For every death in the US, research shows that an average of nine close family members grieve. As funeral professionals, you are called to serve these people, plus the friends, coworkers, neighbors, and many others that face an uncertain future without their loved one. Your job is all the more important—and more challenging—when those people are children.

The 2022 Children Bereavement Estimation Model (CBEM) estimates that over 5.9% children will lose a parent or sibling before the age of 18 in the US. That is one in 13 children, a number that has only increased since COVID. In the US, the Hidden Pain Initiative estimates that over 203,649 children under 18 lost a caregiver to COVID-19.
​
November is Children and Teens’ Grief Awareness Month, so we thought we would take a moment to reflect on what makes childhood grief unique and share some valuable resources to support your work with these most vulnerable and important members of your community.

Former National Football League quarterback Brian Griese and his wife, Dr. Brook Griese, a clinical psychologist specializing in childhood trauma and loss, founded Judi’s House in memory of his mother, who died from breast cancer when he was just 12 years old. While the organization’s events are primarily directed to children and families in need in Denver, the Judi’s House/JAG Institute Childhood Bereavement Estimation Model (CBEM), developed with the New York Life Foundation, provides valuable insight on the impact grief has on youth, families, and communities across the country.
​
Knowledge is power, and the CBEM provides both national and state-level information on children’s grief. If you want to take action on issues your community faces, the CBEM provides messaging, downloadable graphics, and an action plan to help you serve as a resource regarding the impact on children’s grief in your community..

The Dougy Center started with 13-year-old Dougy, who had an inoperable brain tumor and needed to talk honestly about death and dying. The Center’s original peer support opportunities in Portland, Oregon, grew to become a national resource where grieving children, teens, young adults, and families can share their experiences before and after a death.
​
Through their Resources for Caring Community Professionals, the Dougy Center offers tip sheets to help children facing a variety of needs, activities to engage kids and teens, and a bookstore filled with resources on many topics, including What About the Kids? Understanding Their Needs in Funeral Planning & Services. They also have selfcare resources for helping professionals, a podcast to talk about Grief Out Loud, and Grief Education & Training on how to better support children, teens, and young adults who are grieving.

Eluna was founded in 2000 by former Major League Baseball pitcher Jamie Moyer and child advocate Karen Phelps Moyer in Seattle, Washington. Today, their network has expanded to every Major League Baseball city as well as additional locations across the US and Canada. They’re best known for Camp Erin, a free weekend camp for grieving children and teens that combines traditional, fun camp activities with grief education and emotional support.
​
They also have hundreds of resources on children’s grief, including many activity ideas to help grieve and memorialize loved ones. Their Community Conversations touch on the unique experiences of grief in Black and Latino communities, with resources that speak directly to them. Eluna also offers care packages for children to provide outlets and ways to connect when facing grief.

The Highmark Caring Foundation serves many counties in central and western Pennsylvania. Their website offers insights on how children grieve, asking “What is lost? What is left? What is possible?” The Foundation’s Illuminating HOPE is a virtual gathering of butterflies with meaningful messages so children know that they are supported in their grief.
​
Highmark also recognizes November 17, 2022 as Children's Grief Awareness Day, offering a full day of virtual activities to support children and raise awareness of their experiences. The organization provides resources to participate during the day with graphics, messages, and many activities to unite your community in support of grieving children. Remember to wear blue on November 17!

The National Alliance for Children’s Grief (NACG) was founded by committed grief professionals who saw a need to support children’s unique experience. Today, they are a professional member organization of over 1,700 members addressing issues related to childhood bereavement. Every year, NACG offers national and regional conferences to focus on issues that matter. Their virtual Fall Conference, sponsored by Dignity Memorial, is this Friday, November 4, 2022, and will focus on supporting children and families following a stigmatized death.
​
For members and non-members alike, NACG offers a resource library filled with articles on providing support, activity ebooks to engage children in their experience and feelings, and more. In honor of Children’s Grief Awareness Month in November, the group hosts a series of events to raise awareness and support for grieving children. This November 2022, their focus is listening, and you can join their free grief talks, share their social campaign, and use their action center get your community involved.

Research shows that grieving children are at much greater risk than others for depression, suicide, poverty, and substance abuse. Supporting them in their grief is a challenging but rewarding part of your work as a funeral professional. This resource list is here to help!

However, this list cannot possibly encompass the valuable work that your community provides to its youth. Most of these national and international organizations provide ways of identifying local resources from individual grief counselors to peer support groups and organizations suited to your community’s needs.

As a funeral professional, you never know who will walk in your door next. Having the resources on hand to provide support and the skills to support the grieving go a long way toward demonstrating your commitment to your families and your community. As Tom Anderson remarked in Funeral Director Daily, simply knowing there is a need isn’t enough. As a profession, we need to listen to their need and go above and beyond for these families and these children.

You can update your website and your brochure rack with resources from national and local children’s bereavement centers – like Healing Hearts Connection supporting community members in Minnesota and Wisconsin where Alicia Carr (of CANA Member Kelco Funeral Supply) is a Board Member. You can educate yourself so that when you see a family, you can be ready to support their grief and help them find other support systems. And, if you see a need in your community, you can take action to raise awareness with your leaders and organizations, informed by what you’ve learned from these sources.
​
The next time you host a community event, you can give extra thought to the grieving children, teens, and young adults with activities just for them. Next year, you can even hold your own event in November to raise awareness and support for Children and Teen’s Grief Awareness Month.

​Regardless of your role in the industry, it is important to understand the current laws and regulations that govern your work. The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the implementation of many new laws and regulations which may impact your business. Put aside the necessary time to review the federal, state, and local laws and regulations which affect your daily operations.
​
While right to control final disposition and cremation authorization issues continue to dominate legal complaints against people and businesses in this industry, there have been many new developments in the area of labor and employment, employee safety, and non-discrimination laws which may impact your business. If you have difficulty finding the statutes and regulations governing you and your business, try searching the web sites for your state association or licensing board – they often have links available. Federal OSHA and EEOC web sites, and their state counterparts, also provide significant information and updates.

Employment issues are a prevalent headache across all industries and business models. Address common concerns in your employee handbook, so that everyone is on notice of the standards to which they will be held accountable, including:

• Implement clear, unambiguous policies on work hours, time off, sick leave, and vacation time.
• Be mindful that there have been changes in the law and agency guidance on dress codes and make the necessary changes.
• Have appropriate sexual harassment policies in place.
• Communicate your expectations regarding social media use and restrictions on employee posts on business matters.
• Make sure employees are aware that social media is not for airing workplace grievances or complaints.

Make sure your insurance agent or broker understands your business. Make time for these critical discussions. Do not assume that your insurance agent or broker “just knows” because he or she has worked with you in the past. Too often there are gaps in coverage discovered when you need insurance assistance or defense to a legal claim, when it is too late to put the protections you need in place.

Many gaps in coverage result from your agent or broker not understanding your daily work and operations sufficiently to make sure that what you actually do is covered. Just because you have “professional liability” insurance, you have no guarantee that all of your professional services are covered. Proactive insurance strategies will serve you best.

Take some time to think about the education and assistance which will benefit you and your business most in the upcoming year. Then, search for continuing education opportunities that will assist in meeting your goals. There are in person and online resources available to address almost any concern as an industry professional or business owner. Some jurisdictions even allow you to get your crematory operator certification online.
​
While this might be challenging as we all face the realities of a continuing pandemic, it is important to find those educational opportunities that will provide the insight and knowledge you need for success now and in the future.

Getting your new year off to a good start can jumpstart accomplishing your business’s New Year’s resolutions. Best wishes for your success in 2022!
CANA Members: Your association is here to help! If you ever need these resources or anything else offered by CANA, reach out.

Without suppliers, we have nothing. Can I get an amen on that?
​
We need these guys to run our businesses, we need these guys to run our businesses well. This is a new session from CANA. And I'm kind of excited about it. It's all about innovation.

Did cremations go up during the pandemic? The problem with higher capacity, and even with the dispensation by some of the governors who waived all the environmental capacity limits, is what happens to cremation equipment? It breaks. How do you get it fixed if no one can travel? Keeping the wheels turning in creative ways can be just as important.

FT had to come up with a protocol to keep themselves safe and to keep their customers safe. All of our technicians were vaccinated early. And we had strict instructions from Europe – a five-page document that everybody was required to sign off on. Kelly Vinning and I were back on the road in May of 2020 going out to see customers. We had to do daily reports on what we did to maintain safety, and we have not had anybody contract COVID in our company at all.

It wasn't also just emergency services work – we were able to maintain all of our preventive maintenance schedules throughout. So we did not miss any preventative maintenance from Canada, throughout the US, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. We made every PM on time.

