Scattered

Patrick Church is a funeral director, embalmer, and instructor in the funeral directing program at Mount Royal University in Calgary.

In this episode we talk about:

• Patrick’s background and how he found himself in funeral services.



• the history of funeral practices, and how funeral practices have historically been centred around the home until urbanization made these practices impractical.



• the evolution of the funeral industry as it adapted to the needs and wants of the communities and families it serves.



• how funeral services are continuing to adapt to a changing economic climate prompted by the desire for cremation.



• challenges of traditional funeral services in comparison to more recent celebrations of life, and interest in alternatives like natural burials.



• newer services that are offered, such as helping more with grief, pre-death care, and community outreach as cultural perspectives around mortality change, and to focus on meaningful rituals and long-term grief support.



• How the industry may evolve in response to diversifying preferences remains uncertain but adaptability has been key to its development.

You can contact Patrick through Mount Royal University here: https://www.mtroyal.ca/ContinuingEducation/OccupationalPrograms/fu

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Notes from the start

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Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, Patrick. I’m gonna get you to introduce yourself. Because I always have a fear of saying somebody’s name incorrectly and that’s just not nice. So you know who you are, how to say your name, so please tell me who you are and what you do.

Patrick Church: Okay, my name is Patrick Church. I’m a funeral director and embalmer. I also have the privilege of serving as an instructor at Mount Royal University in the funeral director and embalming program and my specific area of expertise is embalming theory.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, I am just tickled that I could get you on a podcast because I’ve always had an interest in embalming.

Patrick Church: Okay.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And I actually tried to get a job an apprenticeship, way back, 20 years ago when I was fresh out of grad school, but everybody wanted me to do the funeral services part, that the sort of sales end of things. I said, “no, no, no, I don’t do well with the living. I want to work with the dead.” But they didn’t seem to want that. They wanted me at the frontend doing sales and so it didn’t work out.

Patrick Church: That’s unfortunate. A loss to the industry.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Aw, you’re very sweet. Thank you. So let’s talk about how you found yourself in funeral services because I find that that’s always a very interesting journey for people. So tell us about your journey.

Patrick Church: So one of the things that I have been told versus my experience — so I don’t remember ever making the comment but my sister very clearly does — I told her at the close — I believe it was somewhere about ’86 — of my dad’s aunt’s funeral that I could do this job. We’re in the funeral home. And I just reflected to her that it’s a job that I could do. I don’t remember that. Now in university, I had a colleague who she firmly believed that I would make an excellent funeral director, that I just had the classic pieces looked good in black, I would stand demurely to the side into the back, and would not be obtrusive in families experiences and…

Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s very interesting that you had these people around you just volunteering this information that, hey Patrick, you should try a funeral services.

Patrick Church: Yeah. When I was younger, I always thought maybe law, but the further I went in university and as I was doing Master’s work, less interested in school, in that sort of eventual outcome. And so I began knocking on funeral home doors and, somewhat probably similar to yourself, I was met with the wall. And that wall was very much, you don’t have experience, we hire people with experience. Well, how’d you get experience? You have to be hired, right? So this weird catch-22.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right! I am familiar with that one.

Patrick Church: Yeah, and so I knocked on doors and, when I was younger, I was probably a shyer kid. So I didn’t push or sell myself maybe in the ways that I should have. So I went into what I knew and was comfortable with and I started working with databases and non-profits and did a lot of work in that field until I had to eventually further my education. So I’m at a crossroads. I have to go back to school. Am I doing something that I really want to be doing? And if I really want to be doing this, how do I come to do it? And so I determined that I would probably end up going to university in the US. And at a place like either San Francisco or Los Angeles or Cincinnati where there were more open programs. And the year that I had made that determination, the Alberta Funeral Service Association gave me a call and said that the program in Alberta was changing and they would like me to be part of the first class. So all of a sudden sure it was there for me and I did not have to leave and incur a lot of expenses by going south of the border and so here I am.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I’m just amazed that you, I mean, if anybody else would were to have somebody, a friend, family member, come up to them and say “hey you should check out a career in funeral services”. I mean that would probably shock some people to receive that sort of feedback — “What on Earth makes you think that I would fit in funeral services?” other than looking good in black. Because you’re dealing with, number one, the dead. Not everybody can do that, and not everybody wants to do that. And you’re also dealing with this whole mountain of emotions that people, the living go through when dealing with their deceased loved ones. That is not for everyone. So for you to, one: take that, be receptive to that feedback, and then, two, to actually do something with that feedback that just, that amazes me.

