DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) - Growing up, Richard Slade knew what he didn’t want to do with his adult life. It’s largely what he’s doing now.
He has spent almost four decades running Slade-O’Donnell Funeral Home, his family’s third-generation venture in the Decatur County seat of Leon. His 86-year-old father and a couple of part-time employees help out, but he and his wife, Connie, are the ones keeping the lights on.
At one point in Decatur County’s history, Slade said there were seven operating funeral homes, including a satellite location of his in Lamoni that he has since closed down.
Now, if someone in the roughly 8,200-person county population dies, Slade’s the only one getting the call. From middle-of-the-night pickups to embalming services and funeral arrangements, the 75 or so cases Slade annually receives has made it more than a family business.
Death doesn’t wait for Christmas Eve dinner to finish or take a rain check for youth baseball games.
“It’s not as much a livelihood as it is an entire life,” sums up Slade, who told the Des Moines Register that he only needs one hand to count the number of off days he’s had the past three years. “Your life is dictated by other peoples’ lives and deaths.”
And for many of his 37 years in charge, he has known that he’s the last in his lineage who will keep Slade-O’Donnell open. His two sons are in information technology at Kum & Go and in the Seattle medical community.
So when the 60-year-old wants to retire, if he doesn’t sell the funeral home, the county with the poorest town in Iowa could have its residents traveling at least a half-hour to Mount Ayr during some of the most emotionally taxing parts of their lives.
Such is the growing occupational story in Iowa and rural America. National jobless rates are low, and the demand for qualified service professionals is high. Count funeral directors, though, as another in the piling set of industries whose young workers find big-city amenities and social communities far too much to pass up.
“Some places aren’t going to have much there at all, other than a Moose Lodge and a bowling alley,” said Marty Mitchell.
Mitchell has operated the Mitchell Family Funeral Home in Marshalltown for 31 years.
“It’s an extreme concern of mine. If we don’t have the labor force for these services, we’re not serving the public the best. We’ll see consolidation, funeral homes merging to cover their workforces,” he said. “The shortage (of small-town funeral directors) is real. It’s out here.”
It’s been hard over the years for national organizations to quantify the problem.
On the one hand, the National Funeral Directors’ Association says the number of funeral homes in the U.S. has dropped by more than 10 percent since 2004, from 21,528 funeral homes down to 19,322.
Yet the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data project average growth nationwide for all funeral service workers over the next decade, from about 54,400 jobs to 57,300. As the Baby Boomer generation ages, the need for funeral service workers only expects to increase.
Around 86 percent of funeral service workers are part of individual or family-owned businesses. The pay is fine, too, with the national median average salary at $56,850, although business-centric funeral service managers see salary spikes closer to the $80,000 range, according to the BLS.
In Iowa, many funeral directors also possess licenses as embalmers, who have particular skills in preserving a corpse and in restorative art before public services. Salaries in the state are more modest, according to the Iowa Funeral Directors’ Association, with newly licensed funeral directors averaging nearly $40,000 (ranging from $30,000 to $50,000 and above) and more experienced workers inching closer to the $50,000 mark (ranging from $40,000 to $60,000 and above).
So wrestling with these problems requires trusting what directors observe firsthand. Kevin Patterson sees the trend. The chairman of Des Moines Area Community College’s mortuary science program has actually seen an upward enrollment trend in the past decade when you include an online program option.
But the draw, again, is more toward metropolitan areas once new graduates complete their schooling. Combine the dearth of funeral homes in some rural areas with the trappings of a city such as Des Moines, which has at least 20 in operation in the metro, and new graduates will flock to where they can make the most of their daily lives, Patterson said.
“People are becoming more educated, more trained for a job. So they’re moving from those rural areas to bigger cities, in many cases, for a number of factors,” he said. “They want more access to the amenities of places like Des Moines.”
John Parrish understands that thought process. The 28-year-old is a co-owner of three Caldwell Parrish funeral homes in Urbandale, Adel and Winterset alongside his 31-year-old brother, Mark. He’s known he wanted to be a funeral director since he was a junior in high school.
That’s the year his grandmother died. The two brothers were close with her, and she had suffered greatly during a battle with cancer. At her visitation, John saw how peaceful and beautiful his grandmother looked, and that experience changed him.