Cremation Systems is a division of Armil CFS which is also an industrial furnace manufacturer. But, during the pandemic, we really didn't have a tremendous amount of the typical casting/forge/heat-treat style business. So, the engineering guys had some time, and we had to occupy their time. We got a call from a disabled veteran of the US Army who had good connections supplying the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). He said, “Do you guys think that you could move a retort and building, and put it wherever you want relatively quickly?” And we developed the modular, on-site crematorium – the MOCx™.
​
We've had a number of people go to FEMA, but the federal government doesn't do anything very quickly. So we are selling them to independent businesses now. But it showed us some advantages on where it could go, and people are talking to us about it. It'll fit on a small footprint, so putting this on a small space would work quite well. But again, it's ready for that C-word that none of us like to say: COVID.

We do digital marketing for funeral homes, and as all of you know, when COVID broke out, everybody put their foot on the brake in terms of how they were communicating with their community. People were scared, people were sensitive, people didn't know how to respond to the new reality we were going into.

A lot of our funeral homes were worried about how they're being perceived by the community. How can you go out and have proactive marketing when people are dying? So, we went through Facebook posts and emails and email newsletters and even websites to modify the content to speak sensitively to that. Additionally, we modified content to make sure that we were providing them solutions on how to do grief support or how to contact offices when you can't actually go in or you can't talk to somebody.
​
It was a tough time. We are still producing a lot of this content for different parts of the country, like how to grieve from a distance or how to memorialize when you can't have a traditional service. We've throttled back on some of that, but as we see the different waves of this pandemic go on, we'll have to adjust accordingly to what each funeral home really feels like they need to do to relate to their community.

During the pandemic, if any of you tried to process any insurance claims, guess what happened with the insurance companies? They had the same issues that we all did: they had people who were working from home, they were backlogged, and they were doing more cases than they ever had in their history. And so that caused a problem for us that do life insurance assignments. So we came up with a program called Quick Claim.

It really started at the end-user – the funeral director or the providers – where you could literally put the information in in 90 seconds. The complete data would go in, what was returned immediately with us was all the documents you needed to have in order to process that claim for that particular company. So we were able to assign life insurance policies for funeral providers and cremation providers in a much more timely manner than we had done in the past.

When the pandemic really hit in March, we were about four months into our business. We had built our whole business with this really specific model to empower the funeral homes with the selling tools they needed to sell in-person to families. We had just started to see families really being impacted by having a form of remains they could touch and hold. And then, all of a sudden, families were no longer going into funeral homes and funeral directors were redesigning how they were communicating with families over the phone, over email, over Zoom.

So our innovation is that we built a suite of tools for the funeral directors to use that included affiliate links so that our partners could use our website as a selling tool to educate the families. We created PowerPoint presentations, we did trainings on how to use these tools and communicate with families. By the time those stay-at-home orders lifted in June 2020, our funeral homes started to see increased sales and the families were happy.

We don't really have a product innovation, but one of the things that we did do, because it was very important to us, is to develop a webinar that would educate funeral professionals about what actually takes place at post-cremation metal recycling. We have an open-door policy, if you're ever nearby please come and you can view the whole thing.
​
I'm very passionate about education. So the purpose of this webinar is to educate every funeral professional about what takes place with metal recycling, because you need to have the correct answers. Somebody in our profession did a YouTube video on what happens if there's gold and says, “well, that all melts, so there's nothing left.” Well, that is incorrect. So again, you need to have the correct information.

We at Matthews saw the double-edged sword of supplies during COVID spikes. The supplies you need are quadrupling and supply chains are breaking down – so the backlog of everything is expanding. Our supply program – the Burn Box – works with the facility. We talk about what caseload you have, what kind of caseload you're expecting to have, what your usage rate is for different supply items, what supply items you use a lot, what you use very little, and we basically break down a shipping schedule for the coming year. So your supplies are showing up right before you need to call and order them again.
​
It has been extremely convenient for our customers. Owners and operators know that there's a few things that you need without fail when cremating: your rollers, your temporary cremation containers, utility urns, and your mailers. Having those come on a cycle without you having to think about it means you can dedicate all your time to your families and the million other things happening right now in the cremation space. It really makes life easier for the operator, the crematory managers, and the facilities themselves.

We train celebrants all over the world. We have about 4,500 people who've been through celebrant training in the last 20 years. And a lot of us are very actively involved in offering services on a very regular basis. And so, when lockdown happened, I went, “this is going to change how we do service. It's going to change so much about how we reach out to families, and how we talk about death in this time.”

So I just sent out a call to Celebrants, and we brainstormed over a weekend and put together a resource book. if you go through celebrant training, you get a 600-page resource book full of full services. This one was about 40 pages of suggested services, suggested words, suggested ceremonies that you could do that would still be effective on Zoom or from a distance. And we called it Ceremonies to Celebrate Together from Afar. We just put it together, we sent it out, and we said “we want you to have this, we want you to have words.” Because, in my world, words are the most powerful thing we can have.
​
We're still having to deal with having services that are unique, different or distanced. We still understand that these times are requiring us to think differently about ceremony and how we do things. So we put this together and have offered it to anybody who wants it. We try so hard to create meaningful things that you can use with your family. So take it, use it, and think of celebrants: Ceremonies to Celebrate Together from Afar.

​WA quick case study: We were helping a lady who was taking care of her husband. As she was helping him out of the tub, she fell and broke her hip right when COVID hit. Her husband was on hospice care and he passed away a few days later. Unfortunately, the intern who was helping report her information reported to social security that she had passed away, not her husband. So, as we start helping with the benefits, we call Social Security, they figure out that they have the wrong death report and they cut off all of her benefits.

Normally, we would need to go and take the death certificate into the Social Security Office, but with everything closed, they couldn't do that. So we reached out to the Senator from Alaska (which is where this lady lived) in Washington D.C., and the next thing I know is the social security administrator from Washington D.C. called my cell phone and said, “I need to get this fixed.” It ended up being a happy story: we got her benefits turned back on.

A lot of our innovation came from helping families and trying to help them work with companies that were shut down or people working from home and they didn't know how to work with their systems. So we helped keep families safe by allowing the family to be at home while Full-Circle deals with all of the companies and government agencies.

It feels awkward to begin emerging from pandemic isolation and start attending in-person meetings and events. After 15 months of virtual meetings and phone calls, it’s a good time to review networking tips for interacting with people in the flesh. While the core best practices for networking remain the same, our collective COVID-19 caution alters some actions we rarely thought about before.

I am fully vaccinated and eager to be around other people. But I’ll admit I’m a little rusty. At a recent board meeting, outdoors, I offered elbow bumps instead of handshakes, which felt weird at first. Then I realized that others appreciated it. However, as one who’s been a natural networker since kindergarten, I’m finding that it takes forethought and self-control to avoid automatically lapsing into life-long patterns that today don’t feel safe enough for me.

For example, although I’ve decided I’m not ready for a bare-hand-to-bare-hand handshake yet, I was caught off guard and my muscle memory took over at a recent event when a respected elder extended his right hand to me. I automatically shook hands and then was obsessed with not touching anything until I could wash my hands. I was anxious even though I’m 99 percent sure this gentleman is fully vaccinated. My mind kept nagging me, “Had he also exchanged handshakes with others who aren’t vaccinated?”

I know I am not alone. Rockabilly singer and guitarist Deke Dickerson recently released a song called “The Year that Got Away.” The song’s line, “I’ll never take a hug for granted again but it’s still so strange to shake your hand,” resonates with me as in-person meetings and events start returning to my calendar. While the COVID-19 pandemic is far from over, many states and cities are easing restrictions and returning to almost the way things were before 2020. Beyond trying to figure out whether a handshake or hug is appropriate and safe, we may need to refresh our networking skills. This means reviewing networking basics as well as considering new COVID-era sensitivities and sensibilities.

I offer the following networking tips.

SET GOALS. Determine why you plan to attend a business event. Are you there primarily to learn from a speaker or do you want to meet others? In either case, decide ahead of time how many new people you plan to meet and why. Research the hosting organization, expected attendees and the location. Understand the venue and evaluate any COVID-19 measures in place and how those stack up against your readiness to venture out.

LOOK GOOD. Dress appropriately for the occasion. Remember that you represent not only yourself, but the organization you represent. It may seem harder to gauge what to wear now, after more than a year of work-from-home casual attire. Compare notes on how to dress post-pandemic with trusted colleagues who are known for exhibiting professionalism. Smart networking attire always includes a sufficient supply of business cards in an easily accessible pocket.

BE FRIENDLY. After avoiding contact with others for more than a year, you may be out of practice in initiating conversations with strangers. As much as ever, it’s important to project confidence and a willingness to talk with others. Smile, make eye contact and strike up conversations. In-person eye contact will feel different than all those Zoom meeting screen stares. Greet others with open-ended, friendly questions that can lead to conversation. Plan some conversation-starter questions ahead of time.

