Death And Mortuary School (with Leili McMurrough)

[00:00:02] Oh, fühlt sich das nach Sommer an. Die neue Sommerwäsche von Chibo begeistert mit leuchtenden Farben und fröhlichen Trints. Feine Spitze, leichte Mikrofaser und sommerliche Schnitte sorgen für pures Wohlgefühl, selbst an heißen Tagen. Entdecke jetzt die neue Wäschekollektion von Chibo und finde deine Lieblingsstücke für den Sommer.

[00:00:33] So it was all women. And I told him right away, I said, James, your opinion really doesn't matter here. And he just started laughing. Death and Mortuary School. I sit down today with a very excellent guest, Leili McMurrough.

[00:01:00] She is the president of Worsham College, the oldest mortuary school in the United States. She started her career as a lawyer and very much like myself, stumbled into mortuary, the world. And just found that it's something really lovely, something worth doing. And what's more, something worth educating people about.

[00:01:24] Now, before we get into our interview, one thing I want to focus on is answering your questions, educating you in the best way that I know how. For those of you interested in sending a question to be answered one of these days, and we only do a couple an episode, you may send your questions to deathandpodcast at gmail.com or deathandpodcast.com,

[00:01:49] where I will eventually get around to answering your question out of the grab bag. Today, we have some interesting ones. So let's jump in. Here's a question from Megan McSpadden. When someone is an organ donor, does the hospital send them to morticians to cut open still? Or do morticians have to cremate the body with open surgical cuts? Okay.

[00:02:19] So anybody who dies in surgery, let's say, for the most part, unless there's an autopsy, the surgeons will just loosely stitch them back up. I've had the case where, let's say, I've embalmed somebody who died on the table. They'll have just little surgical sutures keeping everything loosely together. And then it's my business then afterward to open those up, make sure everything is embalmed, and close them up more tightly so we don't have leaking or other problems that we want to avoid.

[00:02:48] Now, if someone is being cremated immediately, so that is we aren't going to be seeing them or anything like that, which I don't encourage, if they're going to be cremated immediately after dying on the table, then no, they just go as is, right to the crematory. No need to close up wounds or such that won't exist less than a day or two later. Everybody will end up at a mortician, but not everybody will be worked upon. Hope that answers your question.

[00:03:19] Here's a question from Danny Lear. I think you mentioned embalming isolated limbs before. I was wondering, when you do that, how do you keep the embalming fluid in? Like, I get how you would drain the limb first, but wouldn't the formaldehyde just kind of spill out of the ends or something? So yes, this is something I did when I worked in Bequest Lab, and it does spill out the ends. So Danny, that is something actually I have done before, not in the mortuary setting, but when I worked at the Bequest Program,

[00:03:48] the whole body donation lab at my college. So when you're talking about a circulatory system, even if it's just in an independent limb, we might say, one would have to inject down an artery, and the drainage comes out the vein. So at a certain point, you're going to push all the blood through, but then the preservative, of course, is going to come boiling out that vein, right? In the artery, out the vein. So then it's just a matter of clamping that with a hemostat and trying to keep it in.

[00:04:16] You will, of course, get other spilling and such. At the time, we wrapped it with saran wrap and kept kind of like a tight band on the end of the limb just to try to keep some of that fluid in. It is the case. Whenever you're embalming with broken dermal tissue, you will have seeping. And of course, a detached limb is going to have quite a bit. But at the end of the day, if you were to, let's say you were in a mortuary setting,

[00:04:45] you needed to reattach that limb. What you will do is embalm it as best you can. Make sure you have good perfusion, good drainage. And then when you're done, honestly, just let it seep. Let all the fluid come out of the end. We have certain chemicals called cauterins that would do well to kind of make a barrier on that tissue, right? Cauterize it, if you will. So that's what we would do first. We'd make sure that it was embalmed, and then we'd make sure that it's dry,

[00:05:13] and then we'd reattach it after that. So nice question. Thank you. Welcome to our guest, Leili McMurrough. She is the president of Worsham College, an embalming college, mortuary college outside Chicago, Illinois, USA. We have actually spoken before.

[00:05:42] I gave a presentation to your students once, and I want to talk about that because that was really, really wonderful. But we've never met in person yet. I hope to sometime soon, but this is a close second. Leili, welcome to the show. Hi, Victor. Thank you so much for having me. I've had you on my list of people I wanted to talk to, to have as a guest on the podcast since this whole venture started. Because one, I think your story is very interesting. There's something about the fact that undertakers

[00:06:11] can come from all walks of life and do well. But likewise, subsequently, your actual work right now is really, really important to me. And I think it should be important to everybody because everybody's going to need an undertaker someday. So what you're doing is vital. Tell us where you were before you got into this. Yeah, so I'm a first-generation funeral director,

[00:06:41] meaning that I had really no experience in funeral service prior to kind of getting involved. I was actually in law school at the time that I enrolled in mortuary school. So I was going to law school Monday through Thursday, and then I went to mortuary school Friday and Saturday. I'd always been really interested in kind of forensic and anthropology. But when I found out you had to be a doctor, I thought there's no way I'm doing that. So I took more of the route to go into law school, which I loved. And then as I was in mortuary school, I was taking a law class there.