Patrick Church: There was and they’re still remains nothing about the work that would intimidate me.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.

Patrick Church: Does that mean I would have no learning curves? Most certainly not. In terms of the decedent, nothing about the body is so massively overwhelming for me. Now, I grew up on a farm. You’d always have the death of animals around you, not on an ongoing basis, but on those one-offs right with cattle, and we’re animals going to slaughter, animals dying naturally you were engaging with that. So nothing about the body would sort of throw any significant disruption to my world. I knew that.

Being with people is something that, like I said, I was shy when I was a kid and, you’re totally right, the funeral industry demands that you have to be pretty much front and center, and you’re dealing with people one-on-one and at a very horrible and weird time for them and you have to somehow be committed to being there with them. And I think that is something that I have grown into most certainly. But something I enjoy. I enjoy people’s stories. I enjoy chatting with people and learning about people and knowing people’s journeys, as much as I can in the short time that I’m with them.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, I’ve heard that before from others that. either living on or working on a farm, it exposes you to, I guess, the cycle of life. It’s not the typical city experience where you’re very divorced and disconnected from that. You’re immersed in it, and it gives you a whole different appreciation for what goes on in the world.

Patrick Church: Yeah, I would concur.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, would you say then with that very early feedback (that you may consider a career in funeral services) with that kind of been a Plan B, or was that just something that was kind of always in the back of your mind.

Patrick Church: I don’t know if I had a plan, Yvonne. That’s the problem with myself.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, fair enough.

Patrick Church: Was interested in law, but not interested enough ultimately to pursue it when it came time, and I had the opportunity to do graduate work. Was it a direction? I was going to go. No, it wasn’t. It did not hold my attention through university. So I guess I fell into it rather than necessarily having a firm plan.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So what did you do your Master’s in?

Patrick Church: Philosophy religious studies.

Yvonne Kjorlien: wow.

Patrick Church: I studied a Jesuit theologian by the name of Bernard Lanigan.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, that’s big stuff.

Patrick Church: And yeah, yeah, he was a interesting voice in the 40s, 50s, 60s in parallel with sort of what was going on at the same time in Europe. An interesting character. Interesting thought.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, but yet you found yourself working in IT and databases for nonprofits after all of that.

Patrick Church: Yeah, totally fell into it. Yes. My dad was a very early advocate of computers. We had a very early apple system. Back in the early 80s late 70s somewhere in there. he began and…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow.

Patrick Church: Yeah, so I grew up with them.

Patrick Church: They were easy for me to work with and play with.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Huh.

Patrick Church: And even in the 90s, it wasn’t necessarily easy and familiar for everyone.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah.

Patrick Church: So when I came out of school in ‘96 it was okay: where am I? And when the door knocking didn’t pan out, non-profit databases did.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, so things changed in the funeral service industry. You mentioned this cycle of nobody’s gonna hire you without experience. The only way you can get experience is being hired. Which I’m sure that, not just me, there are some other people out there that can really relate to that. But at that time, you said the funeral service education system had changed. Tell us about that.

Patrick Church: So historically the system used to be very much controlled by the industry. You would be working in the funeral home, and after the funeral home had the time to evaluate and determine whether you would be a good long-term fit in the industry and probably within their specific funeral home, then they would sponsor you into an education program.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So it kind of was like an apprenticeship or an internship.

Patrick Church: Yeah, yeah very much so.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right.