LISTEN. Be genuinely interested in what the other person is saying and interact appropriately. For those of us who have craved being around other people, the tendency may be to talk too much. Listen more and talk less. Maintain proper body space distancing, which today may be farther away from others than it was pre-COVID. Successful networkers often report that when they ask questions, listen and show interest in others, they are remembered as being interesting themselves.

RECAP YOUR CONVERSATION. If you’ve met someone whom you’d like to contact again, make your parting words a specific reminder of the issue or point you have in common, followed by a promise of your next steps. Exchange contact information.

HANDSHAKE OR ALTERNATIVE? Decide ahead of time whether you feel comfortable shaking hands with others. If you’re not, have your handshake alternative ready. With a family member, practice initiating an elbow bump, fist bump, nod, or small bow so it will come naturally. Be prepared to react gracefully to puzzled reactions. Conversely, if you would like to shake hands with others, anticipate some people declining, and be ready to react gracefully to that situation, too.

WASH YOUR HANDS. Before, during and after the pandemic, this is always a sound practice. I’ve always been a bit of a germaphobe, so for decades my habit has been to wash my hands or use hand sanitizer regularly during networking adventures: After the Uber, taxi or public transit ride and before the event. Between the networking reception and the subsequent breakfast, lunch or dinner. Upon returning to the office. I recommend this practice. It aligns with COVID-19 safety measures, and it can help prevent spreading colds. It also protects others.

FOLLOW UP. Keep promises you made to others while networking. Send the document or link you promised, make the email introduction you offered to make, set a date for that meeting or for the proverbial “lunch sometime.”
​
ENJOY. Networking can be fun, as well as beneficial to your work. Perhaps these networking tips will help you.

Bereavement professionals such as funeral directors, embalmers, cemetery workers, crematorium operators, and their support staff may regularly engage with diverse, potentially psychologically traumatic events. These exposures can lead to a variety of mental health injuries, including post-traumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder, panic disorder, and alcohol use disorder. Recent research has provided important information about those experiences, such as the scope of the challenges, the potential impacts on mental health, factors impacting health, and some of the opportunities to help protect mental health and provide support.
​
Dr. R. Nicholas Carleton, a professor of psychology at the University of Regina and a registered clinical psychologist in Saskatchewan, introduced his discussion on challenges, strategies, and coping by emphasizing that it was really an introduction to mental health.

“There’s a long-standing notion that we are either mentally healthy or mentally unhealthy and none of the data bears that out,” Dr. Carleton explained. “It’s simply not the case. Most of us, throughout the course of a day—and certainly throughout the courses of weeks or months on end—we shift along a continuum from healthy, to having reactions, to possibly being injured, to being ill or meeting diagnostic criteria for one or more mental health disorders. And this is normal.”
​
Odds are that people probably experience changes in their mental health throughout the entire day. Dr. Carleton described a scenario where someone wakes up in the morning and everything is fine and that’s terrific, only to move on and have somebody cut them off in traffic, and for a few minutes, they might be reacting—might even be “injured” for a few moments—but they recover very quickly and then they’re at work and moving on with their day.

Right now, all of us are sharing a massive significant environmental variable that’s impacting our mental health—and that’s COVID-19. The impact of the pandemic is underlying all of the other things that impact us, including our biology. If we’re sick, if we have a flu, if we have a cold, that impacts our mental health. If we’re healthy and we’re exercising regularly, we’re active, that impacts our mental health and our mental health impacts our physical health as well.
​
If we’re not feeling very happy about something, if we’re worried, if we’re depressed or down, that has a reflection in our physical capacities. We also see those same kinds of challenges with respect to our social environment. If everything is going well with our friends and our family and we’re regularly engaged, that also serves a protective function so that we’re more likely to feel physically healthy and we’re also more likely to feel psychologically healthy. Our biology, our psychology, and our social environment all come together on an overlapping Venn diagram that sits on top of our environmental stressors.

Dr. Carleton informed listeners that it’s also important to remember that mental health has nothing to do with inherent weakness. “We have no evidence that says that there’s one gene or one feeling or one thought or one behavior or one experience that is solely responsible for our mental health or mental state. And certainly not for having difficulties with mental health,” he said. “When we talk about people who are having difficulties with mental health in most cases it’s a function of high stress or chronic strain or physical exhaustion and maladaptive coping all coming together to challenge an individual’s experience.”

He pointed out that anyone can develop symptoms, saying, “At the end of the day, even the most resilient of us is still human. We still experience all kinds of highs and lows in our lives.”

Moving on to talk about potentially psychologically traumatic events that might apply specifically to some of the work that deathcare professionals perform, Dr. Carleton spoke of experiencing, witnessing, or learning about something potentially injurious to a close relative or a friend that may cause mental health injury. He said that other potential events include repeated exposures to distressing details of significant threats such as exposure to war, threatened or actual physical assault or sexual violence, kidnapping, hostage-taking, torture, and mechanisms of severe physical injuries, like motor vehicle accidents and industrial accidents.

“You’re exposed to these things because if someone dies as the function of one of these events, the last responder is you and so you are exposed to these on a regular basis,” he said. “As a species humans are generally resilient and adaptable. So even these kinds of events, when we’re exposed to them, we can bounce back, we can recover. Most stressors—even repeated exposures to these kinds of events—are not typically overwhelming. But you have to remember that our experience of whether something is overwhelming is influenced by our biology, our psychology, and our social environment, as well as what’s happening behind the scenes in our broader environmental variables.”

Dr. Carleton was talking specifically about events that are potentially psychologically traumatic. He said that the most common thing we think of is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when we think about a mental health injury. PTSD can be one thing that happens following exposure to one or more potentially psychologically traumatic events where we don’t bounce back, where we aren’t able to be as resilient in that moment because of any number of things that have come together. It’s a mental health injury for which there are effective treatments that can provide symptom relief for a great many people and it’s one of the disorders that can follow exposure to the kinds of traumatic events Dr. Carleton listed. It’s also not the only mental health injury or disorder.

Major depressive disorder is actually more common, even among people exposed to these ongoing potentially psychologically traumatic events. “There are also difficulties with substance abuse and dependence disorder,” Dr. Carleton explained. “You’re taking the substance for longer than you expected. You’re taking the substance in order to avoid or manage symptoms that you’re having or to change your emotional status. The problem isn’t necessarily volume. It can be the amount that someone’s consuming. But more often than not, the challenge can be that one drink might be too many and ten might not necessarily mean there’s a problem. It depends on how you’re using and what you’re using for. And if you’re using as a function of trying to manage other symptoms, that’s a good indicator that you can probably benefit from some additional support. It’s not the only indicator, but it’s certainly one of them.”

Dr. Carleton underscored that only licensed qualified experienced persons can and should diagnose disorders or imply diagnosis. “Dr. Google gets us part of the way there in some cases, but that’s not super reliable,” he said. “If you’re looking for help with mental health or you’re concerned about your mental health, you want to talk to a registered, licensed, evidence-based mental health care provider who can provide you with information about where you’re at and possible solutions to get you to where you’d like to be.”

Dr. Carleton turned to discussing some of the urgent warning signs and symptoms. First, he pointed out that if any symptom lasts longer than a week, at that point it’s a warning sign that your symptoms may benefit from some intervention, particularly difficulties with falling or staying asleep, intrusions, numbing, changes in your behavior, or sudden increases in substance use. Those are also potentially urgent warning signs and symptoms.

Suicidality, homicidality, violence, or sudden dramatic increases in substance use should all be taken as urgent warning signs where it’s time to get in to see somebody soon. “It doesn’t mean necessarily that we need to call 911, although that is a possibility,” Dr. Carleton said. “It does mean that help is needed sooner rather than later.”

HOW CAN MANAGERS AND COLLEAGUES SPOT SIGNS OF BURNOUT AND ENCOURAGE PEOPLE TO SEEK HELP?
​
According to Dr. Carleton, the more open you keep communications, that peer connection, can help. But if you identify big behavior changes—someone normally jovial now lashes out, as an example—it’s a good indication that you should check in with them. The more engaged you are with your team with regular communication, the better positioned you are to support them.

“What can you do? Well, I think first and foremost it’s important to keep in mind that mental health is a journey, not a destination,” Dr. Carleton advised. “It’s not something you check off as a tick box because you did it well today, any more than physical health is.”