[00:07:11] And I went to the kind of owners and program director at that mortuary college and said, you know, you should really have a lawyer teaching your, you know, mortuary law class and your business law class. And they said, great, you start in August. And I thought, wait a minute, there's no world I can do that. And I was in Syracuse, New York at the time. And I just fell in love with it. I fell in love with the profession. I fell in love with education. I shortly thereafter moved out to Illinois. And while I was working at the funeral home there, I realized there's another mortuary college

[00:07:41] maybe 20 minutes away. And when you think about that, there's only 56 programs in the entire United States. So to have these two colleges that were so close and accessible. So I called them up and said, you know, do you need anybody? They actually said no. But we got a long slimy. The most mortuary just moved, by the way, is to shut down anyone else. Yeah, they were like, yes. Yes, exactly right. They were like, no, we're good. And then they actually called me back about a week later and said, you know, we've been looking at your resume. We're just interested in maybe talking to you.

[00:08:11] So I showed up and I kind of got this job as essentially director of student services and just started kind of figuring out, like, what can I do to improve mortuary science education or just kind of get, you know, move things in a more modern direction a little bit or kind of meet the needs of the students where they're at? Because I saw a real change in who they were. So in the next, like, couple of years, I pretty much moved from director of student services to essentially president of the entire program. And in that time, then built an online mortuary science program for Worsham

[00:08:41] and then really started moving to, how do we get back to the practical hands-on application, especially when we're moving in kind of this digital modality where most of our students are coming to us online? And to your point, you kind of said it so well in the beginning, 90% of our students that are coming to mortuary school right now are like me. The first generation funeral director that have never seen a body before, never been to a funeral before. Those are our students. So when you think about that huge gap that we have to kind of get them ready for when they go out into practice

[00:09:10] and into this profession, that's become a huge, huge thing for us at the mortuary schools. And I've taken that job really seriously of how to kind of get them ready. And I think it's because I also have a funeral home, so I see what's kind of needed where it's like, okay, you know, we need to make sure we've got communication skills, that we've got these ability for the students to go to the prep room, but also then have compassion, empathy, and understand the weight of the work as well. See, and this is interesting. So one of my best friends, Lewis,

[00:09:41] he is a funeral director as far south in Minnesota as I am north. And he's a first-generation funeral director. And he got in never having gone to a funeral. He attended no funerals before he got into mortuary school. And so my, you know, I had a different path. So my question was like, why the hell are you here? You've never been to a funeral. But what's very interesting is he came from a religious background that was liturgical and orderly,

[00:10:11] and he's kind of an orderly sort of person. So he fit right in. And he, you know, he sees people and movement in a way that I think really dovetails nicely with what we try to do with funeral service. Because I mean, really, so much of what your funeral service is actually is movement of the dead, movement of families, and like the changes that occur as people are transitioning from one place, one time, one aspect of being when you lose your soul.

[00:10:41] And so my question to you would be, what, as students, what backgrounds seem to suit themselves well? You know, if you're coming in as a first generation funeral director, what attributes do you need to have? What sort of unteachable knowledge do you already have to have in your back pocket? Would you say? You know, I think two things that I've really seen that stand out most to me are communication and compassion. The ability to just listen

[00:11:10] and be interested in people's stories. What I think we miss so often, kind of when we're just talking about the world of death and kind of like the work that we do, so much of it, like you said, is logistics. It's movements. It's that. But what I realized too is that sometimes that funeral director, that person sitting across from that family member, that might be the last time those stories are told. So you are the keeper sometimes of these stories, of these memories, of these things. And that's such a weight and such a responsibility. And to me, being a good listener

[00:11:40] and being interested and curious where you hear something and you go, oh, that's so interesting. Tell me more about that. Where you're drawing out those kind of moments for that family because what I realized is that that's the important part of the grieving process for so many of them. And that's the work that really only a funeral director can do because not only are we putting together these, you know, funerals where every bit matters and kind of all the personalization, but that personalization comes from listening. So to me, having that interest and being, you know, like wanting to hear those stories.

[00:12:10] Well, and what I have found, it's very fun. I don't know if you, do you write obituaries with your families? We do, yes. That's the first thing we always do. So we sit down and, you know, whatever. They might have a worksheet of some details, but I just ignore that and we just have story time. And so for a half hour of our hour and a half, we're just talking about, you know, ostensibly nothing important, but actually the most important things. And, and what I find is that the stories that come up when you're sitting around the table

[00:12:40] the day after someone dies, like those are the ones that really matter. You know, was, was dad's membership in the Lions Club that important? No. Was, was the fact that he bought a, as an example, is the fact that dad bought a six foot tall Sasquatch silhouette to put in each of his kids' yard. Like that's way more compelling, and those are the things that I think you think of and like the things that you immediately miss. You don't miss his membership in the Lions Club

[00:13:10] because that doesn't matter. But you, you miss all the little things. And so to, to just sit there and listen and draw those out and then write them down for posterity, I think is, like you say, it's a great weight and a great responsibility, but it's also a lot of fun. I love that part. And I think that when you're a student coming into a program in particular, you know, the schools, I think sometimes we kind of have to focus on the particulars, the, you know, how a, how to run an arranging conference kind of because, as you know,

