When a loved one passes and you need funeral care, finding the best funeral director is important. The funeral home director can have a significant impact on whether you have a funeral for your loved one that is a compassionate experience that helps everyone process their grief. The worst funeral directors can make your grief worse and leave you to mourn the loss of your loved one as well as your anger over a disappointing funeral.
You want to choose a funeral director who treats you with respect, provides organized and tidy facilities, and brings sensitivity, professionalism, and tact to every stage of the process.
What Does a Funeral Home Director Do?
You may have seen funeral home directors in the movies and on TV, but you may not fully understand their responsibilities. They provide well-run, thoughtful funeral services and do their best to console those left behind in the wake of a death.
A funeral home director is responsible for every aspect of funeral care. They must work with the family of the deceased to plan, coordinate, and execute a funeral service from beginning to end. This can include supervising or performing duties related to embalming, cremation, and burial as well as a number of customer service and administrative responsibilities. They must do this with compassion and respect for the families they serve and their cultural and religious backgrounds.
Some of their duties include:
- Organizing the funeral performance
- Coordinating with the officiant (clergy member or designated person who “hosts”) of the funeral
- Carrying out any instructions for the funeral service from the deceased
- Providing comfort to the family and being respectful of their customs and religious beliefs
- Organizing the logistics of transporting the body
- Advising the family on and carrying out interment plans
- Helping the family select a casket or urn
- Coordinating the logistics of when and where the funeral service will occur
- Setting up any A/V equipment, memorialization, or anything else necessary for the funeral service
- Preparing the obituary (if desired by family) and distributing it to media outlets
- Coordinating with pallbearers
- Scheduling a grave’s opening and closing with the cemetery
- Decorating every site for the duration of the funeral service
- Ensure transportation for mourners and flowers between locations for funeral service
Additionally, the funeral home director will carry out a number of duties behind the scenes. They will supervise the work of all funeral care professionals involved with the funeral, including cosmetologists, funeral attendants, embalmers, and death certificate clerks. They make sure that every aspect of their funeral care operations is in compliance with laws and regulations and maintain any relevant documentation in support of that compliance.
The best funeral directors will treat you with compassion and inspire your confidence in their ability to carry out all of these duties with professionalism.
Qualities of the Best Funeral Directors
Being a good funeral home director involves more than just carrying out funeral care with professionalism. Funeral directors interact with people when they are dealing with a loss. Loss is never easy, but sometimes a loss can be catastrophic for those left behind. Funeral directors need to bring empathy to their work as well as a number of other skills necessary to carry out funeral care.
The best funeral directors combine the following qualities and skills:
Compassion
Grieving is hard, and people who are grieving need compassion. Funeral directors encounter people who are grieving every day on the job, so they have to bring compassion to the job every day. Grief can take a wide variety of forms and vary across cultures and even individuals. The best funeral director will have seen it all and will respond to every grieving person with compassion. They must know to be ready to provide counseling and guidance at every phase of the funeral care process.
Organization
A funeral is an event that requires a lot of logistical coordination. You can see from the list of a funeral director’s duties that planning funeral services is no easy task. Keeping every aspect of the funeral organized is important so that there are no hiccups during the funeral service. The family and friends of the deceased want to focus on their grief at the funeral, and an organized funeral home director can help them do that.
Communication
Funeral home directors need to communicate clearly with and listen carefully to the family. Listening is especially important. Family members may have a lot of ideas about what they want for their loved one’s funeral. The best funeral directors will listen carefully and then work to carry out those wishes. They must explain the funeral planning process at every step so that the family is not confused by anything that follows. Funeral costs can be expensive, so it is important that the funeral director clearly convey the prices as well as payment options respectfully and tactfully. Communication is key to delivering the family the funeral that best meets their needs.
Creativity
Sometimes families have a clear vision for what they want a funeral to look like. Others need help with crafting a service that truly honors their loved one’s memory. This is where an experienced and creative funeral director can help. They will have carried out hundreds of funeral services and know a variety of ways to help memorialize your loved one.
Reliability
For families, planning the funeral after the death of a loved one is extremely difficult. They may have an urgent concern about the funeral and need to get in touch quickly. They may want to change the funeral arrangements or just need to talk to someone about their grief. Funeral directors who make themselves available as much as possible and reliably respond to phone calls and emails can be incredibly reassuring to family members in their time of need.
If you want to work with the best funeral directors, consider contacting The Gardens of Boca Raton. Their funeral home directors bring compassion, organization, reliability, creativity, and good communication skills to every step of the funeral care process. Contact us today at (561) 693-0399.
