Outspoken Fla. Democratic Rep. Grayson Unseated
Mike Schneider and Bill Kaczor, The Washington Post (November 02, 2010)

Buried deep in this Washington Post article on the November elections is the following factoid: one of the newly elected Republican Congressmen from Florida is also a Funeral Director. Representative-elect Steve Southerland is part of the Southerland Family Funeral Home in northern Florida.

I need to check and see how many funeral directors have served over the years in both the House and Senate. I’ve been poking around but I can’t find a single source on this one. Now that I’m interested, however, I must know. I will find out and report back.

It’s worth noting that Representative-elect Southerland was also a Tea Party backed candidate (according to various news accounts), although I have not seen any official Tea Party literature on the American funeral industry.

The National Funeral Directors Association takes a decidedly non-partisan approach with the candidates that it supports and every year funeral directors from all over America arrive in Washington, DC to meet with elected officials.

The Death Reference Desk will keep an eye on Representative Southerland.

We want to know what kind of death he brings to the table.

Funeral Directors’ Challenge: Death Waits for No Snowstorm
William Wan, The Washington Post (February 12, 2010)

This is a classic news article about two kinds of hot topics: funeral directors and freakish weather events. You put these two things together and WHAMMO, you’re king of the world.

So right now in Washington, DC (which is still digging out from under three feet of snow) local funeral directors are working working working because people keep dying. Indeed, mortality rates tend to go up during heavy snow storms because of accidents and strenuous shoveling.

From the Washington Post article:

Like many bound by duty and snow, James Denham has been sleeping at work this week. For him, that has meant sleeping among the dead.

“It’s not spooky at all,” said Denham, a funeral director in Silver Spring. “It’s quiet. And no, we don’t sleep in the caskets. We’ve got plenty of couches.”

Funeral directors are expected to do their job through rain, sleet, snow and cold. Death, after all, waits for no one.

And so they’ve had to get creative to help clients. Some funeral homes are holding services as scheduled and keeping the deceased in storage until cemeteries are cleared. Others are pushing back plans at families’ requests.

By Thursday afternoon, Denham had spent more than 50 hours straight in his funeral home on New Hampshire Avenue. He spent much of that time trying to find cemeteries that might be open. He helped grieving families make last-minute decisions.

“It’s hard sometimes for the family not to get angry. There’s so many emotions involved, and so many factors, too — the cemeteries, the limo companies, the streets,” said Denham, who has been in the funeral business for 43 years. “It doesn’t make sense to be mad at the weather, even though it is maddening.”

Anyway, my father the funeral director did all these things (and more) during snow storms in both Minnesota and Wisconsin. It is just part of being a funeral director: you never stop working because death doesn’t stop.

Guatemalan Funeral Homes Compete for Corpses
Associated Press (November 29, 2009)

With its excess of murders and dearth of death practitioner regulation, Guatemala is home to “mobile morticians,” chasing ambulances and staking out city morgues to be the first to pounce on mostly low-income, grieving relatives. They’ve even earned a deathly moniker: “calaqueros,” or skullmongers, as seen holding the umbrella below, patiently waiting for a wallet to arrive.

Not only will they track you down in disturbing, often offensive ways, including paying the police to tip them off, skullmongers set up shop wherever possible. As the AP reports,

One funeral home is run out of a former mechanics garage. Caskets are sold in the front of the garage. In the back, among the old gaskets and engine blocks, the corpses are disemboweled, cleaned, embalmed and dressed for burial.

This seems to drive costs down (at least?)… but back-alley embalming can’t be far behind. See the AP story for a number of additional photos.

Contributed to Current.com January 22, 2009.