[00:13:39] there's so many like technical pieces that have to get done. But I find that sometimes the students wanted a script, right? They wanted to, what do I say? How do I say it? And I tell them and our instructors tell them there isn't a script. It's about feeling it, right? Like it's kind of understanding like all these things need to get done, but you're right. No one is going to kind of have this great story from knowing exactly where someone was born and kind of all the just very like foundational details of someone's life because that's not someone's life. You know, my grandmother just passed and we all were getting around

[00:14:09] telling the stories and we got through the logistic details of when she was married and all those different things. But we were laughing about how like you could hear her coming into a room two minutes before because she had this giant like charm bracelet that had a charm for every child when she had five, every grandchild, every great grandchild and we were just laughing about that, you know, like and that's what kind of made it special and the funeral director was right there listening to those things. I mean, so that's and then you pull those details and it's like where's the charm bracelet then? You know, like that to me

[00:14:38] is like the unteachable things. It's funny. I remember one of the first times I sat in on arrangements with a veteran funeral director, Tom, and he goes, all right, Victor, I'm going to make this look really easy and he just, you know, launches in and I have to laugh because I think about that now. I'm like, oh yeah, I put a lot of thought into it but only on the fly. You know, I don't stress about who's going to be walking through the door or what, you know, I wonder what someone's going to say. I don't know. We're just, I'm making it look easy and really like

[00:15:07] I think the trick is for those students is just be yourself. You know, and part of that is curating who you are, right? Because like if if you're not very pleasant, you're not going to be a good funeral director. Absolutely. I think be interested in things. You know, I mean, it can be sports, it can be reading, it can be books, it can be music. Like all of those things are what kind of build that credibility for a funeral director in those moments in the very beginning. Yeah, it's really, I don't know, and it's, the thing is though like the nuts and bolts are also really important.

[00:15:37] You know, the logistical parts, the arteries and the veins because for whatever reason we have a job that is just two wildly different things smashed together. Yes. So tell me about on the practical side, I am curious, tell me about how you do body work within the college. Absolutely. So we have kind of two paths that a student can take at Worsham. You can come on campus and we've actually had a campus-based program always in the Chicago area

[00:16:07] since 1911. We're actually one of the oldest mortuary science programs in the country. We're also a standalone school so all we do is funeral service here which I kind of love because you are coming here to be a funeral director and really nothing else. So it gives us the ability to really focus and do it well. A student that comes on campus with us, we go down to Cook County Medical Examiner's Office and that's where they do all of their practical hands-on applications. So we've been going down there for the past 86 years and Cook County is one of the busiest medical examiners

[00:16:36] in the entire country. So the cases that the students see and get to experience are pretty much like nothing they'll really ever experience again. So it really is something to be seen. In addition to that, they work with a lot of our clinical instructors that have like decades worth of experience that they are working with on a weekly basis. If a student's online with us, we still take that very seriously because so much of what we do is about the debt, right? It's preparation. It is working with them and without them, our job doesn't exist.

[00:17:06] So even if you're an online student, what we do with them is we actually have all of our students that are working at local funeral homes go through what's called a preceptor training and we work with those local funeral homes to talk to them about what are the skill sets that we want to see a student achieve kind of based on, you know, an embalming. And then they fill out case reports and then our instructors review every single case report and then actually quiz them on it so that we know, hey, did you actually do these things? And then when they come on campus, because all of our online

[00:17:35] students are required to come on campus, we actually have essentially a competency exam where it's like, can you actually do what you said you've been doing? So and even that takes place at the medical examiner's office. We also have a brand new state-of-the-art lab on campus as well that we've really designed to kind of model best practices in everything. So a ventilation, tables, we have beautiful like TVs so you can kind of see like what's actually going on and they all can go live to one another, four stations, different machines,

[00:18:06] mortuary lift, like all of those different things and then we can also adjust the lighting so we can see because you and I both know that the lighting that you see in the prep room can be very different when we get outside. It turns out, I mean, the nice thing is a body will always look better when I first see it under bright fluorescent. So anything after that is an improvement. Yes. You know, if I can make it look good there, I can make it look good anywhere. Absolutely. So all of our students participate in everything like that and again,

[00:18:35] we take that very seriously because again, part of the foundational work that we do is embalming. I mean, and even as cremation rates rise and all of those different things, I still think that there is something about a viewing and there is something about being able to say that you did that. You can still select cremation. You know, that doesn't change and also if we're not teaching it at the schools, where are they learning this? So to me, kind of making sure that that's a foundational piece that all of our students experience is something that we spend a lot of time on. So there was one of my, I mean,

[00:19:05] he's probably a hundred now, but one of my old mentors when I first started, Paul Korsmo, he had a quote that he would say every day and he's this tiny little Norwegian guy and he'd be like, well, you can't have a good funeral with a bad body. That was his quote and I think about it all the time, especially when I want to rush or I'm really tired or, you know, I've had my fill for the day and I'm like, no, no, no, can't have a good funeral

[00:19:34] with a bad body, Victor. So just slow down, raise the radial, like do the thing that has to be done. Yes. And we know, don't we? Most of the time, it's like, you know what you need to do. It's just going like, I'm going to get there and I'm going to give that extra push. And that's where like, I think the training comes in where it's like, we do it because it's the right thing. We do it because this is what we're showing up for and this is why we do this work. So I see that and I see such value in it.

