, Nick Reynolds, and Dignity in Dying.

It’s out in May 2012!

Independent funeral directors in the greater Leicester area number only 25% of funeral Service providers.

By Andrew Hickson, independent funeral director in St Neots, Cambridgeshire, first published on his blog http://stneotsfuneraldirector.blogspot.com on 22nd June.

I sat with a client earlier this week, arranging his wife’s funeral. We built up a rapport during our short time together, and as part of making the arrangements I gave the gentleman an estimate of the funeral expenses, as always. He was pleasantly surprised, I’m pleased to say.

I asked him if he minded telling me why he had chosen Kingfisher Independent Funeral Services as his Funeral Directors. He liked the fact that we were completely independent. He liked the fact that we weren’t part of a chain. He liked that fact that we didn’t trade under the name of an old business in the town.

But most of all, and this surprised even me, he liked the fact that we weren’t on targets. He couldn’t understand how a Funeral Director could be “on targets” – so I told him. You remember when we talked about a coffin? I suggested the cheapest in the range because it’s for cremation? You remember when we mentioned Service Sheets? You said you weren’t keen, so I left it at that?

A couple of years ago, I applied for a job as a manager with one of my local competitors. The job description had the word “target” in it, and I knew straight away that the job was not for me. I didn’t even go to the interview.

This is what distinguishes the small Independent Funeral Directors from the Corporate ones, and word is evidently getting out. Of course, the Corporates like to call it ‘Added Value’ to their clients, but in reality, it is ‘Added Income’ to their Directors.

They incentivise their managers with targets, so of course these managers have to ensure their staff are pushing services which may be unnecessary or extravagant.

It saddens me that clients have experiences where they feel they are forced to spend more than they need to, and that a funeral is seen simply as a commercial transaction rather than the emotional journey of which it should be part. Yes, I’m in business, so of course there is a commercial element to what I do, but I certainly don’t believe in upselling at any time, and I was very proud to receive a testimonial recently which stated “There was absolutely no pressure to go for expensive options. In fact [Andrew] recommended some of the least expensive!”

A couple of days ago, a comment was left on the blog, agreeing that services shouldn’t be ‘pushed’ but that they should be offered so that clients are aware of them. I agree whole-heartedly with this: it’s the same as letting every client know, for example, that there are alternatives to religious ceremonies or standard coffins available.

The difference between offering and pushing is clear. Put me on targets and I’ll probably cross the line between them. That’s why I’m so happy being independent.

A reader has written to me to draw my attention to funeralcomparison.co.uk. Is it, he asks, a scam?

I’d not come across it before. If you go to the site you’ll find that it enables you to, in their words, “find the exact funeral requirements you require in-line with your budget. You can search from over 3500 independent funeral companies and you receive an estimated cost and what you services you would typically receive within 60 seconds through our site.

In your time of need it is the single location for you to easily find everything you need with regards to the funeral arrangements. Funeral comparison gives you the user the power to decide what you want, without having to ask the awkward questions like how much will it cost, we will break down the list of services you require and then you can choose the funeral director that best fits your needs.”

Well, it’s not the most literate website I’ve ever read, that’s for sure. What else?

“We deal with all Independent Funeral companies* in the UK as we feel the quality commitment empathy and care that comes from independent funeral companies is greater, and best for you in your time of need.”

I wonder what that little asterisk after Funeral companies means. It doesn’t seem to go anywhere.

I spent some time playing with the search box and came across all manner of Funeral companies that aren’t independent as we know it. Go to Bury St Edmunds, for example, and you’ll be directed to Fulcher and F Clutterham and Son. They are both branches of Dignity.

How is funeralcomparison making its money, you wonder? “We work closely with independent Funeral Directors and charge a small finders fee for the services we provide via our website.”

Enough. I’m out of patience.

Anyone got anything nice to say about it?

Yesterday I drove to Norfolk to meet Anne Beckett-Allen and her husband Simon. It was well worth every mile of the journey. They greeted me with warmth and kindness. They took me somewhere nice for lunch. And we chatted – oh, about death and funerals, mostly. What else?

Anne and Simon have been notably successful. They have opened five funeral homes in five years; they’re doing fine. Theirs is a partnership made in heaven (or thereabouts). Anne was born into the funeral business, worked for several of the big corporate outfits and now revels in the freedom of independence. She is intelligent and she knows how to make a business tick. Simon is an electrician by trade and a builder of considerable talent and taste. He has converted all of their funeral homes brilliantly. He is a funeral outsider, so he’s able to come at things from a client’s point of view. Both Anne and Simon are people of great heart.