“You know, it’s a grind. It can be stressful dealing with people at the worst times of their life. But it’s the most rewarding job in the world,” Parrish said. “You have people thanking you, telling you that it’s the best (their loved one) has looked in years, and you develop great relationships and friendships. … I couldn’t see myself doing anything else.”
It makes sense to do it where the people are, though. Parrish knows that rural funeral homes are struggling, too. He often works with Slade, of Leon, to help transport and pick up corpses if Slade is unavailable. The Parrishes also assist with requests for cremation, which are rapidly increasing and require additional skills and insurance protections that many rural funeral homes don’t have access to.
Even at a larger operation, finding the right employment fit isn’t easy. Including themselves, the Parrishes have half a dozen funeral directors on staff. They just spent several months trying to fill an opening, which they finally succeeded in doing just this week.
Plus, as more people opt into more varied funeral service experiences, funeral directors have to be more nimble than ever in providing the closure families need.
“Anymore, you feel more like an event planner,” John Parrish said. “At a celebration of life, I’ve had food, a full band, all kinds of things. I joke with friends, ’You plan your weddings in a year. Well, I could do it in a week.’… You learn to adapt.”
Whether younger or more experienced, those physical and emotional stresses of the job are evident. Jzyk Ennis, who directs the funeral director program at Jefferson State (Alabama) Community College and is the chairman of the American Board of Funeral Service Education, said the national attrition rate of students entered in mortuary science programs is about half from start date to graduation.
Lance Angstman earned his funeral license in December 2016 after graduating from DMACC. The 24-year-old works at Mitchell Family Funeral Home in Marshalltown. He’s known he has wanted to be a funeral director since age 11 and has been working in a funeral home in some capacity since high school.
His mortuary science class started with 72 people. It finished with 12, and he said he believes just five have remained in the field.
“A lot of people in my class had families, had kids, had events that held most of them back. A lot didn’t understand the hours,” he said. “You don’t have a social life for those first couple of years you work. … And you can work every single day. At smaller places run by families, you have kids who joke that they hardly saw their dads until they were 16, and they don’t want to do that. That kind of thing has a big impact in small communities.”
IFDA executive director Suzanne Gebel pulled together a group of young funeral directors this past winter to talk education and retention. Among the biggest barriers they listed involved a true awareness of what working in a funeral home is like.
“It’s amazing how many people who consider entering the field who have never been to a funeral,” she said. “Having that realization or even a reality check entering school, as far as the demands go, would help.”
Part of those demands may include a shift in required education. Currently, Iowans must have 60 hours of general college credit, completion of an accredited mortuary science program (around 45 hours) and a course covering legal practices, and passing an examination before becoming licensed and beginning an internship.
The IFDA for several years has been pushing for a bachelor’s degree to be required for a license, a bar set by only two other states in the country (Minnesota and Ohio). The news worries longtime funeral directors who fear what they view as further hurdles to entry.
Currently, Upper Iowa University is the only state college offering a bachelor’s in mortuary science - at its Fayette campus and with a $28,850 annual tuition cost. Check that against an estimated cost of $20,000 total if a student received all education through the DMACC program, and one can understand the financial trepidation.
For its part, the IFDA legislative council Michael Triplett insisted that no formal presentation before the Iowa Board of Regents or the state Legislature about a bachelor’s requirement would take place until a program can be offered at a public university in Iowa.
“Especially if you are coming from a rural place, families can’t afford to pay that kind of student loan,” Angstman said. “If you’re coming back to a funeral home that takes 60 calls a year, that’s something you could pay for your entire life.”
For Mitchell, the Marshalltown funeral director, his larger concern remains attracting people with a service-oriented mind and compassionate demeanor to a profession that needs the talent.
And the empathy.
“This is the most job-rewarding profession I could ever dream of,” he said. “I sleep very well at night because I know that everything I did that day is the same thing I would have done for my mom and dad. … For future jobs, there’s always going to be the market for funeral directors, in this state and anywhere. I get very passionate about it, just love the business. We would love to have good personalities and people with big hearts.”
The only trick left is getting them.
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Information from: The Des Moines Register, http://www.desmoinesregister.com
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