[00:20:03] That's why we put a lot of effort into it here. Yeah. I mean, having the foundation is the thing and as you say, you have to be curious and I think so much of this business and being a good funeral director is just purely self-motivation. So I went to the University of Minnesota which has a good program. I learned most of what I know on the job or did I learn it in the class? Most of it's on the job, I think.

[00:20:31] But I already knew it. You know, I already had it inside of me. But really, probably my greatest education when I was there is I worked at the Whole Body Cadaver Lab. I worked at the Bequest Program. So my mortuary school is the only one in the country attached to a medical school which is something they love to toot their horn about. But I got to work in the medical school and when you're embalming bodies, especially for study and you're raising every little artery, you know, making sure everything is perfect so that way they last

[00:21:01] for a year and a half or longer. That's honestly where I got most of my education because nobody was teaching me how to raise a tibial artery. Like the one when you're like, nobody taught me that in embalming lab but I taught myself, you know. So yeah, that self-motivation or even just the belief in yourself, you have to be, I think, stupidly arrogant in some ways I think to be an undertaker. You know, like I had a friend tell me, he's like, he's like,

[00:21:30] I'm the best embalmer I know. I was like, oh, that's funny because I'm the best embalmer I know. You know? And, but like that, but you are, but you're too, right? Like you're the best embalmer, you know, obviously. But the thing is like having, having that sort of self-confidence and curiosity and self-drive that's what's going to make it last, that's what's going to make you last and that's what is going to make you prepare a body when you're like, gosh, what am I going to do here?

[00:22:00] You unzip the bag and you're like, God, what is this? That's the thing that helps you hold on. You're so right and I think so much of it is also, you know more than you think and also a lot of stuff is just about trying. It's just about effort and what you really see that the successful funeral directors out there are the ones that really want to just try and you said it so well, the curiosity, you know, the going of like, I think I can do this, you know, I mean, and that confidence in yourself, but that's where it has to come from is from you and going like,

[00:22:30] I'm going to put in the effort, I'm going to try and see what I can make happen here. Yeah. Yeah. But you have to have the building blocks too. So yeah, it's somewhere, it's somewhere in between. Well, you're, you know, you have to get the foundation and I tell people we do the foundation. It is the understanding because part of it's like learning the language because so many of our students, they might, I mean, they're, it's different between casket and coffin even, right? Or like the understanding the language. To me, part of that is what the, what the schools are doing

[00:23:00] of just kind of getting everyone to speak a similar language across the platforms and then they go out and that's where it comes into that the mentors that you have, I think matter the most. So yes, I can get them through school and get them to pass the national board exam. We can get them on their way, but whether or not they really take to the profession and stay depends on where they land and who is around them and who believes in them from that next step forward. Do you find, so I found this when I was going,

[00:23:30] starting to go to mortuary school, right? Or thinking about it. The first undertaker I ever really knew or I'd sat down and talked with when I was thinking about this when I was probably 17. It was like, don't do it, Victor. It sucks. Pays bad. Hours bad. Just bury your friends and you will hate it. Do you find, do you find that your students get a lot of that messaging as well? Unfortunately, yes. And I think that's, it's really hard because we're trying to combat that all the time

[00:23:59] because it gets a lot of people, they'll go like wide-eyed and excited to, you know, get to just meet funeral directors and the first thing they'll say to them is, why are you doing this? You know, they're jaded or they're like just tired. They should have retired. Who knows? And you're, I'm going, look, this is the next generation. They're excited and I think sometimes even when the students are like, why are you doing that? Why are you doing that? Well, that's not what my teacher said. For a lot of them, this is the first time they've ever seen any of these things done in real life. Everything else for most of them

[00:24:29] up to that point is by reading a textbook. So the question why is not necessarily a negative or them going, I'm going to call the FTC on you. Like, that's not what they're doing. It's more of like, hi, right? Like, I've never seen someone hand a GPL before. Like, I know I'm supposed to do that. I've read about that. I've heard my teacher do that. But like, oh my gosh, why did you do it that way? So I think there's that disconnect there because, you know, these students, they need enthusiasm.