Patrick Church: And then, yeah, that changed. The industry realized that maybe that wasn’t the best way of working. Or at least the school system that we had at the time.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, it was very, I mean, from my experience, which is 20 years ago, which may have been around about that time of this education change, I grew up with the stories of — my dad came from farming community, small town — and he would say he went to school with somebody who was apprenticing through their funeral home. And so that’s what kind of stuck in my mind that that’s how you do it. So let’s go out and I started knocking on doors, too. Which is where I met with the whole, yeah, you need experience but we can’t hire you and you would be better off to do the sales portion rather than the embalming portion, etc., etc. So yeah, that’s a bit of a catch-22 definitely, but things changed.

Patrick Church: Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So you were able to go and get your education?

Patrick Church: Yes, which is fantastic. I was going to one way or another it. Just really worked out to my advantage that Mount Royal offered the program on behalf of the Funeral Service Association in Alberta that I didn’t have to travel. And go someplace else.

Yvonne Kjorlien: How long did it take you to do the program? Were you doing it full-time, part-time?

Patrick Church: It was full-time.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right.

Patrick Church: So it still remains, you have a certain number of hours, apprenticeship hours, that you have to, practical hours, that you have to secure following the schooling. The schooling for myself in the first year was a full year of classes rather than spread out. So some programs rather than doing a spring and summer, will do just fall and winter, backed two years. And Mount Royal did the spring and summer instead of doing the two year. So it made it more appealing to go that route as well. The hours after — I forget the number at this point — but it was essentially a full year of work that you had to engage with.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And that would be at a funeral home, correct?

Patrick Church: Yeah, and you would be submitting various types of reports that would be part of the regulatory bodies’ evaluation of granting you a license. So you’d have your education component. So the college would submit that you have done your education (now university), you would have to submit hours that someone within the funeral home would attest that you have completed these hours, you would have to submit records of certain activities, specifically embalmings and arrangements (so sitting with families and sitting with the deceased).

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, sorry. So pretty much a year of classes and a year of placement in a home

Patrick Church: Yeah, yeah. And then the regulatory board receives all these attestations, and grants license. After you write your board exams. So that’s the final piece is the board exams.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And so are you typically learning and board-certified in both the funeral services and embalming, both at the same time?

Patrick Church: You can be separate.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.

Patrick Church: Now when I went through the program, you could not be. You had to do both pieces. You had to become an embalmer and a funeral director. You could not separate them out.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.

Patrick Church: The license was not a separate license. that changed in the somewhere in the early 2000s and they began creating funeral director only licenses and embalmer only licenses so that who wanted to focus in specific areas could focus in those areas.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So we’ve already kind of touched on at least a little bit of the evolution of funeral services, at least the education portion of it in the past 20 years, that things have changed. But funerals in general have a bit of history. I know, it sounds like you really get into the history of this, and so I’d like you to take us through kind of how funeral services have evolved. I know that embalming, at least in Alberta, and I don’t know about Canada, but it’s not a requirement. And a lot of people don’t know that, and then it’s not always been around. And so I’d like you to take us through, kind of a thumbnail sketch of some of the history. How did we come up to this? Why do we have funeral homes? And why do we have burials? There’s more of a shift to cremation nowadays. And why do embalming when we didn’t always use to embalm. Stuff like that.

Patrick Church: Yeah, the history of our industry is quite fascinating. When we look at, I think, the deeper history that we have with death, we find it’s probably something that’s very familial, something that’s very much centered in small community within a family home. And if it’s not happening within a family home, it’s happening very close to our community. The deceased is probably brought to the home or a central community space. The deceased would be sat with, they’d be watched over. Communities would bring religious and ritual elements to death, dressing of bodies and putting flowers with bodies other other meaningful tokens and elements before ultimately a body would be taken for disposition, whether that be at a at burial, at a cemetery, a community’s little cemetery, or whether that be a community’s point of cremation. So this would have been, I think, the experience most people would have had with death for millennia. It would be something that is is happening very much within a very small community structure.