As always when I meet funeral directors I become aware of the severe limitations of being an ideas-driven commentator. Things always look so much easier when I’m sitting in front of my keyboard. I put it to Anne and Simon that the most perilous occupational hazard of funeral directors is not formaldehyde vapour but, if they are intelligent, paternalism, and if they are dim, self-importance. Funeral directors of all sorts come to reckon that Undertaker Knows Best. The brighter ones want to give you the funeral you need rather than the funeral you want; the dimmer ones give you the funeral everyone else has because there’s only one way to do a funeral. I know, as a celebrant, that I am increasingly inclined to boss my clients about.

There’s an upside. A brilliant natural burialist, whom one might typify as paternalistic, told me of the time when a family came to scatter ashes. They reckoned something perfunctory would do (it was their dad and they didn’t like him). The natural burialist stopped them cutting it short, told them there was more to it than that and invited them to speak. There was a long, agonising and awkward wait followed by an extraordinary and cathartic vocal outpouring of rage and love. It was exactly the right bossy thing to have done.

I talked to Anne and Simon about this business of exploring choices with a client, especially opportunities for participation. To me, sitting in front of my screen, there’s absolutely nothing to it. Just give them the info. What could be simpler? It may take more time and make things more complicated but it’ll make for a much better funeral.

And they responded that it’s not as easy as that. You have to take into account the mindset and emotional state of the client – what sort of people are they, what can they take in? Rupert Callender supports this: making a client aware that they can, say, come in and wash and dress their dead person can create in their minds a feeling that they ought to, even though they really don’t feel up to it – a feeling that they may be letting their dead person down.

So it’s a fine line, isn’t it, between offering choice on the one hand, and Undertaker Knows Best on the other?  Given the emotional state of the bereaved person in front of you, you need to be incredibly careful and empathic. No two people are the same, so there can never be a best practice.

I drove home musing on this, reflecting on just what an incredibly difficult job funeral directing is. And of course I reflected on the occupational hazard of being an inky fingered commentator. You can so easily turn into a glib, opinionated smartarse.

I was emailed last night by someone who wants to visit their dead parent at the undertaker’s. The undertaker won’t make an appointment. The client thinks the undertaker is prevaricating. The undertaker tells the client that the customary time to visit a dead person is the day before the funeral. This is not soon enough for the client. The email concludes with the client asking me what their rights are.

Leaving aside the matter of rights (it’s quite clear what they are), anyone who knows how the funeral industry works will know what’s probably going on here. Let’s hazard a guess.

The undertaker is part of a chain operating out of a satellite branch. The dead parent is not, as the client may fondly suppose, at that branch. No, the parent is in a central mortuary some distance away with, perhaps, a hundred other bodies from other satellite branches. It’s difficult for the undertaker to arrange for the body to be brought to the satellite branch because businesses of this size operate on the fewest staff they can. At this busy time of the year it is impossible to find spare manpower to bring the parent out to the satellite.

Perhaps

The bigger the business, the more incapable it becomes of flexibility and, therefore, of personal service. There ought to be a trade-off here. The big businesses, with their car pools and central mortuaries and staffing rotas to keep everyone frantically busy, enjoy economies of scale which ought to enable them to undercut their competitors. But that’s not the way it works. Economies of scale are not passed on to the consumer. In the case of, say, Dignity that’s not surprising. They’re in it for the money. Their shareholders expect. In the case of Co-operative funeral homes, however, there’s a case to answer.

Let us not deplore this state of affairs too loudly. It is because the big beasts, the Dignitys and Co-ops, charge so much that the little independent businesses are able to thrive despite their higher overheads. Not only are they able to thrive, they are even able to undercut the big beasts. The law of the jungle is not working here. Long may it not.

I decided to find out how widespread is this practice of deterring people from visiting their dead. I made some phone calls and asked undertakers how much notice they required. Here are my results.

Co-op Funeralcare, Aylesbury: Later the same day.

Arnold Funeral Service, High Wycombe (independent): None. Walk in off the street. If the chapels of rest are full you may have to wait for up to an hour or so.

Midlands Co-op, Stirchley, Birmingham: None, but prefer families to visit three days before the funeral.

Henry Ison and Sons, Coventry (independent): None – unless busy.

R Morgan, Dudley (a satellite branch of Dignity): Will try to make an appointment for you to visit when you make your funeral arrangements. All bodies stored in a mortuary in Birmingham where they are embalmed (optional), washed, dressed and coffined. You can visit before the body goes to the mortuary: they will put a dead person on a trolley and make him or her as presentable as possible.

T Hadley, Halesowen (independent): None – unless busy.

T Broome and Sons, Baguley, Manchester (United Co-op): Prefer appointments but around an hour’s notice usually enough.

Haven Funeral Services, London (independent): None

Co-op, Hammersmith: None, but prefer you to make an appointment when you make arrangements and hope that’ll be the day before.