[00:24:58] And we can be real about the job. Like, yes, like, it's long, it's hard. We can be real and have honest conversations. But I don't think we need to like dim their light before they even start. And for our listeners, the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, very scrutinously monitors funeral homes. And as she said, the GPL is our general price list. So anytime a funeral director talks about services rendered or price, we are obliged to provide a general price list

[00:25:28] which lists everything the funeral home does. And usually half of that is not applicable to your given case. So there you go. That's actually the short form of what I tell families most of the time. But we'll give it to them and then you try to explain it, which is the harder part. But, um, so, as far as, I have to say, as far as dimming the light before it starts, I do kind of give that old man advice when people reach out to me because I'll be like,

[00:25:58] just so you know, you're going to hate it, but you're also going to love it. Like, I tell people, I was like, the thing is, like, I can't, I can't not do it. Like, I love it so much and I'm probably broken in my brain for as much as I actually enjoy it. Uh, and like, I just have to embrace poverty a little bit and not sleep so much and just be around, you know, eat grief, just be around suffering all the time, but it is

[00:26:27] the best life also. So, so I don't know how to explain that to young people because it's true. Well, and you know, I teach first semester to the students, so I teach, um, the business law class for them and so much of what I do is to kind of have like, just kind of lessons about like, what it means to be a funeral director and kind of infuse that into kind of the coursework itself because I do think we have to have honest conversations, you know, about pay, about hours, about schedules

[00:26:56] and how wildly different they can be funeral home to funeral home. I think that's the other thing is that there's no one set standard and state to state. So our students, they come in, we graduate students to all over the country. So it's not just as simple as what's going on in Chicago. It's going to be what's happening in Massachusetts, Minnesota, Texas. So all of these different places, our students are going out there. The wild variety between those things is hard sometimes for them to kind of understand and to know

[00:27:25] why funeral homes could be so different from place to place. Yeah. Well, and then you have your culture of just your own little town. Like I look at my little, my little town's funeral culture, the one in which I'd have it, is different from the one 30 miles away. And yet there's no reason it should be that way. But it is. Absolutely. Is it the culture that drives that? Is it the funeral home's own attributes and staff and whatever that change? Yes. And it's just all such an interlinked system.

[00:27:55] Yeah. How do you standardize? Here. How do you standardize something that is utterly unstandardizable? You know, it's so funny because I started to notice that especially with the arrangement conferences. And as you know, the arrangement conferences where you kind of meet with the family, our students have to practice doing those. And what I realized they had no idea what they were doing. Like we, I would do a one-on-one session with them and it was a disaster. It was just, it was so bad. And I thought, I can't let them into the world like this. So we need to revamp what we're

[00:28:25] doing. So what I did is I actually called upon some of our local funeral directors here and had them, essentially, we filmed them do arrangement conferences. And what I did was I picked a small town place that was very like, you know, very much like they were ingrained in the community. Everybody knew everybody as soon, like they knew the death happened before anybody else anywhere, right? I had a very Italian, like very Italian Chicago funeral director that was like, hey, forget about it. Like just like the whole accent, the whole thing.

[00:28:54] And then I had more of kind of like a standardized corporate kind of more styled one as well too. And I wanted the students and we call them movie nights. And so we watch them and then we critique them. We talk about them. And the idea being that like, look, there is a standard format in a way of like, yes, we need vitals. We need all of these different things. But look at how each community is different and look at how the geography changes the nature of it. Do we still get all the information that we need? Yes. Do they still feel like they're being like served and helped and all those things? Yes.

[00:29:24] But that's where your personality starts to come in. So I had to kind of be creative of how to do that because there isn't one standard way of doing it, especially when you get into your communities. Well, and so, for instance, at the University of Minnesota, we're in the basement of the medical building, which is just so appropriate. That's where we belong. We're barely related to the medical field. But we're in the basement there. And some years ago, they built kind of a mock funeral home. And so they have a little selection room

[00:29:53] with corner cuts of the caskets. They have an arrangement conference room, you know, equipped with video and all this jazz. And then they would hire actors to come in and play a family. And you would make arrangements in front of all your classmates, which is the last thing I want to do. But so you're in like this beautiful room and it's all, you know, tailored for this. And then I get here to Warren, Minnesota. I'm sitting there now. I'm just at like a dining room table in the foyer.

[00:30:24] It's just real chill. Yeah. You know, you could, if you walked in the door right now and I had a family sitting here, like we'd all wave at each other, probably because we know each other. The kind of like clothes, you know, womb secrecy thing that I was taught in school in the practicum turns out is just totally different here. And you just learn to roll with it. You do. And I think that's again why it comes back to, you know, the students walking out of any mortuary

[00:30:53] program are going to have these ideas of what it's going to be and what it's going to look like. Where they land is where they start to kind of go, how do I make this my own? You know, being, when I was in law school, it was absolutely no different. You learn kind of like the basics of everything, but where you end up and kind of what you, kind of the firm that you're working with or where you decide to practice, that's where you learn to be a lawyer. That's where you learn your style and how you're going to approach things. I really find it's no different in funeral service as well.

[00:31:25] I think for myself, right, if I were to take the job that is perpetually dangling over me to go work somewhere much larger and, you know, in a city at a corporate place, I don't know how well my 12 years of or 13 years of licensure here in the middle of nowhere, I don't know how it would work. I don't know how it would translate really. Like this, you kind of, you grow where you're planted. I agree and I always tell the students that too, go explore different places.

