What exactly does a funeral director do?
If your answer is “arrange funerals,” you’re certainly not wrong. But you’re leaving out quite a bit.
Funeral directors may be caregivers, event planners, salespeople, administrators, writers, drivers, business owners, community leaders and, depending on their training and state licensing requirements, embalmers. In a small funeral home, one person may handle many of these jobs. In a larger operation, an entire team may divide the responsibilities.
Episode Fourteen of Mortality Movies looks at the many roles funeral professionals play and how movies and television portray the people who make their living caring for the dead and serving the living.
On this episode, host Gail Rubin, The Doyenne of Death®, is joined by Spiritual Counselor Kelly Saindon and Death Educator Jane Westbrook. They examine scenes from Bernie, My Girl, Departures and Six Feet Under. Along the way, they consider not only what funeral directors do, but why society sometimes has such complicated feelings about the people who do this essential work.
The Funeral Director as Jack-of-All-Trades
Bernie (2011) offers perhaps the best cinematic example of the many hats a small-town funeral director can wear.
Jack Black plays Bernie Tiede, an assistant funeral director in Carthage, Texas. The dark comedy is based on a true story, but before Bernie’s life takes its infamous turn, the film shows just how involved he is in his community.
Bernie picks up the deceased. He prepares bodies for viewing. He assists families with casket selections, makes pre-need arrangements, conducts funerals and comforts grieving survivors. He even goes on local radio to announce deaths in the community.
That’s a lot of job descriptions packed into one person.
In smaller funeral homes, especially in smaller communities, funeral professionals perform a remarkable range of duties. Larger funeral homes may employ separate people for removals, embalming, arrangements, pre-need sales, funeral services and administrative work.
Either way, there’s far more happening behind the scenes than most members of the public ever see.
Every Life Deserves More Than a Template
My Girl (1991) takes viewers inside a family-owned funeral home, where Dan Aykroyd plays funeral director Harry Sultenfuss and Jamie Lee Curtis plays Shelly DeVoto, the funeral home’s new cosmetologist.
In the featured scene, Harry is writing an obituary. But there’s something awfully familiar about it. His obituaries tend to sound very much alike.
That provides a perfect opening for discussing another role funeral directors often play: helping families communicate the story of the person who died.
Obituaries can certainly provide the basics: birth, death, relatives, career and funeral information. But they can also do something much more valuable. A thoughtfully written obituary can capture personality, passions, quirks, accomplishments and the small details that made someone unmistakably themselves.
Was she famous for feeding everyone who entered her kitchen? Did he tell terrible jokes? Was she devoted to rescue dogs, ballroom dancing or the Denver Broncos?
Those details transform an obituary from a death announcement into a miniature life story.
My Girl also reminds us of something obvious that can nevertheless be easy to forget: funeral directors have lives outside the funeral home. They date, raise families, have hobbies, argue, laugh, fall in love and deal with all the same complications everyone else does.
Death may be their profession, but it isn’t their entire identity.
When Being a Funeral Director Carries a Stigma
The Academy Award-winning film from Japan, Departures (2008), approaches funeral service from a very different cultural perspective.
Daigo is a cellist who loses his job and returns to his small hometown with his wife. Desperate for employment, he answers a classified ad that he mistakenly believes involves a travel agency.
Instead, he discovers the job involves preparing deceased people for their funerals.
Daigo gradually becomes skilled in the ceremonial art of preparing and placing bodies into coffins. A montage shows him serving families from different backgrounds and participating in a variety of Japanese funeral traditions.
Yet as he becomes increasingly comfortable with and proud of his work, people close to him are anything but comfortable.
His wife and a childhood friend are repulsed by his profession.
Their reactions raise a fascinating question: Why are people sometimes uncomfortable with the very professionals they depend upon when someone dies?
Funeral professionals routinely enter people’s lives on some of their worst days. They handle tasks most people would rather not contemplate, much less perform themselves.
Yet our broader cultural aversion to death can extend to the people whose careers revolve around it.
Departures turns that discomfort around, presenting care of the dead not as something shameful, but as skilled, compassionate and dignified work.
Caring Profession Meets Business
Funeral director David Fisher in Six Feet Under.
Then there’s Six Feet Under, the groundbreaking HBO series centered on the Fisher family’s independent funeral home.
In the first-season episode “The Trip,” David Fisher attends a funeral industry convention and gives a speech touching on independent versus corporate-owned funeral homes.
The scene opens another part of funeral service that consumers don’t always think about.
A funeral home is both a place of care and a business.
It has employees, buildings, vehicles, insurance, equipment, regulatory requirements and bills to pay. Funeral homes compete for customers, market their services and make decisions about pricing and profitability just like other businesses.
The growth of corporate ownership adds another dimension. Independent and corporate funeral homes can operate under different business structures and may have different approaches to management, purchasing, staffing and decision-making.
For consumers, the important lesson is not to assume that every funeral home operates the same way. Ask questions. Request prices. Learn who owns the business. Understand what services are included and which are optional.
Planning ahead gives families time to do that homework without the pressure of an immediate death.
Serving the Dead and the Living
Taken together, these films reveal just how broad the funeral director’s role can be.
They care for bodies and comfort families. They organize ceremonies and complete paperwork. They write obituaries, sell merchandise, arrange transportation and help people plan ahead. They must understand both the emotional realities of grief and the financial realities of running a business.
And while funeral directors work around death every day, their real work is largely about serving the living.
Perhaps Departures provides the most important lesson of all. Caring for our dead is necessary work. Instead of distancing ourselves from the people who do it, understanding their roles can help us become more informed funeral consumers and perhaps a little more comfortable with mortality itself.
After all, a funeral director knows something I’ve been saying for years:
“Talking about sex won’t make you pregnant. Talking about funerals won’t make you dead.”
It may simply help you plan a better one.
Before you needed one, how much did you know about what funeral directors actually do? Share your experiences and observations in the comments.
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You can also discover a treasure trove of conversation-starting films and TV shows in Gail Rubin’s latest book, 98.6 Mortality Movies to See Before You Die.
