#66. M - "A funeral director." (Edited)

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

#66. M - “A funeral director.” (Edited)

It’s Mark’s job to appear at pivotal junctures in people’s lives.

A Russian businessman is gunned down and Mark wrangles a full-size motor-coach of 75 relatives to the funeral home. A friend’s 22-year-old daughter is killed in a car accident and Mark is there, crying with him and making arrangements. A 17-year-old boy dies in his sleep for no reason at all while his mother is at work and Mark comforts her and the boy’s brother.

For me too, Mark has been behind the scenes of a lot of formative events. He’s not unlike the Jacob character from Lost: So good at his job, I never even noticed him.

When I was a sophomore in high school, “Tim,” a boy I was acquainted with, died in a plane crash with his father on the way home for our Winter Formal. When I was a senior, “David,” a fellow classmate I’d been briefly tutoring was killed in a suicide bombing in Israel. Both deaths were huge, immeasurable tragedies in my hometown’s Jewish community.

Mark was the director for Tim’s funeral. A recommendation from Tim’s mother led to Mark directing David’s funeral as well. Thousands of people attended David’s funeral. It was the largest I’d ever attended and the largest Mark had ever worked. The Israeli consulate gave a speech. His mother, father and sister huddled in the front row. His best friend told the crowd, “He wasn’t a pawn in a war. He was just David.”

I remember. I was there.

Mark was too.

It both hurts and is mind-blowing to be interviewing him now, years later. Mark also directed my grandfather’s funeral six months ago, but that one I knew about. That’s how my mother found Mark for this interview.

Those are three monumental occurrences in my young life. For Mark, they were his job.

Mark offhandedly mentions tidbits about the people’s lives he’s impacted. This woman was so heavy she had to have her double-wide casket lowered with a crane. This young boy had 500 classmates at his funeral. This college girl died in a car accident in the 1980s and her friends still come to visit her. This couple were forced by the Nazi to throw their baby over a balcony during the Holocaust. This man’s wife had a mailbox inserted on the front of her husband’s mausoleum so she could mail him postcards when she traveled. This couple was married for 70 years. This woman died in 9/11. This man literally ate himself to death.

Mark started working for funeral homes in Florida in 1974, after forgoing college. He admits he couldn’t make the grades.

Mark worked as an intern for Riverside Funeral Home in Miami Beach. He started out going to the hospitals, nursing homes and residences picking up the deceased, running errands, getting death certificates signed, going to the Health Department, and helping assist on funerals.

Mark became a licensed funeral director in 1979. Since death is unpredictable, Mark says he can never really know what each work day will bring.

“When you first start working in a funeral home [you wonder]: can you handle working with deceased human beings, the grieving of families, the sadness, the sorrow,” he says. “And it’s not the type of thing that just anybody can do. I can do it. I deal with it. There are people that just don’t want to talk about it. They don’t want to hear about it. They don’t want to think about it. I guess I was cut out for it.”

He also learned how to deal with the sadness through experience. He’s married with two children. Being around death makes him appreciate his family even more, he says. He goes home and immediately hugs and kisses everybody.

In the beginning of his career at funeral homes, he mostly made arrangements. Now at the cemetery, he interacts with people more. He can get to know families and they can get to know him. He doesn’t want people to associate him only with bad days.

The concept of the funeral has really changed since Mark started in the 1970s. Everything from the ceremony to the headstone is more personalized. Some of these monuments are amazing (etchings of faces, guitars, golf logos, crossword puzzles, Betty Boop). Some are less so (A scorned man’s headstone reads: “My ex‑wife should go to hell”).

Another new trend is cremation, which Mark says people are choosing more often for economic and environmental reasons. A funeral, Mark says, costs about $12,000 or $13,000. This includes buying cemetery property, the funeral and rabbi, a casket and death certificates. My mother chimes in that my grandmother chose her own casket. I cringe. She asks Mark about the silliest item he’s had to put in a casket.

He says golf clubs and golf balls are common in Florida. A roll of quarters. A desk of cards. Cigars. Cell phones. Baseball memorabilia. An always-worn leather jacket for a beloved father. Miami Dolphins gear.

I tell him it’s interesting that people want to personalize their lives, even in death. Like your casket is just another miniature monument to the idea that you lived. It’s Facebook or Twitter to future generations after you’ve left the Earth. It’s proving you - with your ideas and loves and opinions - existed.

“It’s wonderful,” Mark says. “People have gotten really creative.”

Mark says today, at funerals, more family members speak at the podium than did in the 1970s or ’80s. Funerals are turned into “life tributes” or “celebrations.” People put up pictures, and easels; displays about people’s lives. They show home movies. Mark had a woman spend three hours last week setting up a huge collage with photos of her mother.

“The person lived a life,” Mark says. “Why shouldn’t there be some kind of tribute?”