[00:31:55] Sometimes I know, like, and I tell them most of it's your own personality. I don't like being told what to do so, like, I wouldn't work well in some places. Like, I like to have the freedom and flexibility to do things the way I want to do them. So, but with that comes additional responsibilities and additional liability, all of those things, but I choose that because that's my personality. Whereas some people want a very like tight schedule and they want to know what's happening and where they're going and all those different things, those are available too. But it's the research. It's kind of getting out there and exploring

[00:32:25] these different funeral homes and understanding how different they really are. Yeah, I think at least for me, I likewise do not like being told what to do. I never have. I'm not that obedient. That's surprising. Yeah, yeah, I don't think being told what to do. So my boss, God bless him, Mike Dubour, he started as an accountant and he's very much like nickels and dimes. And he's still the small town gregarious guy, but he's very much like, we need more structure. And I'm like,

[00:32:54] I just want to dream. I just want to make my dreams into reality, however foolish and frivolous they might be. So we butt heads sometimes because I'll be like, I gave away a turn. And he's like, why'd you do that? It's like, ah, it just seemed like the right thing. But you can, you can do that in a small town. You can't do that when you're working for SCI. That's the thing. Like, I'm the same way. Like, I walk into work almost every day and I'm like, oh, I had an idea last night. And sometimes my staff is like, whoa,

[00:33:24] but that's just who I am. Like, I like to look like what's coming next. Where are we going to be five years? How do we get there? Like, that's what gets me excited and that's what keeps me coming to work, doing everything that I do. And if someone was like, you have to hold back on that, I don't know if I could. It would be like, that's against everything that I am. Yeah, I do feel like most undertakers are, we're just fierce independents. You know, like, we only operate on one, in one track. Like,

[00:33:54] I'm only ever going to be a dreamer. And there's just, there's no other way. Exactly. It's tough, but it's good though. I think like, those are the things that, especially as families start to know you, you know, those are the things that shine. So if you're like a very organized person, they're like, oh man, I'm so glad someone's, you know, Samantha's here because she's wonderfully organized and she's going to keep our crazy scattered family intact.

[00:34:24] And just yesterday I had a family stop by and they're like, we need a headstone for our dad. We hear you just love to dream up headstone. Like, yeah, like you talked to the right person. You know, don't, don't ask me to, to like organize all the accounts receivable. I'm not going to do that. That's such a great point. And so I, you know, I've been, I talked to funeral directors a lot throughout the country about working with the younger generations in particular. And because, you know, there's a retention issue and not enough students, all those different things.

[00:34:54] So what I find so interesting is that one of the things I talk to them about is exactly that. What are people good at on your staff? And then compliment those kind of behaviors. If you have someone like yourself that's not going to be doing the accounts receivable, don't hire another person that's going to be like that, right? I mean, you need to kind of figure out your staffing in a way that allows people to shine and kind of do the work in the way that makes them happy. And also, that's where you get that work performance and the retention and people want to stay if they can kind of be themselves but excel in those

[00:35:23] categories that they're good at, you know? Being that dreamer for you, being that fierce independent, but then also finding someone that's like great with like the organizational details. Like we need both of those people. Oh, absolutely. No, I mean, well, it's coming up because we're starting to talk about purchasing my funeral home. So I'll purchase the place. And so now I'm in a small town and I'm like, oh boy, I need an employee at some point in the next couple of years. And so I've been thinking about it in terms of

[00:35:53] archetype. My boss's dad, Chuck, who's 90, he's the oldest licensed mortician in Minnesota. Still licensed, still comes to work every day, right? But he's more like me. He's more like loosey-goosey, ran the business, you know, not as efficiently as he could have for a very long time. And his uncle, who he bought it from, was a much more structured guy. And Chuck's son is a much more structured guy. And I'm a dreamer guy. And so I'm like, oh man, I need to hire

[00:36:23] a structured guy. You know, I need to hire the structured archetype. And even though, you know, in my heart, I'd be like, oh, another dreamer here would be fantastic. I'd be a fool if I didn't recognize that I need someone to kind of fill in the gaps where I just do not have the skill or the motivation. You're so right. And that's the thing. If you look at real successful businesses, even outside of funeral homes and things like that, it's exactly that. It's having the right dynamic of people where you have the dreamer,

[00:36:53] but then also the person that's like, let's bring you back down to earth just a little bit. Let's be a little more serious. I think that's what's going on in some funeral homes right now like, oh my gosh, I've got to like get them ready. I've got to like work on, you know, helping them to learn to answer the phone properly. And they wanted somebody that was already ready to go and someone that kind of reflects them or what they're already doing. And that's where we start to have these issues with this retention

[00:37:21] of why I think people leave funeral service sometimes. Can we talk about retention and attrition? Because this is something that I have heard for years that our attrition rate is terrible. People leave it all the time. What's the scheme? Yes. I mean, so I think there's two things. I think first of all, we can't have that conversation without first having a conversation about who's coming into funeral service. Right now, on average, most all mortuary programs in general, we're graduating 75% women.