AW Lymn, Nottingham (many satellite branches): None. All bodies kept at city centre mortuary, or at Long Eaton. Either pop down there, or the body can be sent up to the satellite. They have a bed with quilt if you prefer that to visiting your dead person in a coffin. If they’re really busy and no one’s available to drive a body out to a satellite, “management will step in and do it.” Oh yeah? “YES!”

I stopped ringing. The picture is clear enough. Small, independent funeral homes are very responsive. Members of chains aren’t, with the exception of Lymn’s, quite so willing: they’d rather tie you down to an appointment made when you make funeral arrangements. That’s a heck of a lot of big decisions to make in a very short time!

My emailer’s undertaker would appear, thankfully, to be a rare exception.

While ringing round I made a discovery I ought to have made ages ago about transparency of ownership. This is a debate which rages and will go on raging. When a big beast buys out an independent it goes on trading under the old name in which all the good repute is tied up. There’s nothing unusual about this. No one demands that Harrods change its name to Al Fayeds. But in the case of a funeral home it can be misleading to those who are looking for an independent funeral director.

Here’s a scenario. Someone has died and I am looking for an independent, family undertaker close to me in Moseley. What do I do? I google funeral director birmingham moseley. What do I get?

Funeralsearch.co.uk tell me about N Wheatley and Sons. Good-oh! So does zettai.net. And fastfiners.co.uk. And 192.com. And uk.local.yahoo.com. And yell.com. And businessclassified.com. And cylex-uk.co.uk. And sheriffratings.com.

That’s only for starters. There’s plenty of help on the internet. But what none of these sites tells me is that N Wheatley and Sons is, actually, in the ownership of the Midlands Co-operative Society.

I needed to know that.

My apologies for the sudden reappearance of this. I’ve been doing a spot of categorising, resulting in the usual inexplicable nonsense, of which this is but one example.

This blog gets as tired of the sound of its own voice as, probably, you do. So it welcomes guest posts from whoever wishes to sound off, air a view, explore an idea — whatever. If you would like to make use of this platform, please feel free. Just send me what you want to say at charles@goodfuneralguide.co.uk and I shall be delighted to post it — subject to the obvious provisos: it mustn’t be libellous, gratuitously offensive, etc.

Today we welcome back David Barrington. The YouTube video above was not David’s idea — I chose it for its tenuous relationship with David’s last incident (below).

Over to you, David:

For a while now I have been amazed by the lack of compassion shown by some of my fellow professionals to prospective clients. In fact, some of the comments just had to be turned into a posting for Charles and all his readers.

First of all there is the funeral arranger who when the family would not accept the coffin he was trying to sell them said:

“Oh okay so you just want a bulk standard one then?”

Maybe that was the only one they could afford. Did he know them personally? Also, surely all of the coffins are of good quality so what difference does it make to him? Or maybe it’s because he has a target to meet? Should funerals be subject to sales targets?

Next there was another person who when the family called for an estimate said before anything else:-

“We’ll need a deposit, you know.”

Again, what bearing does this have on the family’s question at this point? They are asking for an estimate and the funeral company’s representative is assuming they have money problems because they are shopping around.

While visiting a family with a terminally ill relative (who was present at the meeting) I was told about another funeral director who had visited them to discuss funeral costs. The other funeral service representative worked for one of the larger funeral businesses.

Now obviously visiting somebody in this situation is uncomfortable at first, both for them and you and the first thing to do is put them at ease. Show you care, ask about their background, how long they’ve been ill etc.

The guy from the big company turned up dressed as a pallbearer (the family’s words).  When he came into the room where they were, he sat down, didn’t pass the time of day with them, plonked a copy of their brochure down on the table and said:

“Have a look through that and tell me what you want and I’ll let you know how much it is.”

That was pretty much it! For that service, for which the family would pay a premium of around £750 – £1000 more than me.

How can a funeral professional show such a lack of humanity and compassion? Did he think he was selling them a fridge or a washing machine? The lady going in the coffin was sitting there in front of him and he didn’t ask her how she would like to be remembered; what music she wants at her service; how she would like to be dressed; who she would want as the minister and whether she would want to meet him.

The person whose funeral it was to be told her family to tear up the brochure when he left.

One last incident that you should hear. Recently we had a funeral going to our local crematorium. We turned into the driveway and I got out of the hearse to walk the last 100 yards in front of the hearse. As I was walking slowly along, another funeral turned into the driveway and proceeded to go in the out lane, overtake us and pull into the crematorium chapel.  It transpired that they were late for their slot and wanted to get in first. I was absolutely speechless, however the funeral director had only been working for them for 6 months and had been let loose on the public so, I suppose, what do you expect? Again, a large company who charge about £1000 more than me.

These large companies say that they have the best training and development of their staff. Well, where is the evidence of this?

What can I say about these other guys except HOW DARE YOU treat our profession so shoddily and these families so thoughtlessly.

Going the extra mile feels so much better.