The Funeral Home is No Longer Home

Taking a look at what causes your best Director to quit (it’s not money)

First, it’s your keys.

You set them down somewhere and there is a full ten seconds where the house is unfamiliar. Then it’s the drive. You have made that turn four thousand times and this morning you go right past it, and you cannot say what you were thinking about, because you were not thinking about anything.

Then it’s the small things you used to know cold. The name of the church on Elm. Whether you called the family back or only meant to. Which casket the Hendersons picked, when you sat with them on Wednesday.

Then you are reading the same line on the death certificate three times. You are shorter with the removal service than you would have been a year ago. You are in the arrangement room with a widow and you can hear yourself saying the right things from somewhere a little behind your own head. But it feels out of body. You get home exhausted but you cannot fall asleep, and then you cannot get up.

And then one day you are sitting in the parking lot and you cannot make yourself walk in.

Nobody quits at the keys. They quit eighteen months later, and by then the exit interview says “looking for better work life balance,” which tells you nothing, and you write it down and post the job.

That is what retention is. Not a poster in the break room. Or some statistic someone compiled on it. It’s the eighteen months from the keys to that parking lot. It’s keeping your right hand for another twenty years.

Every retention article in this profession ends the same way. Boundaries. Days off. Therapy.

None of it is wrong. Boundaries help. Days off help. Therapy helps.

But all of it assumes the problem belongs to the person burning out, the one in your office at four on a Friday saying something about work life balance. Burnout isn’t a shortage of resilience. It’s having to carry something that gets heavier with no space built in to pass the load.

Many years ago, the funeral home was a home. Not a metaphor. An actual home. For most of the funeral home’s history the director’s family lived upstairs from the business. The wife answered the phone. The kids helped with the flowers. Somebody was always on call, because that is what happens when you live and work in the same building.

Between calls you ate dinner with your family, because your family was twenty feet away. You got the small interactions that happen when everyone in a house is pulling on the same rope.

That was the deal. Be reachable at all hours, and in exchange be home.

Then the arrangement dissolved. Spouses built their own careers. Directors moved out. Homes consolidated, or grew, or hired staff with no stake in the name on the sign. The building stopped being a home and became a business.

And we forgot to change the expectation around availability.

We kept paying directors like they lived upstairs. We assigned on call the same way we always had. The only thing that changed was the distance, and the distance was the whole deal. A director is still expected to be reachable for days at a stretch. Except now reachable means driving in at three in the morning from twenty minutes away, and lying awake the rest of those nights waiting for the phone.

We kept the availability and deleted the compensation.

So here is what it costs. A 2019 Harvard Extension School thesis by Jessica McClanahan surveyed 333 working mortuary workers and found 28.5 percent screened positive for PTSD. Estimates for the general population run in the single digits. A study of one large Belgian funeral operator tracked its directors across eight weeks of the first COVID wave and found those in the moderate burnout range rising from 19 percent in April 2020 to 45 percent in June. None reached the highest band.

The numbers are thin because almost nobody studies this. That’s the entire point. We fund research on cremation equipment. We study what we want to sell and what we want to hear. I’ve heard rotation lengths from friends in this profession, but when I went looking for actual data on what a typical rotation is, I came up blank. So when a director sits down across from an owner and asks what the rotation is, neither of them has anything to compare the answer to.

Now let’s try something. Details in what follows are changed. The pattern has been described to me by more than half a dozen directors in the last year.

Imagine you inherited your father’s funeral home. It’s your entire life. You’ve put everything you have into this place. Yet you’re short staffed and financially stretched now more than ever.

You have been trying to fill two director positions since January. Not one. Two. You have run the ad in three places, you have called the mortuary school twice, and you have interviewed four people in nine months, one of whom did not show.

It used to be three. Then you hired Earl. Earl is fine. Earl will be good in three years. Earl is not a person you put on call alone, because you did that once and you spent the next six hours fixing it and the eleven days after that on the phone with a family who should never have had to hear from you.

Volume is up and revenue is not. Cremation keeps climbing, ceremonies keep shrinking, the casket line does not look like it did five years ago, and you are doing more calls with less staff and less margin on each one.