And as I mentioned, we would have begun practicing ritual elements around death. As we see the rise of religious institutions, they would then begin to serve in a means between the home and that final disposition of interment or cremation. We would see with the rise of churches that we would then bring our loved one into those religious spaces for ultimate service and internment. When we are seeing the development of our large religious institutions, we’re seeing ultimately the growth of community and as communities grow, that brings problems to death remaining something situated in the home and in the small community. So, for example, when communities grow and we begin to experience plague years within large urban settings, community’s response is to move death outside of the urban center to the edge, and so we begin to see cemeteries not being community cemeteries, but being large urban cemeteries located at the edge of urban dwellings. That brings, of course, a level of sort of distance and bureaucracy to death. We will see larger institutions, for example, hospitals, prisons. Those people are going to, when death is experienced in those institutions, be buried in relationship to those institutions. So they will have burial grounds attached to those institutions. So again, death is moved away from our community. Or when we see people going off to war, bodies are going to be buried where they fall. There is no repatriation of death historically, there is no bringing our loved ones home. When we die in in battle, we are buried at the battlefield. So as communities grow and we experience these growth challenges, death is moved further away from that central space that would have been the family, the family home, in our very small community.

Of course, another factor is when we have the growth of. Communities. We also have the growth of communal living. We don’t necessarily have our own living space. We’re in shared spaces. And it’s not fundamentally feasible to bring our loved one into a shared space. And so instead, we have then the places, like churches, like our religious institutions, being able to step in and being able to accommodate and host our experience and our relationship to the deceased. So we have this movement outwards from the home.

Now things are happening in Europe and things are happening in North America. And I want to reflect first on North America, because something quite unique happens, and that is the US Civil War. The US. Civil War brings together horrible, horrible, bloody battlefields, where surgeons, where doctors are needed to address the wounded. These doctors, though, have gone through university where they had to train, and their training involved the preservation of deceased bodies for their study purposes. So doctors knew how to preserve bodies, how to embalm. So, while embalming happened infrequently, prior to this, very infrequently, all of a sudden, the US Civil War offered something that we had never seen before, and that is the opportunity to bring our loved ones back from where they died. We could repatriate them. And so we had doctors undertaking this work and serving as embalmers during the US Civil War, and coming out of the war, offering those services to their communities.

And so we see the rise in North America of embalming in the following the US Civil War in the late 1800s. And with this brought a number of just very pragmatic pieces. So if you are embalming someone, and if you are going to help arrange for someone to be taken someplace, you’re also going to need some sort of transportation receptacle, a casket or a coffin, to do that. And so these folks then were able to then sell these pieces of merchandise. Now that’s fairly niche and does not necessarily provide a living. So you know, you’re working with wood to build a casket for people. Maybe you could work with wood and have furniture. So our industry has this very close relationship to furniture stores, because lots of funeral homes were related to funeral stores, furniture stores in their very early existence.

And so we in North America now see, in the 1800s of course, the rise of, again, those dense urban living situations and apartment dwelling, again that’s not feasible to bring our deceased into those spaces. And so the again, most pragmatic space to bring our deceased to would be the embalmers home. So embalmers homes began to have parlors for families to be with their loved ones.

So we begin to see these, early, early vestiges of our community, as people are want to do well we have this relationship to. To bringing our loved one to church or to our religious institutions. People don’t always stay with their religious institutions. The curious thing about Western Europe is, of course, the Protestant Reformation and the leaving of institution to create one’s own religious practice and paradigm. And once that is something that is ingrained, you can’t really reverse that course. And so people vote with their feet, and they leave their institutions if their institutions are not speaking to them. And so you have this, in the — and I’m sure throughout all of all of time — a leaving of our religious institutions. So in the 1800s the early 1900s continuing to today, as people drift away from those spaces, then it’s not appropriate to bring our loved ones into those spaces. And so we have the development of the creation of chapels associated with the embalmers funeral parlor, and you will see many historical funeral homes that are anchored by a house that was the embalmer, funeral director, the morticians residence. And of course, as those spaces continually over time grow or get outgrown, then we see the more modern funeral home that is those chapel, those service spaces, those visitation spaces, an office space, rather than being tied to a residence, they are much more funeral homes as we experience them, probably today by the vast majority of folks.