He encourages deathcare professionals to monitor both their physical and their mental health. “We have tools that we make publicly and freely and anonymously available on our website for our public safety personnel, and those tools might be beneficial for you as well,” he offered. “They allow you to compare your responses to the general population, and, in doing so, you get immediate anonymous feedback that you can use to see where you are sitting relative to everybody else.”
​
Because changing mental health requires culture change because of stigma and misinformation, it’s extremely difficult and takes a long time to accomplish. Dr. Carleton believes it’s important that we all pay attention to the idea that mental health is something we’re trying to change at a population level, but he pointed out that for people who are regularly exposed to potentially psychologically traumatic events, they may very well be forced to engage with culture change more directly than everybody else. He encouraged listeners to engage in ongoing monitoring regularly and get help sooner rather than later.

What can we do in addition to the monitoring? The doctor advised people to look to their social support. “Talk about your experiences. Not necessarily about the details of what happened in your job and specific day, but how you’re feeling and what else you’re doing in order to manage those feelings. If you’re having difficulties with the symptoms we’ve discussed, talk to family or friends. Make sure that you keep a regular diary so that you can watch what changes for you that supports or undermines your mental health.”
“As cliche as this sounds—and it sounds cliche in part because we all keep saying it—engaging in regular healthy behaviors enhances your coping ability and helps to maintain your mental health,” he continued. “So, exercising regularly, even light exercise: simple walks, getting outdoors, 20 minutes. Any exercise at all tends to be beneficial as long as it’s regular.”

Dr. Carleton added that people should watch what they eat. Eating healthy is important because the highs and lows of sugar affect your biology, which impacts your mental health as well. Substance use and misuse is much more problematic and a much more slippery slope than most people realize. If, for example, you’re using alcohol to manage your emotions, that’s a good indication that there’s a better set of skills you can access to manage those emotions.

He also emphasized that, where possible, it was important to maintain routines, even in the face of COVID-19. “The more routines that you can build in, probably the better off you’re going to be, as long as those routines include strict work-life balance where possible,” Dr. Carleton said. “As a professor, I can tell you that the boundaries between my work and my life are permeable at times. They’re permeable most of the time, but it’s important to try and manage those separations because that’s what’s helping to protect and sustain your mental health. So making sure that you’re managing that is an important part of living an ongoing happy, healthy career.”
​
Last but not least, Dr. Carleton addressed early evidence-based interventions. “Evidence-based interventions are evidence-based for a reason. It’s because they’re helpful. It’s because they’re beneficial and there’s proof, there’s research that says that they work.” He spoke of the importance of finding the right type of practitioner to offer those interventions. “Psychologists is a protected term. So is psychiatrist. But counselor, therapist, and healer are not protected, which means that anyone can take them—and there is a lot of variability among them. That doesn’t mean there’s not good counselors, therapists, and healers. It’s just that there are a lot fewer restrictions on those names and titles than there are on things like psychologist or psychiatrist. So I recommend you demand registered and licensed, experienced, evidence-based, empirically-supported mental health care (which is a mouthful!), but you can find that from colleges, registered provincial associations, and registered state associations.”

Everyone is tired of hearing the phrase “These are unprecedented times,” but a worldwide pandemic that has affected our profession and our lives as much as this one has is truly unprecedented. As a result, this makes for a very difficult time, both physically and emotionally.

We all rose to the call—and still are. Some in different ways and some with different needs. And we are coming out better on the other side. As we often hear, “The more difficult the situation, the higher the reward.” I truly believe we will be better funeral directors and better cemeterians and better cremationists as a result of this pandemic. This was very much a positive learning experience for us all. As an industry, we pushed to new levels and encountered unchartered territory.

During all of this, the creativity and resourcefulness of those in our profession does not surprise me. It is our job to respond to families on a daily basis, to listen to them carefully and explore effective ways to serve their needs while protecting everyone’s safety.

But we can’t do it alone. We rely on the collaboration and generosity of our colleagues and the stamina and ingenuity of our staff. Professional associations play an important role, too. It is CANA and it is organizations like CANA—be they national, state, provincial, or local—that have been tremendously resourceful on behalf of funeral directors and cremationists. In a crisis such as this, we are so busy in the field that we often do not have the time, the energy, or the means to educate ourselves and our staff with the most current information. We benefit from expert guidance to learn how to properly protect ourselves. It’s really helpful to hear what professionals advise and what other colleagues are doing to cope.

One year in, we asked some industry leaders to share their reflections and pass along what they’ve learned during the past year. I’ve added my own story from Texas as well. Knowing how busy everyone is, we’re grateful for these responses and send our support to everyone as we all continue to meet the challenges of this pandemic.

Reflecting on the past twelve months, it is hard to find the right words to describe it. “Unprecedented” has been used, if not overused, but still, to me, feels like the one word that most accurately describes what has occurred.

I still vividly recall the first day COVID impacted funeral service in New York. It was the afternoon of March 12, 2020 and we had just finished the Association’s quarterly board meeting when we learned about the first gathering limits. That moment until mid-summer was a blur. Due to the rapid spread of COVID and increasingly high death toll, especially in downstate New York, we had months filled with constant changes and stresses on the death care system never before seen. And, in turn, we supported our members in ways we never had before.

The most impactful and important role we played (according to our members) was as a communicator. We sent out at least daily emails with updates, created a COVID resource page, hosted weekly webinars and served as an advocate with state and local government to ensure our members had the resources they needed to meet their role as public health officials and so they remained able to serve families in their time of need. We also became the chief spokesperson for funeral service, with local to international media conducting TV and radio interviews as well as speaking with countless reporters for printed stories.

We (both the NYSFDA and our funeral directors) quickly became experts in the use of technology. Platforms like Zoom and Skype became essential for communicating with our members and for our funeral directors to communicate and work with families. The pandemic also accelerated the use of technology with our state and local government agencies that support death care. Paper heavy processes like completing death certificates and issuing burial permits pivoted to electronic means within days.

Many of the changes we adapted to in the spring and summer of 2020 remain in place. The use of technology to conduct business is a change we expect will become permanent which will, in the long run, help both the association serve our members and the funeral directors run their business and serve families. Others, like the restrictions on gatherings have certainly taken a toll on those who have lost a loved one and the funeral directors who take such great pride in being the experts in helping families through the first stages of grief. Seeing those restrictions phased out will be a welcome sight.

So, as we navigate through what we hope are the final stages of the pandemic and return to some sense of normalcy, we remain steadfast in our efforts to support our members so they can continue to fulfill their vital role. We are also thankful and so very appreciative for the sacrifices they made, risks they took and endless compassion they displayed throughout the past year.

2020 will forever be the year that lives in infamy for many if not all of us. When I think back to the last twelve months, the words fear, vulnerable, confusion, chaos, stress, disruptive, and game-changing all come to my mind.

It was late January 2020 when we learnt about the first case of COVID 19 in our state. I did not think much of it and was not concerned about its impact in our community. After all, we have had other viruses and I was certain it would be contained. Was I ever wrong! I began to realize the magnitude when the stay-at-home order was issued by our governor.

What did this all mean for our profession? That ugly word nobody wants to talk about (death) was everywhere. People were dying. Italy and New York stood out. It was early March that my world began to be impacted. It started with us having to cancel two of the three regional mini conferences scheduled for the WCCFA association members. It turned out to be the first of many decisions I had to make as a leader this past year that required courage and being firm in doing what it is right even though people would be and were upset. This was the beginning of a long hard journey that continues to this day.

No funerals? Immediate family only funerals? These were the ever-changing directives from our governor’s office with not much clarity to each definition. Chaos, confusion, anger, and tears—this was everyone’s (ours and our families) response. How does one tell a grieving attendee who unexpectedly showed up that we are over capacity? This was and is still our reality. Funeral directors had to be explicit in our directions and communications. We had to move into a pro-active mode of communication by emailing guidelines to families and having families sign a document that spells out the guidelines and agree that they understood we were required to enforce them.

The biggest challenge for us was how to do our job with all these restrictions and social distancing requirements. Building rapport with families has always been drilled into me my entire profession. How do we build this rapport when we cannot hug, touch, or even see our families? How do we let them know we still care and their loved one is safe remotely?

We already had Livestreaming and the ability for families to do online arrangement conferences and electronic documents. The challenge was for our staff to effectively use them so the level of service would not be impacted. The telephone has always been an important tool for us, but now our livelihood depends on it. Our words have to be clear, concise and demonstrate empathy, compassion, and trust. This requires training.

With a lot of restrictions at all facilities where people passed, we realized we had an opportunity to give families a chance to say goodbye. Emails were sent to all our local nursing homes, hospitals, and other gate keepers letting them know we do allow people to see their loved ones. This past year, we have seen a huge increase in “identification” view and viewings in general. I realized we do not place enough value in this for our families. We are now working on educating our community on this.

