Lights! Camera! Action! Movies are a great way to teach, learn and tell stories that people remember. Studies indicate most humans are visual learners, so movies are a powerful medium to make a memorable educational impression – especially on touchy topics like death and grief.

Movies can be a great way to introduce funeral directors and cremationists, especially those new to the industry, to the diverse reactions that families may exhibit after a loved one dies.

When you look at examples from movies, coupled with background information from thanatology – the study of death, dying and bereavement – you can learn about the different ways people express or repress their grief. You can better understand grief responses without fear of offending a client family.

Consider these movie scenes and the types of grief they illustrate.

Drew, a young man who lives in Oregon (Top 5 in cremation rate), has come to his father’s home town of Elizabethtown, Kentucky (Bottom 5 in cremation rate). Dad had unexpectedly died of a heart attack while visiting family there. Mom instructs Drew to have Dad’s body cremated and return with the remains to Oregon. The family in Kentucky wants to bury Dad in the centuries-old family plot.

In one scene, he’s having a phone conversation with Mom in Oregon about the cremation choice. She says, “Honey, I don’t know when I’m going to crash, but as of right now, we are learning about the car, and I’m learning organic cooking, I’m going to tap dance, and later on today, I am going to fix the toilet. It is five minutes at a time.”Drew says, “Mom, I think you need to slow down.” She replies, “Look, everybody tells me that I should take sedatives, but hey, I am out here and I am making things happen. All forward motion counts.”

The instrumental grieving style focuses on practical matters and problem solving. Mom is busy, busy, busy – that’s her way to deal with grief. This reaction is not determined by gender, as reported in the book Grieving Beyond Gender: Understanding the Ways Men and Women Mourn by Kenneth Doka and Terry Martin (2010).
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You might think men are more inclined toward the practical approach, but Doka and Martin found it’s a pretty even split for men and women to experience an instrumental grief reaction. If you see a family member working a list of things to do prior to the funeral, understand that person is likely an instrumental griever.

At the opening of A Single Man, George, a gay man mired in grief over the death of his partner, wakes up and gets ready for his day. He gets out of bed, showers, shaves, gets dressed, and goes into the kitchen. He narrates his thoughts in this monologue:

An intuitive grieving style emphasizes experiencing and expressing emotion. Rather than getting busy with activities that may distract or channel emotional pain and sadness, the intuitive griever is immersed in mourning. While we may think of women as emotional, men are just as likely to embrace this style of grieving, although they may retreat to the privacy of a “man cave” to mourn.

Overt sadness, tears and withdrawal in the arrangement conference or at the funeral/memorial service are signs of an intuitive griever.

In the film, George is experiencing profound sadness eight months after his partner’s death. While there is no timeline for grieving, at this point, he may be experiencing complicated grief – when deep mourning is unremitting. Addressing complicated grief is best handled by working with a trained grief therapist.

Because A Single Man illustrates mourning for a partner in a homosexual relationship, it’s the perfect segue to discuss disenfranchised grief. Disenfranchised grief is “the grief that persons experience when they incur a loss that is not or cannot be openly acknowledged, publicly mourned, or socially supported.” (Kenneth Doka, 1989)

While people may be more understanding of mourning the death of a same sex partner now, A Single Man is set in 1962, well before homosexual relationships gained acceptance. Other examples of disenfranchised grief: a mistress unable to publicly mourn the death of or breakup with an illicit lover, mourning other losses, such as jobs, health or friends, or pet owners who are devastated by the loss of a beloved companion animal.

At the opening of the film, friends gather for a graveside funeral, complete with a celebrant, flowers and a photo of the deceased. It turns out the funeral is for a woman’s dog. One attendee checks her watch. Others roll their eyes.

At the reception afterward, a man says, “Let’s get some perspective here. I mean, do you think if Jocelyn was married with kids she’d be giving her dog a state funeral? This whole thing is warped.”

The love of a pet is intense, and with the loss, there is intense grief. Yet, grief over the loss of a pet often does not get the same level of public recognition given for the loss of a person. Mourners may turn to social media sites like Facebook to receive supportive comments from friends.