So we have this trend in North America of bringing the deceased to to the funeral home, and we have then the creation of these, these service spaces. Now in Europe, we have something curious happening, and that is, through the 1800s, you have the development of crematoria and people working on the establishment of cremation spaces. And while cremation slowly develops in Europe, similar to here, it does not, it does not take off. But you have this. You have this different experience in Europe, where you have crematoriums functioning to offer disposition. And you also have something that we don’t have here in North America with cemeteries, and that is cemeteries being reclaimed, where graves are only used temporarily, and after a certain period of time, the bones of the deceased are taken from the grave so that the grave space can be reused, and then bones are placed into either charnel houses or some other large receptacle where the bones are stored en mass. And so Europe has this very different experience with with their cemeteries, and with their relationship to disposition that we don’t have in North America, but they had this focus on the creation of crematoriums. And so crematoriums come to North America, and we will begin to see them in the 1950s but we don’t really begin probably to see their impact probably into the 80s. And it’s in the 80s and 90s, that cremation really changes the landscape for the funeral profession and for the industry. All of a sudden you have this process that, again, well, death moved from our very familial community space ultimately into the space of a funeral home, now cremation allows it to move out of that space again. So our funeral homes, while they originally those early chapels modeled churches with chairs focused towards a pulpit or a podium where the casket would be at the front, just like an altar would be at the front. And often at funerals, we see that replicated so very much church like structures, funeral homes, in their very modern iteration, have become, rather than being sort of set have become more multi-purpose spaces to be able to accommodate very shifting needs of client families and consumers. And so that is a little bit where we are at and why we are at the funeral homes and the spaces and the practices that we are at now.   

    Yvonne Kjorlien: It sounds like from what you’re describing that being with the dead is very much a community activity, whether it’s to support the grieving of the family or to, just the community coming together to help out that the living who remains, and the focus of the community for a long time has been the church you look at the layout of small towns even now, I mean we’re starting to get away from it, but small towns across North America and even in Europe, if you look at the layout of a small town, usually the church is the center of the town and that represents the center of the community and that’s where people went to see their neighbors, you saw your neighbors once a week, you got the local gossip and he had some tea and then you went home and you wash, rinse, repeat again next week. And so it sounds like, from what you’re saying that when the population started to get such that the church couldn’t house those community functions where the funeral or the grieving process couldn’t be done just in the home, they had to find another bigger space to have those community functions, but at the same time, people started to disconnect from organized religion and to disconnect from the church. And so maybe people didn’t want to go to a church to do those community functions, but wanted someplace a little bit more agnostic or non-affiliated. And so it sounds like there’s been in the funeral industry, yes, a little bit of industrialization and then also evolution to meet different people’s needs a different times.

Patrick Church: Very much so. Well, the church speaks to what people are going through, it speaks and talks about death, right?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely. Yeah.

Patrick Church: It’s a big part of people’s lives and a big part of what gives meaning and what has come to them in the person of their loved one and what has all of a sudden being taken from them by this event? So the church historically, it’s part of their narrative, part of their conversation with their congregants, so it makes sense that people would want to be there for that experience of loss. Now not being a church person other than in name, it makes sense that it doesn’t necessarily speak to everyone, so I can appreciate why you would get that shift from the need to be in church, the need to be in that space, the need to contextualize your loved one within that setting.

I also understand that people still have that need to contextualize their loved one within that setting too. But if that setting and what it’s offering doesn’t speak to folks, then why go into that space? So here’s an interesting piece. Early in my career, you would have families who don’t want religion, don’t want the church stuff as part of their service. Yet who do we turned to, as Funeral Directors, we were turning to clergy. And we’re turning to more liberal branches of the church and saying “hey, can you help this family by not really being a clergy person?” And I always thought that was a little bit disingenuous of, not only ourselves his funeral directors, but for the position that we were asking clergy to step into in dealing with families.

Some families don’t mind some of the touchstones of faith, some of the prayers, some of the structure. But some families wanted very little to nothing of that. And yet we would still turn to these folks. Now very fortunately, at the same time we’ve seen the development of celebrants, non-denominational folks, people who are serving as chaplains in hospitals and hospices, who don’t have that solitary commitment to one church institution That they have to sort of somehow try and step away from or take out of their meaningfulness at that moment. Instead, we have people who have the ability to craft services that provide sort of ritual structure for families who don’t want those religious components.