A year later, we are hopeful with the vaccines that soon we will see things resume to normalcy. In our state, it does not seem immediate. My mindset has shifted from temporary crisis management and doing the best we can to how we plan and build the future and permanency of our business amidst this pandemic and recovery years.

2020 was a curse but a gift as well. A gift in helping me realize that we can serve families in different ways and still do it effectively. Embracing technology and e-commerce is so important. Understanding the most important asset in our organization is our staff. These were individuals whose personal lives were crumbling all around with them with schools being shut down, family members being sick or dying and still choosing to show up every day to care for others. Most importantly, when faced with a problem, we must tap into our creative sides to come up with a solution that is still legal, ethical, and moral.

Personally, I grew as a person and as a leader. I was afraid of getting sick of COVID and potentially dying from it before my children turned 18. I was afraid to get the vaccine when it became available to us. As a matter of fact, I canceled my initial appointment. On January 14th, I finally received my first dose of the vaccine. I am still fearful of what might come of it. Fear is a powerful motivator; I choose to feel it and push through it. My words for 2021 are hope and trust!

When I became Executive Director of WSFDA in 2018, the board and I worked to find solutions that met the needs of our members and leadership across the state while relocating the office to Spokane. Our Member Talks YouTube series, now also a podcast, and Zoom meant that we could talk to our members and each other without a five-hour commute. Little did we know how valuable these solutions would be a year later.

I can break the last year in thirds, each a major hurdle we had to meet for our members. The first was PPE. As the first epicenter of the pandemic, Washington was unable to prepare for the PPE shortage. We joined the state’s Emergency Operations Command to source PPE, but funeral directors were constantly shifting from the front of the line for supplies to the very back. We had to combat their belief that we were “simply picking up bags” from the coroner and educate these colleagues on what our job is really like.

The next hurdle was gathering restrictions. In a matter of days, funerals were limited to 50 people, to 20, to none at all. Meanwhile, I was in constant communication with the state and local departments of health tracking these orders to make sure we were in compliance. The problem was that the people we had worked with for resolving the PPE issue had been moved or transferred to different departments.  When the PPE task force dissolved, we had to build all new relationships within the State – every conversation was rebuilding channels of information to get answers.

It was a crazy year, juggling each crisis, and sometimes all three at the same time. Now, we’re dealing with the third hurdle—vaccine access—and figuring out if mortuary workers are listed in 1a, 2b, or even on the Vaccine distribution list at all. Each government agency we spoke with provided us with a different answer. Officially, Mortuary Workers are listed in a Phase 2b category by the Dept. of Health. However, many counties in Washington have begun Offering vaccines to mortuary workers. Now, I hope that the goal of 40,000-vaccines-a-day by April works.

As a profession, I hope we can take what we’ve learned as use it moving forward. The first being the tech options to meet remotely, the second the value of PPE and universal precautions. I want to get back to where we were or back to something new. As for my third year as Executive Director of WSFDA, I don’t know what it will bring, but I’m looking forward to it.

Who would have thought that we would STILL, one year later, be locked down, wearing masks, not visiting our friends and family outside of our bubble (or feeling guilty about cheating), and all the other calamity that has left so much in shambles? The vaccine is finally here but what a struggle to get vaccinated in some places.

How does funeral service NOT qualify for the first round? I do not know about you, but I have never been so jaded concerning something so critical ever in my life. Safely jaded of course. I wear a mask, stay 6 feet away, and use curbside pickup (that will hopefully never go away), but I refuse to let this thing get me down. Although I do not travel with anywhere near the frequency that I did before March 2020, I am not afraid to get on an airplane. I was home from March 12 through September 28, but I have, since then, taken two business trips and am currently on a plane to my “warm office” in Central America for the second time. What is my point here? When you are going through hell, just keep going!

Early on, especially in the New York City area, the number of deaths and cremations were overloading the capacity of the city’s crematories. My first thought was “be careful you don’t overuse and abuse these units, or they will break down and you will be in even deeper trouble!” The States of New York and New Jersey even waived emission restrictions allowing crematoria to operate virtually non-stop to keep up, and now many areas of California are doing the same.

When anyone asked me what the most important thing to consider regarding crematory operations during the pandemic, this is what I preached: a balance of customer service and safe, efficient operations. As hard as it is to be the cause of a delay in returning a loved one to their family, returning the wrong person because you were rushing is far worse. For the most part people understand. Sadly, the media has chosen to highlight the worst of funeral service during this time, not the best.

The massive majority of deathcare professionals go above the call of duty to serve, finding ways to provide service within the parameters of the current regulations, embracing technology with open arms, making adjustment after adjustment to our already deep set-in procedures and processes, and more. This is not easy and can become very tiresome—even debilitating. I can honestly say I am even sick of hearing about self-care and all that goes along with that, but we cannot let up yet. We still have a way to go and we cannot become complacent.

One positive aspect of this pandemic is that people are realizing that mourning their dead is important, necessary, and valuable. And we need funeral service professionals to lead the way. So, what is the answer to getting through this? Keep going!

I’ve had the great honor to be a part of and preside over many deathcare organizations, including the Texas Funeral Directors Association (TFDA). As chairperson for the TFDA Texas Disaster Response Team, I and my team have been dispatched to assist with a lot of different types of missions. But the COVID-19 response in the summer was very different. We quickly saw that the plans we had in place—the training that we had for mass fatalities and weather-related search and rescues—were not the plans we needed for a pandemic.

In other types of missions, we generally know the number of decedents in advance, but COVID-19 was different. We had a large number of decedents to deal with immediately, in coordination with funeral homes, crematories, and cemeteries in the region who were all overwhelmed and past capacity. We had to establish long-term, secure holding facilities to hold the decedents still coming in.

Our team worked long hours, and after the adrenaline wore off, the stress set in. The deathcare workers, healthcare workers, and local municipalities were stretched beyond measure. We saw funeral homes unable to do business because of staff shortage due to COVID-19. This was difficult for all of us involved.

For you as a funeral professional and a cremationist, being prepared will certainly put you in a less stressful situation when and if the need arises in your area. First and foremost, you need to ensure that you and your team are safe and healthy. There are not a lot of people in your community who do what you do. If you and your staff members contract this virus it can potentially force you to shut your business down and, even worse, lead to serious long-term medical complications.

I know I have faced this firsthand, as I’m sure many of you have, with staff members that are out on quarantine. Prepare yourself and your staff to minimize exposure to surviving family members. Make sure you’re fully staffed, prepare your staff for long hours and also prepare for another weak link in this system: transportation. If you’re a crematory owner, make sure your equipment is in good working condition and ready for extreme use.

Secondly, it is important to prepare for increased cold storage capacity. This has been the number one issue on every mission that our team has been a part of. This may become the biggest obstacle to overcome as your community encounters large numbers of COVID-related death.

Lastly, remember that you have colleagues willing to help. During this crisis I saw competitors that were normally probably not the closest of friends coming together to help each other for the common good. Almost all state and provincial associations have resources available to help you. Don’t be afraid to ask.

Preparation today will lessen some of the stress down the road. Remember to take care of yourself through these difficult and changing times. There is no silver bullet to make this easy. We’ve all struggled with long hours, subbing with team members so we can get rest. Being organized and trying to prepare is the best way to get through this and prevent burnout.

CANA’s website caters to both the profession looking for resources and the general public learning about cremation services. Satisfying both groups’ interests, the Transporting Cremated Remains page consistently ranks among most visited of CANA’s website. Staff frequently get calls for advice on carrying and shipping cremated remains domestically and internationally. Yet too often, we see articles about cremated remains mishandled or lost with families desperate to find their loved one. Unfortunately, transporting the dead can be complicated, with different rules for every mode of transport, for every origin and destination, all of which is further clouded by a general lack of awareness about the funeral profession and the work we can do.

At Fairfax Memorial Funeral Home and Crematory, CANA’s President-Elect Archer Harmon has the staff and experience to help get the dead where they need to go. Being so close to Washington D.C., Fairfax Memorial is frequently called on to help families all over the world. Archer has addressed members of the College of Consulates, a group of international consular staff, on procedures for transporting the dead. These attendees are seasoned professionals for whom the United States posting was not their first. They had extensive education and training for this posting, but to the one, they were surprised and unprepared to handle the variety of inquiries regarding repatriating casketed or cremated remains to their respective countries. In several cases, Archer has actually helped the consulate repatriate a citizen when the staff were uncertain on how to proceed.

