I have often thought and said that most funeral professionals deserve a PhD in Experiential Expertise. Their life knowledge goes beyond the standard academic degree.  Nothing is comparable in the world to the experiences of the average funeral director across the globe.

  I believe there is deep substance in the idea that the more we search ourselves, the better we can understand, and control our behavior and the better we can appreciate the behaviors of others. This is what experiential expertise is all about and this type of deep knowledge takes time.

  Such an attitude will help the client family trust us. They will know who we are, for we the funeral professionals, shall feel no need to hide behind a mask, to be a phony. As most veteran professionals have learned well it is important in the funeral interview that we need not be preoccupied with ourselves but can concentrate on the client family; and this skill does take time; the more you do it the better you get – or that is the idea anyway.  

  We can be free to listen, to attempt to understand just as much as possible –in brief, to be genuinely interested because nothing in us gets in the way of what comes from our task of building a trusting and respectful relationship with the client family. It is in the exclusive arena of human communication that truly experiential expertise blossoms.

  CASE STUDY:  Years ago I worked with a young person who had just graduated from mortuary college, and was serving their internship at a funeral home I managed. She interviewed well, she made a great first impression but after one month most everyone who worked in the mortuary realized that she was not devoted to the service, she was devoted to the drama in her life.  Her normal day would revolve around play by play reports of her latest argument with the latest of her suitors, and if in the middle of her theatrics she needed to go on a death call she actually gave every indication that she was being “put out” by having to respond to the death of a human being which is one of the responsibilities of the funeral home.  Her addiction to her own life dramas was so self-consuming that she even began sharing her theatrical life issues with people who came off the street to attend a visitation or service.  To be sure she was young, and we had conversations about her improving, but in the end her own life prevailed and she found employment in another funeral home – a place in her own words “that understood and appreciated her” but most sad of all here, potentials of developing solid experiential expertise froze, it was paralyzed. 

  Hence the overall professional results being often that the selfish funeral professional (now there is an oxymoron – a selfish funeral director) actually ends up helping enhance the insecure funeral professionals ego and/or a salve or a tonic for their own dysfunctional life instead of actually helping the client family make once in a lifetime decisions. This is where all this PhD in Experiential Expertise comes from in the first place.

  Trusting our own ideas and feelings constitutes another important quality of funeral expertise. To me this type of trusting in no way entails us telling the client family what to do.  Most veteran professionals would not do that even should it be asked of us.  Instead this type of rare expertise centers around the funeral professional’s openness, ability, and knowledge of presenting options, alternatives, and suggestions. 

  It will be valuable for us to remember that the definition of a suggestion is when we are told about an idea that we had never thought about before.  One of the responsibilities of the funeral professional is to take on the role of the suggestion maker. People who love something or somebody usually have a myriad of suggestions on how things can be done better, more safely, more creatively, and more lovingly. If you love something your experiences, your developed expertise naturally follows the course of offering thoughts, counsel, advice, - this is an essential in funeral professional expertise. 

  The result of suggestion making is that because most funeral professionals possess experiential expertise which cannot be found anywhere else, we ought to be able to make one suggestion after another, simply based on that we have the experience– this is indeed honorable experiential expertise.  We need to tell our client families what we know, we always need to tell our story, we need to not be timid in telling our story, and our story in and of itself will aid us in the task of moving past being stuck in the traditional role of the old-fashioned order taking method of making arrangements.