[00:37:51] So the new director coming out of our mortuary science programs is a first generation funeral director female. Like that's, that's who's coming to school. Case in point. And I think that when, yes, so that's when you look around, that's when we just had one of our classes, we had a, there was only one gentleman in the entire class. So it was all women. And I told him right away, I said, James, your opinion really doesn't matter here. So I think like as far, then he just started laughing. So thankfully he got my joke and was like,

[00:38:21] but that's what it is. You, you look around and it is few and far between. So that's, first of all, who our new director is. I think when we start looking at this idea of retention, when we have these numbers and the number that was always thrown out is, you know, within the first five years, 50% of funeral directors leave. It's very hard to actually track that number and to have any real data on that if we're being kind of very transparent about that because as soon as a student graduates from Mortuary College, they're off our books and then nobody else tracks them from that point forward.

[00:38:50] So you could possibly look at licensing and numbers and things like that. But as far as like having any real understanding of what they do, if they're even, let's say, tangentially related to funeral service still, maybe they went to a medical examiner's office or whatever. We really have no way of tracking them. So a lot of that stuff is anecdotal of people going, well, in my class, I had all these people and now only 10 of them are left. So we have to first start with that as kind of anecdotal evidence. In 2019, there was several of the Mortuary Schools we got together and we were getting

[00:39:20] really tired, myself in particular, people just throwing out numbers. I think the lawyer in me and also just like the researcher was like, these aren't real numbers. You can't just decide that's what the number is. So we actually looked at all of our kind of historic records and we actually started reaching out to our students because we at least knew them. And for me in particular, I know all of my students. I mean, we're a standalone program and I started reaching out to them. Who is still in funeral service? And I looked at 10 years to date. And what I found was is that our gentlemen were still in the profession.

[00:39:50] About 68% of those that had graduated in the last 10 years were actually still in the profession. When you switched over to the women that were graduating, only about 40% of them were. So what we started to see and what I kind of put together was a lot of the women that should be here right now, kind of filling those gaps of like where they should be, they're not there because they left. A lot of them left because pay was dismal for them. The hours were dismal. And a lot of times I think too, as soon as they want to have a family or a child or anything like that,

[00:40:19] it was, well, you can't do that in funeral service. And I think that was really a mentality that was there years ago. As we shift to kind of this new normal of most of our students now are women, I think that we're going to have to really have these conversations about schedule, about what it looks like to be a woman in this profession because they still really are carrying a lot of the load at home, especially if they want to have families and things like that. So I see this kind of trend, right? Like I think that that's going to be the nature of it that it's going to be forced

[00:40:49] upon funeral homes to start to reckon with what does it look like to be a funeral director in 2026 and in the future? Well, that's, see, this is interesting. So I actually looked at my class. I went through and I did like a whole, I did an audit of my whole class and I looked up licenses and I kind of reached out. I kind of found everybody, right? And it was something like 80% of my, my graduating class in 2013 is still in it. So that's pretty good.

[00:41:18] And a couple of people that quit, like you could have, you could have called it right away. But the other ones that were not at least actively practicing, maybe had their license, but they weren't, you know, working in funeral service were mothers. Most of them were mothers. And, and I, I don't know how to bridge that gap even myself because I, I look at it and I'm like, oh gosh, I, there are days where I don't, I'm not home for dinner and then I get home for a half hour and then I run off again

[00:41:47] and I pull some 200 pound lady who's bare naked out of a bathroom by myself. And I'm like, I don't, I don't know if I switch roles, like my wife could not just physically couldn't do that. So, so that, that's always my question. It's like, you know, what sort of things do we have to have in place to make that more attainable? Like I, I have a, I have a friend who, um, you know, when, when the ladies are, he has like two, you know, they're interns, I suppose, or maybe they're

[00:42:17] just newly licensed, but either way, like when they're on call, he's like always backup in case you get someone heavy, you know, but it's like they, they, they figured out a plan that kind of works and then he gets like an extra night off call a week, you know, a week, you know, for being backup. But it's like, you have to have something because it's, uh, yeah, it's, it's just tough and then you can throw a family in the mix is tough. Well, and I think that that's the truth is that where we are now is that we have to get creative. You know, I mean, I think before it was just a standard that, you know,

[00:42:47] we were 24, seven, seven days a week and that death doesn't change that piece of it, right? That's still the same. But if your workers can't do that physically, you know, and because they have families because they're, then we have to address that somehow. And, you know, one of the, the same company that makes the mortuary lift has done an incredible job of putting together like essentially this like cot that actually helps so much. We actually have one here at the school for the students to look at too so that they can start

[00:43:15] to see how do you move bodies if you are tiny or if you are smaller on the smaller end? Like, what does that look like? Because the other thing too, not all the, not all the gentlemen that are coming in can do that lifting of the bodies either. So, you know, even like weight training a little bit from all of that. And to your point also, sometimes with those like home removals, things like that, we should have more people there if we can anyway, right? I mean like all of those factors kind of come in. I think we just got so used to in funeral service of just figuring it out, you know,

[00:43:45] and it was kind of like, I'm the only one here. I just gotta figure it out. And then on top of it, you have all these old guys who now have like destroyed their backs. So, I mean, it's not something you had to give. Like, they're all hunched over and they're like wobbling and you're going, well, I don't want that either. I don't know what, I don't know what the answer is. But yeah, it's, it's something we'll figure, I mean, every profession figures out, you know, their, their little,

[00:44:14] their little bumps along the way. But I think it's good. Like, I think it is, it is good. And I'm, I'm grateful. I'm grateful for it because I guess, you know, some, some years ago, well, hell, even the first, the first time I made a national appearance was in an article and the title was Need for Morticians Increases as Minnesota Agents or something like that. And the whole crux was that, the whole crux was that there aren't enough funeral directors out there.