The laws and regulations exist, but death is fraught with cultural interpretations and misunderstandings. For most countries, cremated remains are subject to the same guidelines that apply to a casketed body. The paperwork is extensive and may include some, or all, of the following:

Understandably, this is a complicated process, made more difficult if a business isn't near the nation's capital or doesn’t have a staff with experience in this work. CANA estimates that only a handful of funeral homes, cemeteries, or crematories in the US handle repatriation alone. Families without professional expertise are at a greater disadvantage without the experience and network to get their loved one safely on their way. This difficulty is why CANA gets so many phone calls, and our first step is to refer to reference books like the Redbook. We also reiterate the same guidelines we provide on our webpage: ship to a funeral home, not a private residence; contact the consulate/embassy first; get duplicates of all paperwork; carry rather than ship when possible; etcetera, etcetera. Even then, one CANA faculty member used to warn, too often you can expect your international postal shipment of cremated remains to be returned to the sender.

We recommend reaching out to the professionals who have dedicated staff monitoring the many variables of transportation and shipping, who are experienced in this work, and come with an international network to help. Shipping via an agent or air cargo may be more expensive, but well worth the peace of mind.
​
CANA Members that specialize in transporting remains offered these valuable insights:

Of course, this complicated process is further challenged by a pandemic: travel restrictions between countries, canceled flights, closed offices, and more. Here's what CANA Members say:

Inman Shipping: Travel restrictions and embargos during the pandemic are significantly impacting shipping and transporting remains. Inman works closely with our sister company, Eagle’s Wings Air receiving hourly updates as airlines continue to delay and cancel flights. Inman constantly monitors all of these factors and provide up-to-date information to the receiving funeral home. Due to the pandemic, many airlines have significantly reduced their flight schedules. We advise to not set services until the remains have arrived at your funeral home. We are also asking for your patience while waiting to receive permits and death certificates. Many of our funeral homes are located in cities with lockdowns and have local health departments which may be currently closed. Additionally, due to airlines needing to furlough both reservation and cargo staff, certain airlines are unable to book flights during the weekend. Unfortunately, certain airlines will not allow COVID-positive remains to ship internationally. We continue to work closely with the airlines to monitor what is available to our customers.
​
MacKinnon & Bowes: The pandemic has provided some new realities that must be taken into account for shipping bodies or cremated remains.

National Mortuary Shipping (NMS): For the most part it is getting much easier to ship and transport human remains then it was at the beginning of the pandemic. Airlines are starting to have more flights and loosen up their restrictions some. However, there may still be time delays because even though the airlines are regaining traffic there may be less available flights and some cargo stations are still closed. Some International destinations are not always available and often very delayed.

And even when everything settles into a new normal, don't forget that the seasons will still change, and the weather with it. In the same way you plan your travel and gift shipments, advise families that they will need to plan well ahead, and delay making plans until remains safely arrive. CANA Members suggest:

Inman Shipping: Winter weather issues, post office delays, and seasonal holidays can cause delays in shipping and mailing of cremated remains. With the dramatic decline in available flights and only cargo space for two human remains onboard a flight, it is necessary to set proper expectations for family members awaiting the return of their loved one. While families may wish to proceed with quickly setting services, it is very important that services are not arranged until body has been received into the care of the local funeral home. Most cremated remains are returned home via the US Post Office, which has also caused unexpected delays due to slower Post Office service.

MacKinnon & Bowes: Winter months in northern US and Canada represent challenges for delayed and cancelled flights due to weather. Even flights from the south could be impacted by interruptions caused by delays in the overall system and aircraft that does not arrive at the point of departure in time for scheduled departures and connections. Holidays represent times when most Airlines provide diminished service capabilities. Advance planning and anticipated potential for disruption should always be taken into account when forecasting arrivals, services, and dispositions.

National Mortuary Shipping (NMS): It is important that everyone understands that time can be a sensitive issue when shipping. There are times that doctors and health departments as well as distance may create delays in shipping. Another factor is the hours and location of airline cargo facilities as well as delays caused by weather and other circumstances. These may be unavoidable and create unanticipated delays in shipping. We know it is difficult when a family requests services be set for a specific day; however, we always recommend because of these potential delays to try to avoid deciding for services until the deceased has arrived at his or her location.

Like seasons, political situations also change with countries falling in and out of favor with one another. This can impact the ability to cross borders, even for the dead. As an example, when shipping to Cuba from the US was limited, Canada often provided a necessary layover where Canadian companies could take possession and arrange the final leg of the journey.

As CANA's founder, Dr. Hugo Erichsen, said, "Cremation is preparation for memorialization." This idea is also immortalized in CANA's Code of Cremation Practice. When discussing plans for permanent, dignified placement of cremated remains abroad, it is important to plan ahead and allow time for arrangements to be finalized. That way, everyone gets the homegoing they deserve, surrounded by the people that loved them.

CONTACT THE EXPERTS

For more from CANA’s member experts in shipping and transportation:

Inman Shipping Worldwide is the oldest and largest repatriation company in the country. We are the experts in returning a loved one home for ceremony. We address the needs of an increasingly mobile society. As careers and retirement take us to all corners of the country and even the world, Inman addresses the need to return the remains of a deceased loved one home for ceremony. Inman coordinates the transport of the deceased from any part of the world to their final resting place. We oversee the entire process, regardless of the distance involved, so that the sensitivities of the survivors are fully protected.
At Inman Shipping we provide round the clock support to our customers. Our team of professionals are available any time of the day or night to begin a new domestic or international shipment, or answer a question related to a shipment. Our website, www.shipinman.com, is also available to request a quote for transportation or start a new shipment. We can assist your funeral home with an out of town direct cremation as well as full body repatriation.

MacKinnon & Bowes Limited is an assistance firm that provides support services to funeral providers, crematoriums and cemeteries for a wide array of services including flight bookings, shipments, cremations and repatriations from countries all over the world. MacKinnon & Bowes is a family owned funeral service company staffed by licensed funeral directors and has been a proud CANA member for over 25 years. For more information on MacKinnon & Bowes please check our website or give us a call.
MacKinnon & Bowes continues to provide those services and consultations that they are known for both pre and during pandemic. Flight bookings, international and domestic shipment coordination, cremation services and shipment of cremated remains are those things that funeral providers have come to rely on MacKinnon & Bowes for over the years. Over the road transportation for longer distance requirements have become more frequently relied upon by those that rely on and engage MacKinnon & Bowes. A comprehensive support system for shipments, cremations and repatriations from far away is at the fingertips of those that call for assistance.
​
National Mortuary Shipping and Cremation (NMS) assists hometown directors with out-of-town deaths. NMS has been the funeral industries trusted source as a full service provider for close to 40 years. We are proud to offer:
Domestic and International shipping, cremations, removal services, embalming, livery, airline transfers, flight booking, graveside services and disinterment’s as well as assistance with shipping requirements, death certificates, and airline requirements.
Our knowledgeable staff is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to provide you service you can count on. We are always available to help funeral homes with their out-of-town needs or questions. Even if a funeral home does not have an out-of-town death, we welcome them to call our office and ask any questions that may help them better prepare should a need arise. We also offer many resources on our website as well as a phone app that allows funeral homes to contact us electronically.

We are all virtual now. In addition to conducting virtual funerals and celebrations of life, you may find yourself attending birthday parties or toasting at Happy Hours online. The global pandemic and local gathering rules have forced us all to plan events within new limitations and with a whole new set of considerations.

CANA followed suit by converting our 102nd Annual Cremation Innovation Convention to a virtual event. It turned out well, but it involved a lot of careful planning. Once our leaders and staff decided to go virtual, we found we had a short four months to make a lot of decisions.

CANA’s may have been the profession’s first virtual convention, but it won’t be the last. Below I’ve shared some thoughts about our process and the lessons we learned. I hope it helps you as you plan your own events—whether it’s taking your next graveside service online or gathering family and friends for a virtual game night.

As a longtime devoted fan of Simon Sinek, I looked to his recommendations for guidance on moving forward with a virtual meeting. In both his viral TED Talk and subsequent book, Start with Why, Sinek encourages us to look at what we do (hold an Annual Convention) and examine the heart of it (why do we hold it?).

CANA started our planning process by posing the difficult question “Why should we have a virtual convention?” Other associations within the profession and around the world had cancelled their events, so why should CANA move forward? The immediate answer to the why question was, essentially, why not? We had four months to plan and a compelling desire to re-envision our 102nd annual event to a virtual platform, so we met the challenge. We are an association known for a progressive response to disruptions, so our leadership and staff were eager to uphold that reputation.

Closely related to WHY is HOW – how will we be able to successfully translate the CANA convention experience to a virtual platform? An in-person CANA convention takes place in one large room. Everyone is in that room together, meaning attendees and exhibitors are learning, eating, drinking and networking seamlessly throughout the event. A virtual platform supports the same integration, also bringing everyone together into one space—an easy adaptation.

