After Hours

Every funeral home will have different arrangements when it comes to providing after-hours service. I’m sure somewhere, perhaps family-run funeral homes, there are open door policies but in most cases funeral homes close at night like any other business. The problem is, just because we lock our doors at night doesn’t mean death stops occurring. Where I work, there are certain staff (mostly funeral directors but can be managers) required to take a cell phone or pager home with them. Once a month I am required for one week to take home a pager and take calls… which I’ll get into in a minute. One thing I want to point out is that especially in small towns, the funeral director is also responsible for doing the transfers (picking up the body and bringing them to the funeral home). I am privileged in the sense that I work for a corporation and we contract out a transfer team to do our pick-ups. We also have a live answering service, which allows me to carry the cell phone and pager. The answering service picks up when our funeral home gets a call from the hospital, family etc. and then they reach me – relaying all the information I need. I then dispatch the transfer team and go back to eating my dinner, or sleeping, or getting ready for work… you get the picture. So who do I get these calls from? Well most of the time it’s a nurse from a care home. Care homes do not have morgues therefore they need us to pick up the deceased. While that person was still alive they would have stated which funeral home they would like to be arranged with so the nurse knows to call us. The next common calls are hospices – again they do not have morgues. Then there are also families who call who have had an “expected home death.” (Please note: Rules change and names of things change depending where you live in the world – It may not be allowed, or it may be called something different wherever you are.) An expected home death is where a person is gravely ill and has had their doctor fill out the required legal paperwork allowing them to spend the rest of their days in the comfort of a home rather than a hospital. Usually when someone dies at home it requires a call to the coroner, however if they have expected home death form, then it gives us the permission to bypass the coroner and pick up the deceased and bring them to our funeral home. That’s the bulk of the calls I get after we “lock our doors” however once in a while you have a family that pressures the answering service to get in touch with us for some reason or another. Honestly, that’s part of the job, being there for people when they need you the most. As I’ve discussed before, emotions run high when one is grieving. I had a family call once at 10p.m. freaking out about the service date having to be changed. There was also the time where a family member wanted to know if the clothing they needed to bring should include shoes, or the time they wanted to talk about what papers the obituary should go in. The latest one was a fellow shopping for the best cremation price at 1:45am. You get all sorts, it definitely keeps in interesting and it’s amazing how you discover new things about yourself. Did you know I’m extremely patient at 3:00 in the morning? I know….amazing, I would have never guessed either.