I have often thought about death, especially how we create spaces to celebrate and honour someone at the time of their passing. Funeral homes have always held an intense fascination for me. Our ideal conception of home is a place of comfort, retreat, and rest, in which the problems of the world are left at the door. I have often wondered how we unite two things that, on the surface, appear to be so contradictory.
In a funeral home, we are forced to confront something painful and traumatic. We often describe death as a “final resting place,” and we design cemeteries for that purpose. How do we reconcile all of this? Who works to make this happen? Who helps us when we need to celebrate and honour someone’s life, and furthermore, why do they help us? I was able to speak with a group of people who are veritable experts on funeral homes, each of whom helped illuminate something that is important, but rarely contemplated.
The Funeral Services Student
The first person I speak to is Bryn Robertson, a student in her first year of the Funeral Services Education Program at Humber College.
I ask Bryn why she chose to pursue funeral services education.
“Actually that’s the first question that anyone ever asks me when they find out what I do. I don’t really have a structured answer to it. I considered it when I was younger. You see, I used to altar serve at the church my family went to… I would altar serve a lot of funerals, and so I was exposed to it more,” she says.
She elaborates: “I considered it for about five or six years, but it’s not like other career paths where you can just jump into it. There’s an emotional weight to it and I didn’t want to put myself under any emotional distress until I knew I could and would want to do this.”
Bryn’s coursework at Humber includes anatomy and physiology, microbiology, ethical issues in funeral services, legislation, cosmetology (restorative work on the body), and pathology. Funeral services education involves at least a year of courses and another year of interning at a funeral home. “[Funeral directors] actually started out as carpenters way back when families couldn’t afford to do anything with their dead,” Bryn says, explaining the origins of the occupation.
“They used to do it as a free service and then the volume got higher, so they started charging and ended up buying out the funeral transportation service. They would go to the funeral home and they would hire a priest, and they started taking care of all of those responsibilities,” she explains.
“After a while families started getting exhausted because people would not leave their house. Everyone gets to a point where they need to be with their family and left alone. The carpenter — the funeral director at this point — started offering up his own home for the public and that’s how it started.”
But what about the two concepts of home and death? How are they brought together? And how successful is it?
“I’ve definitely seen some families who are uncomfortable in that environment,” Bryn says. “But I’m sure that people do appreciate the fact that they come and go whenever they want, and they don’t have that pressure of keeping family and friends around if they don’t want to.
“I’d like to think that [funeral homes] are known as a safe haven. I think people really appreciate that they can go somewhere and, once it’s over, they can leave it behind. They can keep their own home a happy place.”
Meditating on Impermanence
For a more conceptual exploration of home and death I talk to Dr. Tony Toneatto, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry, and program director of the Buddhism, Psychology and Mental Health Program at U of T.
I ask him about the environment that funeral homes create for families.
“They take that experience outside the usual home, but it’s given a home-like atmosphere. It’s comfortable — there are chairs and a dedicated room. It looks like home, often, in its final arrangement. It’s essentially the last place a person will be on the planet before they are put into the ground,” he tells me.
But why are people so terrified of death when it’s such a constant in the world?
“I think the reason we’re frightened of death and things that are similar to death — you know, threats to ourselves, and other illnesses, old age — all of these signify an ending to our existence,” he says. “These are all terrifying to us because they strike at our belief that we’re special, that we should go on forever, ideally.”
Dr. Toneatto explains that this is why many religions are dedicated to the idea of personal immortality after death, as an attempt to ease our anxieties about the end of our existence. “People in the West often want to be buried rather than burned, so it’s like you’re still there somehow. The funeral process is one where the person looks very normal, almost like they’re sleeping. They’re made up, they’re put in their best suits. You don’t encounter the odours of decay or the look of damage someone may have experienced in the death process.”
This is normal because the terror or anxiety of death comes from a natural sense of self-preservation and a desire to continue our projects. Still, dealing with a loved one who has passed away is very painful.
“The people we love are aspects of ourselves. When we say our loved one is dead, we also know [that it’s] going to be us one day,” says Dr. Toneatto.
So then how should people prepare themselves for such an inevitability?
“One way would be to pierce denial, to see that everything on the planet dies: why should you not? The seasons, autumn, plants die, every insect dies, every animal dies. We kill half the animals on the planet: either to eat or just to expand our civilization,” he explains.
“One way is to meditate on impermanence. Nothing exists. Whether its life-form or non-life-form everything breaks down. The nature of things is to change, break down… You are part of nature, you are part of the process of death.”
Stages On the Way to Death
Most people like to think of home as a permanent space, and death challenges that. How do you make a space dedicated to dealing with such a painful experience comforting, or even home-like? For this answer, I had to speak with two people who work in the funeral services industry.
Linda Lee and Nathan Johnson are both employees of the Mount Pleasant Group of Cemeteries. Both work for different sub-companies under the umbrella of the MPGC and manage diverse aspects of funeral service. Linda is the funeral operations manager for Mount Pleasant’s Visitation Centre and Nathan is a district manager working in family service for Mount Pleasant Cemetery and Toronto Necropolis. Our meeting takes place at Mount Pleasant Cemetery’s newly built Visitation Centre, which I notice captures a pleasant, home-like atmosphere without being overwhelming.
I ask Linda about the services offered by the Visitation Centre, and she explains the similarities and differences between a visitation centre and a funeral home.
“It’s complicated, because visitation centres are slightly different than funeral homes. Our company does own and operate funeral homes, which provide full services to families, from basic transfer services to elaborate three day visiting services and reception-type funerals,” Linda explains.
“The visitation centres are themselves built on cemetery property, which cannot allow bodies to be transferred immediately. We just offer an alternative chapel or alternative venue for the services to take place, but everything goes through the funeral home.”