So a good development in my opinion because it was always hard to ask a clergy person to not be a clergy person in that moment.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s hard to ask anybody not to be who they are.

Patrick Church: Exactly. Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so we’ve seen the evolution, I guess, of funeral services away from or, at least, maybe less integration with faith, religion, and the church and to something non-affiliated. but we’ve also seen an evolution away from burial, embalming Tell us a little bit about that.

Patrick Church: Oh yes. The evolution from?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, because we’ve seen a lot more cremation, green burials.

Patrick Church:

That is very true. Now, our chemicals are purposeful.

We do need to employ them when we are for example, if someone is making a repatriation journey to another country or to another location. They are required by international shipping regulations. They also allow us time. Everybody will go through unique and individual changes and embalming buys time for families to be able to plan and to gather and be together, a very important piece. As you see the movement westward and people need to travel. They’re no longer in their home communities, so they need to be able to come back and historically travel, not being necessarily the easiest process. Embalming did allow for that time. Now, do we need to embalm everybody today? Most certainly not. And I would argue that the vast majority of bodies are not embalmed and do not bring those those chemicals to their disposition, largely because most bodies are being cremated, and that disposition is happening relatively quite quickly. However, embalming and the use of those chemicals does have a purpose now, the other piece is that the cemeteries have regulations around how bodies are buried within those spaces and those regulations will account for the, ultimately, the presence of those chemicals within the environment of the cemetery space. And I think a final point to bring to this is really those chemicals aren’t used in concentration. They are very much used in diluted A little bit of those chemicals goes a very long way in doing its preservative work. So while they are, they are used it is. They are used minimally, and I think by the industry, cautiously, and I think ultimately by by environmental agencies and regulations securely.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Because it sounds like that there are common practices in the funeral industry, like burial, like embalming and then there are regulations. And the two may not necessarily be the same. Burial an embalming may not be a requirement; it’s more of a standard of practice. Whereas vaulting depending on where you are maybe a requirement.

Patrick Church: Yes. Yes, burial is sort of a requirement if we just couldn’t keep a decedent at home, for example. I think most communities, most jurisdictions, most provinces who would be governing health wouldn’t allow for a body to be any other place other than medical research or buried within the confines of a cemetery. Now that doesn’t include cremated remains. But I don’t think we could just keep bodies at home. We would have to find cemetery space for them.

So we technically do have to bury bodies if we are not going to look at something like cremation or aquamation or body donation to medical research, for example. So there is then the requirement to bury within the confines of a cemetery.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Patrick Church: But creating a cemetery is very complicated and not anyone can just create a cemetery.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I can well imagine.

Patrick Church:  So how do you create green burial when you don’t have that option to create a cemetery? You depend upon existing cemeteries to create green burial for you. But they then have to have profound insight and practice, and they’re also governed by legislations that determine how deep you need to bury bodies.Tthe most excellent green burial happens in shallow grave not in deep graves with four feet of Earth. Microbial activity just doesn’t happen as efficiently and effectively at that depth. So when that call regulated, it becomes hard to look at anything else in a substantive way.

Yvonne Kjorlien: We get locked into our own perspectives.

Patrick Church: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Interesting.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Because really what this all boils down to is just that the pragmatics of it that we need to dispose of this body.

Patrick Church: [ALKALINE HYDROLYSIS]Yeah, and all the regulations around, so for example, I believe Saskatchewan has an alkaline hydrolysis aquamation, where the body is cremated through waters and lyes. And there are the province of Ontario I believe has put a stop to further development. So two came in and started and then the province sort of we haven’t done enough Environmental Research and totally stopped. Communities have gone into big fights over crematoriums coming into their spaces, even though municipalities have zoning for crematoriums to operate and they operate relatively efficiently without any affluent or odor or anything that people are scared of when they think about being next to a crematorium. Yet communities have thrown up roadblocks to the establishment of crematoriums within zoning. So simple body disposal because that’s what it is, very ill and cremation are two primary means of it are hard to manage and negotiate around.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Righ. I find that very interesting. So I understand cremation. It uses a lot of energy to burn a body, but then there’s also the burn off. And it’s a lot of carbon and stuff putting into the atmosphere. But at the same time burial usually involves formaldehyde and all those lovely embalming chemicals which can then leach into the soil and the environment.

