Confessions of a funeral director
Mark Baker met his wife at a funeral. Three years later he joined her family’s business – funeral directing. It was a significant career shift having just left the army where he worked as an electronics technician.
‘‘I was actually coming back to join the police, that was the original plan.
‘‘It’s an interesting calling. I would refer to it as a vocation, not a job, because you’d be mad to do it as a job for money because the money’s not that great and the hours are rubbish.’’
The manager of Abraham’s Funeral Home in New Plymouth describes the lifestyle as shambolic and said the average funeral director or embalmer earned $45,000 to $50,000 a year.
‘‘It takes a toll on your social life. The best way to describe it is it’s completely unknown. You can’t plan much. You could go from having nothing to do for the weekend to being jam-packed.’’
Baker said Abraham’s had worked over the past few years to ensure staff have a good work-life balance, but ultimately funeral directors did the job for the love of helping people.
‘‘The successful funeral directors are the ones that are very relationship based and want to engage with and help people. That’s where they get their reward from.’’
The most challenging aspect of the job was family dynamics, Baker said.
‘‘It’s not the dead you have to be concerned about, it’s the living.
"Most families that we are caring for, their mum and dad have had a good life and it’s more around the celebration.
‘‘Yes absolutely there’s an element of sadness but there’s times that we spend two hours with a family just laughing because that’s the kind of space they’re in.’’
There aren’t many options for training to get into funeral directing and younger people who come on board tend to come from a caregiver background, Baker said.
‘‘WelTec in Wellington do an introduction to funeral service course. The tutor describes the course as a really good way to weed out those that think they’re going to be funeral celebrants.
‘‘There’s a misconception that it’s all about standing at the front and driving the nice car but that’s less than 10 per cent of what we do. The average funeral takes 40 hours to put together and the actual service is only about an hour.’’
There’s legal requirements, liaising with doctors and care facilities, preparing embalming, supporting the family, venue preparation, and the administration that happens after the funeral.
Baker said funeral directors were people pleasers.
‘‘Something as simple as playing the wrong song at the wrong time – for a funeral director that really works on you for weeks afterwards and, I tell you what, you only do it once every five years. It’s not something that happens again.
‘‘The most rewarding part is at the end of the funeral, when everything has gone well and the family come up to you and say ‘that was awesome, granddad would have loved that’ and that really tells us that we’ve listened to them and come up with ideas that suit the person.’’