“On the cemetery side we also deal with privately owned funeral homes, family-run businesses, and other corporations. We have crematorium facilities, we have a chapel where we can receive other funeral homes and their families, to have a service here and go up to the grounds for burial,” Nathan adds.
“We offer land for interments, niches for interment of cremated remains, and all under funeral services. Aside from that, we do a lot of outreach. What’s really special here at Mount Pleasant is that we are right at the centre of Toronto. We touch on four or five different small communities. So it’s a very active park-like cemetery.”
Linda walks me through a typical day and explains the different aspects of funeral service such as the 24-hour phone line that can be called if deaths have occurred overnight, executing prearranged funeral services with families if they have them, and having the families meet with funeral directors.
“It’s sort of like event planning,” she begins. “Any little details like limousines, catering, whatever products we need on the day of the service, and making sure those products are finalized and ready to go.”
However, she quickly emphasizes that, while these are basic services, the actual process is more dynamic.
“There is no typical day, every day is different. We may have two or three services lined up for the day, it doesn’t mean that someone doesn’t walk through the door and say, ‘I need to speak to a funeral director now.’ So our day is very unpredictable and we need to be able to accommodate whatever comes our way.”
“The cemetery is a little more drawn out, it’s a relationship that can go on for years and years. A lot of those calls come from outside funeral homes. The immediate urgency isn’t always there, though it can be. Often it’s just a phone call saying someone has just passed away and ‘can I have such-and-such a plot,’” Nathan says.
The fact that there is no such thing as a typical day becomes obvious when I ask Linda and Nathan about the qualities that someone working in the funeral services industry needs to possess.
“They need to have a strong desire to serve a family. Compassion is definitely required, but they need to be empathic. They need to do what it takes for the family — go above and beyond good customer service. Be very detailed, be very organized because you have to do so many things. It’s not just meeting families. It’s also handling administrative files, doing paper work, and making sure details are followed through,” she says.
“Meanwhile, you have to run out the door to go to church to look after a funeral with over 200 people,” Nathan says. He characterizes funeral service as a calling and believes that those who do well in it are those really enjoy the work.
This echoes a lot of what Bryn told me in her interview, about how funeral services should be approached.
“It’s not like you’re working behind a desk and you’re dealing with somebody’s car. There’s a huge emotional aspect, and you have to be sensitive to other people’s needs, and make sure that you can’t say things like: ‘No you can’t give your loved one a teddy bear.’ You have to make sure you’re not denying the family anything. You’ve got to give it your all,” she says.
I ask Linda about how Mount Pleasant unites both the funeral and a home-like atmosphere in one setting.
“In this building in particular we’ve really succeeded in making that atmosphere as home-like as possible, and also extending our hospitality to [families] in a way that [makes] them feel that they’re at home. Décor and setting and surroundings, the serenity of the cemetery, the comfort of the furnishings, even the colour schemes used. Whenever the designers made a decision, it was based on our desire to capture the warmth of the facility. It’s really the hospitality of the staff. Even if you have a nice building and a nice setting, if your staff isn’t hospitable and caring and wanting to make you feel like you’re at home here, then it doesn’t gel.”
“I think another skill of the funeral director,” Nathan elaborates, “is answering the families’ questions before they ask them. Grief is a very unique experience with everyone, where you’re feeling all different types of things. They’re perfectly normal and everyone feels them at different times. You may have a conversation with a family that they totally forget even took place… It’s grief. It’s shock. You need to think for the family. Even during the first call they need to really feel they can trust you, because you’re really their backbone for four or five days. You need to look out for them during the whole process.”
The design of a cemetery isn’t as set as that of a funeral home or visitation centre. In 1876, Mount Pleasant initially surveyed about 20 acres of its land and this has grown substantially. Ponds that were once part of the cemetery have dried up and are now used for grave space. Over time, different sections of the cemetery have evolved to accommodate the needs of people within Toronto, and certain parts naturally reflect different cultural needs.
“In some sections of the cemetery, the majority of the graves are east-facing. A majority of the Orthodox [Christian] families want east-facing graves. It’s not specific to them, but then you have a whole section based on the direction of the graves… If you start at the west side of the cemetery and you go this way, you can see how immigration happened in Toronto with the different families that are buried here,” he says.
My final question for Linda and Nathan is what advice they have for coping with death, and the challenges that come with working in the funeral services industry.
“I think you just expect the unexpected. You don’t know how families are going to react to different situations. They don’t carry themselves like they would in a normal part of their day,” Nathan advises.
“A lot of it is our support with each other, as funeral directors. We share our challenges. We share whatever we’re feeling. We talk it out all the time. But overall you’ll find that people in the funeral industry are upbeat, positive, optimistic people with a very good sense of humour,” Linda explains. I can see that this is an integral part of how they define themselves to the families they serve. Nathan explains that they let the family dictate the pace, but he feels that part of Mount Pleasant’s success lies in the fact that their employees are still able to show some of their personality.
“I think the industry has changed that way. It allows people to be more like themselves. It’s just totally natural,” Linda says.
“We’re very progressive, but we’re still quaint, like a small little family. We’re just local, here, within Toronto. We have ten cemeteries, three funeral homes, five visitation centres. We have 315 employees in all. We’re big enough but just small enough.”
I leave Mount Pleasant’s Visitation Centre feeling both satisfied and very refreshed. I realize that a funeral home is not contradictory in any sense. It can be a place of retreat, comfort, and rest for a grieving family. Although the experience is painful, there are those with the compassion, dedication, and skill necessary to ease the transition from grief to acceptance. Funeral homes and cemeteries are not so perplexing to me now. I can see that they can indeed be a final place of peaceful rest.