Savvy funeral homes are expanding their services to include sensitive death care to help pet parents. Such services can provide an opening and connection with families that leads to human death care business later on.
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Other films cover the many faces of grief, including Grief and Past Trauma (The Big Lebowski), Grief and Talking and Repressed Grief (This Is Where I Leave You), Processing Grief (Walk The Line), You Can’t Tell Someone How To Grieve (Six Feet Under), Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ Five Stages (All That Jazz), and Moving Beyond Grief (Gravity). I have a presentation called The Many Faces of Grief: Mourning in the Movies which offers two CEUs through the Academy of Professional Funeral Service Practice and looks into all of these films in-depth to help funeral professionals see different forms of grief on display.

The future is here, and it's mobile.

In many ways, mobile advertising has transcended print and television ads. You might see an advertisement between watching YouTube videos on your smartphone or between games of Words with Friends. Companies are using mobile marketing to get your attention wherever you look.

Smartphones are the new frontier for digital marketing; here's why that matters for your deathcare industry business:

Businesses in all sorts of industries are spending more on mobile marketing, and for good reason. In an increasingly mobile world, mobile marketing has a clear advantage as use grows. If you have a smartphone (as you almost certainly do), the fact that consumers spend more than five hours a day on their mobile device will not come as a surprise.

Think about it like this: You need to advertise where people are looking. If people spend a large portion of their day on their phones, spend accordingly.

Almost 20% of internet users in the United States use a mobile phone only so they can browse the internet, according to a survey by eMarketer. That number will only grow as people continue to move from desktops to smartphones.

Factor in that over 80% of internet users use a smartphone and that half of web traffic was mobile in 2018, and the importance of focusing on mobile advertising for the deathcare industry feels necessary.

And that's just for casual users. Let's consider potential clientele. We know that many people spend a large portion of their time on smartphones. There are now almost 4 billion unique active mobile internet users. That's nearly half of the world's population.

Eighty percent of those active users shop on their smartphones. They don't simply shop for for products, of course. They shop for services, and that includes cremation and related deathcare services.

Perhaps the most important statistic about mobile usage isn't how consumers are using their phones, but rather how tech giants think about it. For instance, Google has maintained a "mobile-first" indexing policy since as early as 2016.
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That means Google considers the mobile version of your business website first—over the desktop experience—when determining how to rank it in search results.

The trend toward mobile has been talked about for many years now. Marketing strategies bend toward what attracts consumers, and mobile-friendly marketing is certainly an inflection point.

Mobile marketing, at its simplest, simply means marketing via smartphones and tablets—including delivery channels such as email, SMS messaging, push notifications, in-app advertising. That's just a small sampling of the options.

Any effective marketing campaign must consider mobile advertising on some level. The top strategies being used by small and large businesses alike include:

• In-app mobile marketing: This is essentially what it sounds like: marketing that takes place inside an application on your mobile device. These advertisements can be deployed through the applications, in the loading screen, or perhaps as a sidebar advertisement.
• SMS mobile marketing: This type of mobile marketing has been around for a while (starting in the early 2000s). The most common use of this type of mobile marketing is to generate inbound marketing leads for your deathcare business or to communicate promotions/events.
• Push notifications: When we think of push notifications, we are generally thinking about Facebook or other social media applications. A message is waiting, so we receive a "push notification" with the app's icon on our smartphone. For marketing purposes, push notifications are great for keeping a conversation going and for client retention.
• QR codes: This might feel a bit dated, but QR codes that can be scanned by a mobile camera are still very much in use. The appeal for advertisers is that it combines physical and digital marketing techniques. Where other mobile marketing strategies are intuitive practices for your average smartphone user, QR codes remain more difficult to deploy.
• Mobile search ads: In many ways, mobile search ads are the gold standard. Users see these advertisements when they search for related products and specific keyword phrases. Location services can also allow for an optimized experience for your potential clients.

Regardless of the strategy you choose to employ, there are a few best practices to consider. Given that mobile marketing is about targeting prospective clients in a personal way, it's vitally important to keep your particular audience in mind.

Precision and optimization matter as well, because limited space translates to a need for nuance, and mobile marketing requires making sure it looks good on a mobile device.
Give clients a reason to engage with you! Strategies are constantly changing, so it's important to benchmark your results to understand if and how your strategies are benefiting your deathcare business.