We had already established a strong virtual link to the cremation and death care professionals. From the beginning of the pandemic, CANA has convened its members to share information, hear from experts and formulate solutions together. Networking and education have never been more closely linked. So for us, a final WHY to hold the virtual convention was our charge to advance CANA’s mission and serve members and the broader profession.

Having identified WHY a virtual convention has value, we identified three key elements to its success:

This list is absolutely in priority order. By August 2020, many of us were craving connection, even if it was only available via a screen. Networking was the top priority, as it is with in-person conventions, so we sought a platform that supported networking in multiple ways.

While the CANA Convention prioritized networking over other elements, every event is different. It is incumbent on the host to identify and market the event’s value proposition – jargon for the WHY. Your event may prioritize education, community engagement or gathering together. Once you know that, you can then market the event and attract key audiences. However, just as with in-person events, you’d better be able to deliver what you promise.

Below are some of the questions we posed that informed our planning, our decision-making—and even our marketing—with our answers.

One important lesson we learned is that very few attendees planned to completely pull themselves away from the office or work during the convention time. Of course, because the rituals of packing and flying or driving to the convention and the respite of a hotel stay  were not a factor, I am not sure it would have occurred to me to stay away from work either. I came home from the CANA office and slept in my bed at the end of each day.

The etiquette of an in-person event is familiar. Advance preparation is helpful, but an attendee or exhibitor can grab a program at the registration desk and make snap decisions about how to plan their experience without much of a learning curve. We know what to do, and we can take cues from the other people in the event.

A virtual event has a steeper learning curve. There are layers of technology to navigate just to conduct a group chat, or simply to identify who is currently available on the platform. For our Convention, the platform required a computer (not a tablet or phone) in order to get the optimal networking experience. So even if attendees and exhibitors were able to run their business on the go, they couldn’t get the full convention experience from a phone or tablet. Since CANA members do not spend large portions of their day in front of computers, many struggled with internet access or finding a compatible browser. Many discovered that they didn’t have an accessible camera on their computer.

We could not have predicted these challenges, but we created and offered a lot of advance education and technical support to help attendees and exhibitors understand and use the specific platform tools. We did this on YouTube with walkthroughs, emails with images and instructions, and on this very blog. And it was effective! Most of the attendees planned ahead and knew how to use the platform and therefore learned quickly.

Unfortunately, many of the exhibitor staff who set up the booths and attended the CANA training were not the same people who staffed the actual booth during the Convention. 90% of technical support questions came from exhibitors on Day One of the event.

Many registrants apologized in the post-event evaluation survey, explaining that they successfully attended the education sessions, but were pulled away afterward to serve families and help staff and thus were unable to follow up and network with their colleagues. That split attention had another consequence—no break from their regular duties. This is especially unfortunate at a time when our profession is working so hard, possibly harder than ever before. A Convention provides that intangible benefit—getting away to spend time with CANA friends and getting the opportunity to play as hard as you work. That may seem inappropriate during a global pandemic, but it is important for our physical and mental well-being.

In a virtual meeting, networking is a bit more difficult than simply walking up to an individual or a group and joining in the conversation. “Seeing” people on a virtual platform doesn’t have the immediacy of seeing their faces, but rather checking a participant list or patiently waiting for a response to a text. Just as you text first to arrange a Facetime conversation, the video chat on the platform worked much the same way.

Additionally, there was quite a bit of uncertainty as to the etiquette of a virtual convention. How should we behave? What comes across as pushy? I am confident we will get better at this with time.

This uncertainty often meant that attending the convention was, at least initially, a pretty isolated and individual experience. It took effort to find people and text chat or video chat. There was no walking into a giant room abuzz with voices and full of people.

Most in-person attendees are owners or managers and often come solo or bring one employee. It is expensive to attend and in-person event, and someone has to keep the business running. Conversely for the virtual event, some members registered several people from their staff so they could have a watch party at the office, enjoy the presentations and move through the exhibit hall together to give some conversation and camaraderie to the event. Others formed their groups online and kept the conversation alive in the chat functions and caught the competitive spirit with our passport game. The hook of cheap CE became a team-building opportunity.

CANA Supplier Members are a crucial factor as to WHY we hold our Convention. This event was our one big annual opportunity to connect exhibitors with attendees and showcase their products, services and solutions. A virtual convention supports our funeral home, cemetery, and crematory members sharing their challenges with professional colleagues, and our supplier members putting their solutions front-and-center.

In addition to apologizing for missing networking, many registrants apologized to exhibitors in the post-event evaluation survey for not visiting the trade show or for only visiting after hours. Some attendees chose to simply enjoy watching the pre-loaded video and downloading information from the booth page rather than interact more directly with exhibit staff. Even those who attended during staffed hours would not necessarily communicate through the booth text or video chat. The average booth attracted 150 visitors with maybe 5% entering the group video chat. That is completely opposite of an in-person trade show experience and entirely out of the exhibitors’ control.

The primary challenge faced by exhibitors was they couldn’t “see” visitors to their booth. Many had set up a table-top style booths with a video feed, expecting people to click on the group video chat link and enter their booth, but only a handful of attendees did so. The surveys showed that they either didn’t notice the link or weren’t sure what they would walk into. One survey respondent specifically requested a preview to see if they wanted to enter and who was in there, before committing to clicking on the link. If seeing is believing, no wonder exhibitors questioned whether the final tally of booth visitors CANA downloaded through the platform and forwarded to each of them was accurate.

Here too, the etiquette of a virtual exhibit booth was uncertain. Was it rude to click on a link unannounced and barge in? Why were some booths empty and while others were staffed?

Education is what CANA does well and is the easiest to translate to a virtual experience. CANA’s online Crematory Operations Certification Program (COCP) is wildly successful. CANA webinars are attracting crowds as well. But a convention is different. It is an event that people experience together, in one room, at an appointed time for several hours in what would otherwise be a busy workday. At least, that is what meeting planners believe and plan for accordingly, but many of our virtual meeting attendees and exhibitors were multi-tasking and not giving their full attention to the online content.

Fortunately, across the board, our presenters received rave reviews. We were very thoughtful and intentional about our selection of presenters – a virtual event is no time for a sage on a stage. A presenter needs to engage with the audience through polls, questions asked and answered in the chat, and the electric energy to keep an invisible audience focused on the content and away from their inboxes. Handouts and downloadable slidedecks are valuable, but the presentation itself needs to be the first priority.

CANA enjoyed the benefits of going first, in that attendees and exhibitors were curious about a virtual platform, forgiving of technical difficulties and offered grace to those learning the new technology.

We learned that not every element of an in-person convention translates to a virtual platform. For example, I decided to hold the membership meeting the week after the Convention, which meant we didn’t have a quorum and had to reschedule again and work harder to achieve the quorum we easily obtained during the convention. I won’t repeat that mistake.

It was heartening to see how every event participant learned to be the expert, then went on to help others. That could mean that they discovered something, then posted it to share with others. CANA is made up of caring people who want to support and help each other. We were all learning the platform even as we were teaching others. For the event, CANA Staff opened the Convention early to allow for some time to familiarize with the platform. That, in addition to live tech support by phone, email, one-on-one chat, Zoom, and Convention chat meant that we were able to answer questions and get people on their virtual feet quickly. And with CANA staff on the other end of the line, we were a friendly and familiar connection to our registrants.

Bottom line, the old adage “You get out of it what you put into it” is as true with a virtual event as in life. Whether through attention, technology, or preparation, we all can improve.

More virtual events – for certain. A number of state, provincial and national associations are offering their own virtual conventions and trade shows in Fall 2020. Will they be the same as in-person experiences? No. They will be great, but they won’t be the same. Virtual is an alternative, but not a replacement.

CANA is planning a Hybrid Symposium on February 10-11, 2021 in Las Vegas at The Linq Hotel and Casino. That means we’ll provide the opportunity to gather in-person for live sessions and Vegas fun, with portions of the program livestreamed for online participants. I am optimistically planning for a hybrid experience, because there has to be a path forward and CANA is excited to find it.

CANA is also planning another Game Night for members. You are working hard and deserve a break and prizes. In the meantime, we’ll continuing learning together and helping one another. So until we can safely meet again, I will see you via Zoom.

You know, there are so many things we can’t control right now, and for most of us, that makes us anxious. But I want to encourage you with this: In each moment of your life, you have the ability to change yourself and those around you in profound ways.

No matter the time.

No matter the day.

No matter the circumstance.

Even amid moments of uncertainty, like the one we find ourselves in right now.

In moments that seem out of our control, there’s always something that’s within it: our perspective. I like to say that I’m a Spiritual Pragmatist, which means that while I appreciate believing in a higher power and it’s guidance and influence in our lives, I also believe in action and doing, to bring about success and happiness. It’s about having balance, and part of having that balance means that we have to be conscious and mindful of how we’re showing up and how that influences any given situation, including the one we’re amid right now.