Your wife told you last Thursday, without raising her voice, which was worse, that if you miss another dinner she is taking the kids to her mother’s.

So it’s four in the afternoon and you are looking at tonight. Earl is not ready. There is nothing left in you for a two a.m. call and an Earl mistake at the other end of it.

Enter Alice.

Alice has been here eleven years. She is your right hand. She knows the hospice charge nurses by name. She has never once handed you a problem.

It’s one night.

And she’s so good at on call.

Then it’s the next night, because Earl still isn’t ready. Then Saturday, Sunday. It sort of snowballs. And before long it’s just how the month goes.

And it doesn’t hit her on a bad one. That’s the thing. She has taken the infant and the highway and the one where the son came in swinging, and she drove home from all of them and carried on.

It hits her after a Tuesday night that was nothing. A ninety-one-year-old at the nursing home, expected, the family already gathered, everybody kind. Forty minutes, start to finish. She has done a thousand of them.

And in the morning she’s in the parking lot with the engine off, and it isn’t a decision, and there’s no thought behind it. Something just doesn’t lift. She looks at the side door she has walked through eleven years and she cannot make her hand find the handle.

That’s what it looks like when it goes. Not a breakdown. Not a scene. A woman in her own car at 7:52 in the morning who cannot go in.

Nobody made a decision here. Two people in the same building, both cornered, both doing the only reasonable thing in front of them. That is how it happens every time.

If you’re running someone else’s staffing model, most of what follows isn’t available to you. This is for the person whose name is on the sign.

Because the schedule is set by the home. No amount of personal resilience fixes a rotation where the reliable one absorbs every gap.

The silence is set by the home too. Directors don’t say they are struggling because this profession treats saying so as a confession of unsuitability. Toughen up or get out. It is an inherited norm, and norms come down from the top.

Here is the worst part of it. The home is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t. When a good director narrows what she can do, or leaves, the home eats it. Recruiting in a licensure-constrained profession is slow and expensive, as you already know, eleven months into looking. The families who chose you because of her do not transfer to her replacement. You paid for the burnout whether you budgeted for it or not.

So staff the rotation like it is a rotation. If one person is covering nights for seven days straight, you have a problem. Yes, shorter cycles cost more. But replacing a twenty-year director costs more too.

Watch who absorbs. The reliable one is the one you stop worrying about, which means she is the one you stop looking at. Count her nights. Not the assigned ones. The actual ones. Check in with her. Tell her to leave early, come in late. Take care of the ones who take care of you.

Debrief the hard ones as a standing practice. A short, expected conversation after the calls everyone knows were bad. The infant. The suicide. The one where the family fell apart in the arrangement room. This is where it’s ok to not be fine.  

Stop calling it compassion fatigue and moving on. It is a good term. Naming a thing is not addressing it. What are you doing about it, this month, for the people who work for you?

Some of that costs money you may not have this year. But not all of it does.

Go read the job ads. Every funeral home in America is hiring from the same shrinking pool of licensed people, and every ad says the same thing. Competitive pay. Family atmosphere. Great team. On call in rotation as assigned.

As assigned. Not how many nights. Not how many in a row. Not how many weeks until it comes back around. Not whether the overnight hours are paid or absorbed. A licensed director cannot find out what the job actually asks of her until she is there on call, the sixth night of the week.

So say the real thing. Tell her exactly what the rotation is, in nights and in weeks. Tell her you debrief the hard calls and tell her what that looks like. Tell her nobody here has to pretend they are fine.

That ad will not sound like anyone else’s, because almost nobody can honestly run it. So good. You’ll stand out and get your pick from the best of the bunch.

This work is difficult, heavy, and a beautiful thing. The hours are long and the pay isn’t enough. We can’t put the family back above the building, but we sure can stop pretending it’s still there.

Find your Alice. Send her home early tonight. That’s how we start.

Anna Ciboro is the consultant and writer behind Marketing the Unmarketable. Death. Grief. Trauma. The industries built around the worst things that happen to us, and the people who carry them. Read more of her work at marketingtheunmarketable.com.