Patrick Church: [FORMALDEHYDE AND EMBALMING]That is very true. Now formaldehyde itself is, it’s isn’t that, none of embalming chemicals or the greatest chemicals to be exposing ourselves to at the end of the day. But they are purposeful. They do have a purpose. You think about folks who need to be transported overseas. Lots of factors can affect the need for them. Our bodies bring lots of challenges to being able to be well for services. Time and our ability to ensure good holding of bodies. Does every body have to be embalmed? Probably not, that is in embalmed, but it is a tradition that lots of folks follow.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So with all these new, I guess, options available now — green burial and, composting –where do you see funeral services, and maybe even the continued disconnection with faith and faith-based practices and rituals, where do you see funeral services in the next 10 to 20 years?

Patrick Church: Oh, to have a magic ball, right? To have a looking glass.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. They’ve done an amazing job over, even just 50, 60, 100 years of adapting to what people want, to their needs.

Patrick Church: The big adaptation that really came at the industry was cremation. That really forced the re-figure its relationship to itself somewhat. So you have, traditionally, when you do a burial, you have caskets, and you have funeral coaches, you have all these equipments that you have to engage with, you have all these revenue streams that you have coming to you. When you have cremation taking over, you lose those revenue streams. And so the industry had to begin compensating — not that the funeral industry is all about money — we’re gonna talk a little bit about it beyond that — but you had to compensate for lost revenue. And so you have unfortunate pieces arise where people would sell hard to families. You have, and would try and upsell on cremation containers because we have to put bodies into something when we cremate them. We have to be able to move them into the confined space of a cremation chamber, so they have to be in something. Every jurisdiction broadly defines it as rigid, combustible, and enclosed. So you have very at minimum cardboard, but cardboard doesn’t work for everyone because it’s not rigid for certain bodies. And so let’s move away from cardboard into your particle boards. And then you would have people who would push more elaborate containers and try and sell more elaborate containers on a regular basis. And so you got a disingenuous feeling created somewhat towards the industry, probably fairly so. People have a bad impression, I think, through for many years of the industry and relationship to being sales focused. And I think that was in terms of a compensation for those shifting lost revenues when it came to came to cremation.

Now we are also seeing though a rise celebration of life services. That are more focused simply on visitation, sort of reception pieces, and not focused on sitting in a chapel, sitting focused at a podium, or focused at a table with an urn. Not that those pieces aren’t part of those celebrations. Not that the deceased isn’t brought into those celebrations that urns our present. But the focus is for lots of folks shifting away from that that need to be in a chapel, need to be in that space.

Patrick Church: So I think that is going to be an ongoing trend, that will probably bring more challenges to the industry. Because at the same time is that rises, do you need the funeral home anymore? Just like with cremation, you don’t need the funeral home, you can take that wherever you want to take it and do whatever you need to do with it. The same when you do those celebrations of life and not those chapel services. You don’t need that space to be able to sit anymore. Well, maybe the funeral home has a reception space we can use that, but lots of places have reception spaces that you can bring stuff in and put things around for people to look at, that you can play videos, that you can pause it some point and offer a toast or a few words. Legions. Think of small town Legions. Think of bars, right? Depending upon the type of people. Golf courses, golf clubs. So there’s all these places where funeral services shift to when you don’t have to have that focused chapel space, and you just want to be doing a celebration of life party. Go to a funeral and ask people about what they want.

I’m in the industry. So I hear it all the time about what people want. But the people who are most vocal about what they want, don’t want funerals.

Yvonne Kjorlien: What is it about the funeral that they don’t want? Is that the faith? Is it that the somberness? Is the chapel? What is it about the funeral they don’t want?

Patrick Church: I think it’s a little bit of all of those pieces, right? So, for some people there is the drive away from seeing the deceased and being with the body is about experiences of seeing someone “put together” poorly, right? Their cosmetic work was wrong, their hair was wrong, things weren’t done well, and so they have just a poor last moment experience with this person. So those are still common stories. There is that peace.