I spent 20 years as a funeral director and embalmer; I like to say that everything I’ve ever learned, I learned from dying. One would think that a career surrounded by death would have taught me a lot about dying, but in fact it taught me so much about life, and gifted to me the most beautiful lessons. Ones that, in moments like this, come through with crystal clarity and enable me to put into action the behaviours that can ground me, even amid all of the uncertainty.

My British, tea-totting grandmother used to say, “Good tea steeps.” My grandmother knew the difference between efficiency and effectiveness. For her, there was no such thing as an efficient way to make tea; there was only an effective way. Can you make tea by dropping a tea bag into a mug of water and putting it in the microwave for ninety seconds? You can, sure. But, according to her, that’s not going to make a delicious cup of tea.

A drive-through car wash is efficient, but you might enjoy the therapeutic process of washing your car by hand. Ordering takeout is an adequate way to put dinner on the table, but a great satisfaction comes with preparing a meal from scratch yourself. Sending a friend a text message to see how they’re doing is an economic use of time, but it’s not quite the same as picking up the phone and talking.

As a society, we are consumed by efficiency, collectively racing from one thing to the other and from one person to the next. Being able to make the rush seem effortless is perceived as honorable. Those who work the most are revered, as though the most stressed-out person will be awarded a trophy. Sometimes you have to choose the efficient way; there’s no denying that. But we could all try a little harder to choose the effective way more often, especially when it comes to our relationships. How do we do that when we are in the throes of the hustle or in the midst of chaos? We pause.

Most of life’s magic happens in moments of pause. We need to stop and re-centre in order to reach a state of conscious awareness. Pausing helps us to slow down and plan our time more effectively, so that we create more meaning in our lives. The way my grandmother did with her tea. Normally I would profess the importance of creating the space to do this, and so often, and I’m including myself, we struggle to find the time to do it.

Now, we’re at a place in time where the world has quite literally slowed down. So many of us are sequestered away in our homes, adjusting to a world where physical distancing is common place, and life outside of our homes has come to a grinding halt. Is there time in your day to create the space to reinvest in something that brings you joy? It wasn’t that long ago that many of us likely caught ourselves complaining that we didn’t have enough time in a day, or that we were missing out on things in life: missing quality time with our children, missing time for the gym, missing time to just sit and read. There are likely many more things you could add to this list.

While we adjust to this new normal we find ourselves in, try to negotiate some time for you to invest in ‘the pause’, even if that time is spent on an activity like reading a book, or moving your body, meditating or sitting in prayer. Whatever it is that fills your cup, it’s important to realize that in order to be of service to others, we have to spend time investing in ourselves.

The late, great Jim Rohn once said that we’re each a reflection of those with whom we spend the most time, so the key to being your best self is to be surrounded by those who support and inspire you. I like to call these my “finger snap people.” They’re the ones with whom you feel an instant attraction, as quickly as you can snap your fingers. More often than not, you can’t quite distinguish exactly what it is that draws you to them, but their energy is like a magnet. There’s something about their character that causes you to be perfectly content with who you are, while also inspiring you to seek ways to be a better version of yourself. And when you find these like-minded individuals, hold on to them tightly, because you are much more powerful together than alone.

We might be physically distant from one another right now, but that doesn’t stop us from taking advantage of the incredible technology that helps us stay connected. I would encourage you to reach out to one of your ‘finger snap people’. Make that phone call, send that email, heck, you can even watch a movie together over video chat. Will it be perfect? Maybe not, but you’re connecting to people that matter, at a time when connection matters. I promise that you’ll feel a little better afterwards, because people need people and we’re all in this together. We don’t have to make grand gestures. The most meaningful moments can happen in the simplest of ways.

Sometimes, allowing someone the space to be seen and heard is the one thing they need the most, as they navigate their new normal right now. If that person is you, your community, your go-to people, are the ones you can rely on, no matter what. Just ask. I suspect they’ll be there, in the snap of a finger. There’s no question that the world we find ourselves in today, isn’t the world we were in not that long ago. There’s also no question that through it all – the up’s, downs and all-arounds – if we just remember that our perspective can shift everything, we suddenly find ourselves with more control than we might have believed we ever had.

If there’s one thing I believe, it’s that everything we’ve ever been taught about legacy – either consciously or unconsciously, is that it’s something that there once we’re gone – once we’re dead. I also know that when we shift the narrative around legacy, from something we leave to something we live, every single day, we can realize the power of understanding the impact we’re making - while we’re still here. I’ve seen first hand how that shift can help us realize the depth and breadth of that impact, help define our purpose and help us live our everyday legacy. When we realize that the way we show up in the world today, is the way we’ll be remembered tomorrow, we transform not only our relationship with the world around us, but also with ourselves in that world.


For all the chaos that COVID-19 has caused in the world, it’s powerful to see humanity band together for the greater-good – living with purpose, on purpose and showing how marrying that with compassion can be so incredibly powerful.

I am a funeral director. If you had told my 25-year-old self who was beginning a career as a determined and dedicated special education teacher that 40 years later I would be typing that sentence, I would have laughed in your face. And, yes, I’m that old.

But life has an interesting way of taking turns and detours and branching off the map to the point where today I am proud to be part of this very special and unique band of professionals.

In the twenty-five years that I have been part of working with funeral directors, I’ve become known as one who trains, speaks and writes in the arena of imploring our profession to do better. To grow into the needs of our new consumers. To widen our practices beyond the safe and traditional. To think outside the proverbial box. Some people have appreciated the message and embraced the opportunities to try new things. Some people think I’m kind of a shock jock and loudmouth. All are accurate.

But, today, all I can say is wow! These past months have presented such overwhelming challenges and unprecedented practices as my sisters and brothers have faced the daunting task of caring for the dead and supporting the grieving families. This virus that has the world by its grasp has forced us to turn on a dime, to think differently, to adapt and adjust while being on the front lines of unknown potential dangers and a nationwide fear. And just when you think you have it under control, situations change once again, and a new plan has to be developed on the fly. We often talk about thinking outside the box. Well, for all of us, the box has been destroyed. All that we knew to be usual and predictable no longer exists for this moment in time.

In those states where the death toll has been crushing and constant, just the physical toll on staff to keep up with the demand, to deal with shortages of protective equipment, running out of space to care for the deceased in a safe and honorable method, to answer the phone again and again and again, knowing that capacity is a faint memory, has been nothing short of amazing. Every person involved-- the removal personnel, the embalmers, the arrangers, the office staff, the crematory operators, the managers and owners have all answered the call to stand in the chaos and provide the final farewell for every family. In those states where COVID-19 has not been the overlying problem, the issue of quarantine and social distancing has complicated the opportunities to say goodbye.

Removals have taken on a whole new level of caution and care. Those of us who attended mortuary school were all trained to deal with infectious diseases, but did we every think that we would be facing this? How do we honor a sacred moment of taking a loved one into our care while being vigilant for the staff and the family? How do we help those families whose loved one had to die alone in quarantine? How do we offer comfort without a handshake or a hug?

Funeral professionals live their lives to say yes. To be accommodating. To move heaven and earth to meet the needs of every family. So, the difficulty of having to look at a family and tell them that they cannot have the service that they planned and want is devastating. To be the bearer of the bad news that a grieving family cannot invite friends and family to join together as we always have, to hug, to hold hands, to cry together, to remember as a collective and see their reactions. Broken hearts that are further crushed by the restrictions of our current realities. It’s hard.

Everyone has had to stretch, to learn new skills, to think creatively and fiercely as we try to provide a healing moment of gathering in a world that changes with each sunrise. Technology that had never been used. Exactly what is a Zoom? Arranging by phone, online or by Facetime, streaming services live, posting complete services on the website, gathering safely at graveside, resurrecting drive-in movie theaters for an entirely new audience. Funeral directors, Celebrants, clergy, chaplains, officiants are all searching for meaningful and healing ways to offer remembrances, benedictions and blessings. Our hearts ache for those families who say “we’ll just wait and have a service when things are back to normal” because we know grief does not wait for normal. And we understand that for many it will be too difficult to capture that moment again and gather months later.

So, this is my moment to say thank you. As the hospital and health workers are applauded each day for the difficult and dangerous work they are called upon to do trying to heal the sick, I applaud our funeral professionals who are the ones called upon to care for our dead and their survivors in difficult and dangerous situations. People may not stand on street corners and sing to you, but please know that your efforts and diligent work are noticed and celebrated.

I am in awe and appreciation for each one of you who are waking up each morning determined to do the job you were called to do. There will plenty of time for me to get back on my soap box about things we could do better or differently. But today, I offer my deep gratitude. You are heroes. And I’m proud to say that I’m a funeral director.