[00:44:43] But now I look around and I've got, I, I sent, I sent a copy of my book out to a mortuary student in Kenya. I, I sent three copies to morticians, like mortuary students in New Zealand. Like there are people all over the world going into this. So it's, it's not as bleak as, as it looks. It's not, it's just about creativity. One of the things we started doing is like flex scheduling, you know, hiring two people for one job so that instead of having like the one full time where it's like

[00:45:12] they are kind of your right hand, having two people to kind of balance those schedules out, you know, that was something we had to look at because we couldn't find someone that was able to do exactly what had always been done before. So reimagining those roles, reimagining what schedules look like, you know, as long as you have the coverage, figuring those things out can be a little bit easier as looking at it going, okay, how about if we do two for one or something like that so that, you know, they get the time off too because that's the other thing to your younger generation,

[00:45:42] they value their time. So they want that necessarily more than money. So that's another factor. We're in funeral service. That's kind of the opposite of what we do, right? It's like our time is everybody else's. No, it's a balancing act but I'm glad, let me say this, it's a balancing act and I'm glad there are people like you on the other end of the teeter-totter. I think it makes a huge difference. I think things are already changing for the good and let me say this, I mentioned this

[00:46:12] at the beginning and I want to mention it before I go. I met you first, you invited me to speak to your students by webcam and I will say this, I've talked to a lot of mortuary colleges including my own and the students at Worsham had the best and most curious and the most real life questions out of any mortuary students that I've talked to. They were like eminently practical and interesting and thoughtful and that tells me you're doing

[00:46:41] a lot of things well. So I want to thank you for coming on the show. I could talk to you for another hour. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for what you're doing and for you mortuary students among us, what's the best way to get in touch with Worsham if they are curious? Check out our website warsham.edu. We also have Instagram so any way that they want to kind of reach out to us would be great. They can also call. Most of the time I'm the one that picks up the phone so they usually

[00:47:11] get me on the phone and can answer their questions. Lely, this has been an absolute treat and I look forward to talking to you again. Thanks, Victor. What an excellent guest. Don't you think so? I thought the interview was very interesting. It's nice to talk about our own careers but also the careers of the future. A lot of our time is spent in the mortuary world telling people not to do this and I admitted right?

[00:47:40] I'm guilty of that too because you have to I think take the bad with the good. It's easy to talk about the good. It's easy to talk about the impact you make in families' lives and quite frankly how fun it is to make these really strong connections with people. It's wonderful. It's beautiful. But it helps I think to temper that with the reality that sometimes the hours are bad. Okay, not sometimes. Oftentimes. I think it's good to talk about

[00:48:10] sometimes the grotesque that we have to deal with even in the families right? The fighting and the bickering and the backstabbing that we get to see front row even the challenges right? The other challenges like how do you mother children and also work in an industry that is borderline impossible to predict? And we touched on that too right? All these things are challenges but they're not insurmountable. I think with the right mindset

[00:48:40] the right amount of care it'll all be figured out along the way. I think at the end of the day really what we should all strive to do and not just as morticians as anybody you and me is to do our best to live with principle and by that I mean do that that which is good avoid that which is evil do the things that bring us joy and the things

[00:49:09] that we have we have competence in do those things and while the world I don't think all the time rewards that very well I know lots of people who are not nearly as principled doing much better financially than me much cannier and savvier more cutthroat the world doesn't always doesn't always reward the people who stay true to themselves

[00:49:39] but I will say this I go home happy every day I go home very happy from a job that I enjoy I get to go go home to a wife that I love and children whose company I actually enjoy so maybe that's the trade-off you live with principle and you get to do the things you love you might not be the most successful mortician in the world banker in the world whatever it is

[00:50:09] you might not be the most successful but I can guarantee you can learn to be happy and if nothing else I think that that's really what the conversation revolved around did it not how do we how do we form our students and have them live enriching good happy lives not cutthroat successful lives but happy ones and I think you have to have a happy life in the midst of all this death working where I do

[00:50:40] there's no other way to balance it because it has to be balanced so can I go home happy every day from a job that is by all appearances terrible and gruesome sleep depriving the answer is yes for those of you out there looking to go to mortuary school I think I give this advice all the time but it's this if you've gotten this far let me give you

[00:51:10] this one piece of advice go get your foot in the door tomorrow go walk to your local funeral home get dressed up nice go talk to the person in charge or hell just talk to the secretary but just go talk to people and I think once you're in the environment you'll know like oh this is for me or maybe it's not and then when you do go looking for mortuary schools find someone like Lely McMurdo

[00:51:39] someone who cares about the student not simply about the nuts and bolts which are important but about the people coming through the door and the people that they will serve because that's at the heart of it all thank you so much for joining us on this episode of death and it has been an absolute privilege and an honor I'm your host Victor M. Sweeney and I'll see you next time