There is I think the somber, the solemnness of the chapel, I think there is probably underlying it. Sometimes the costing of it all in people’s minds. Because the generation that we’re now largely serving is we’re at the Baby Boomers. Right? We’re just at the end of those who were born before World War Two, so at we’re people who were born in the thirties late 30s 40s early 40s, and we’re coming into the Baby Boomers who just the priorities of that don’t really mesh that well for them, I suppose. And I think it’s a little bit of all those pieces you identified.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, so it’ll be up to the funeral industry to see how they’re going to continue to adapt to the rising cost of funerals to, I guess, the increased demand of walking away from the somberness, from faith, from chapels, but into what, but that’s I guess the question that’s going to be up to the industry to figure out.

Patrick Church: So I think there’s a whole bunch of positive pieces and that is the industry has learned how to create ritual and offer meaningful ritual to families more than they probably ever have. Offering fantastic and creative types of services to really help be with families. Because we’re starting something very profound when we go through a service. People are on a long journey after someone dies. That grief journey is not quick. It’s not to be underestimated. It’s not to be thought of lightly. It is and — when I say with families, I can’t tell you and emphasize how precious that opportunity is because I get to hear their story about their loved one, the loss of their loved one. I get to be one of the first people who hear it. And it’s a story they’re going to craft over months and years. That story is going to change and shift with grief, but I get to be one of the first people who gets to hear that. And so the ability to, I think, be present to that sort of integral relationship with families has never been, I think, as well appreciated. The relationship that we have to grief work, is I think wholly remarkable at this point. Funeral homes are doing fantastic work with their communities, with their families in that post-loss period and people are taking much advantage of that.

I’ve never understood it, but I suppose it is correct, we had a homeless man the other day at the funeral home, and he just wanted to charge his phone. And so he’s having a coffee and charging his phone. Then he asked for a ride downtown or money for a ride. And so I said, “I have a vehicle. Why don’t I give you a ride?” And as we were on the journey, he asked me the question about my relationship with my death, like, how am I, what is my thoughts around my own mortality. And I’ve never really understood that we’re a death denying culture or if I really understand what that means. But I think the work we are doing is probably reflected in the fact that people have a difficult time with loss, so we must be in some way somewhat of death-defying culture. Because funeral homes that are doing the work with grief and outreach within their communities, there is just such fantastic need for it. People are really taking them up on that work, which is excellent. And funeral homes are really taking up that clarion cry.

There’s other pieces, I think, that are great and that is going to show, I think, profound development and that is probably as we do that work, we have a shift within the culture of, we have death doulas, we have entire pre-death caregiving community that just needs support and I think the profession is learning to appreciate and reach out to those communities and those folks who really are in, I don’t want to say crisis mode, but I would think are in overwork mode for sure. So the industry is really looking at needs of the community in very broad ways that sort of go outside of those traditional pieces that when we think about funeral industry we think about, I have to get cemetery plot, I have to be cremated, I need an urn, I need a casket, right? I mean I need to get right that those are pieces of it, but there’s much more integral pieces. before us. And so I think the industry is moving well in that direction to be with families and to be with the community on those fronts and to help lead where those places need.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right, absolutely.

Patrick Church: Is that affecting ultimately funeral service and those pieces that are more imperative to your podcasting conversation about the deceased? I’m not sure that it is, but I don’t think in 10 years I’m going to see green burial shift around me. I would think that there’s lots of great opportunities for it. But I think it’s overcoming legislation. It’s overcoming lots of pieces and I really like to see it. Now it’s growing I think south of the border and it’s growing in communities on the west coast, and there’s some interesting changes, but I unfortunately don’t think they’re coming soon enough. It may take a more virulent pandemic to change those body engagement policies somewhat. I don’t know.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Maybe we’ll just have to see what happens. There’s just too much going on at the moment. Time has flown, Patrick. Thank you for sharing your history, your background, how you got into funeral services, the history of funeral services, and also what’s going on and how things may change. Thank you for coming on and speaking about all of that.

Patrick Church: No, not at all. Thank you for having me, Yvonne.

Transcribed by Google and Otter.ai