What I've learned after 500 cremations

Five hundred is an arbitrary number. I crossed it last month. Here's what I know now that I didn't know when I opened the doors in Pasadena.

Most of what follows isn't advice. It's observation. Some of it is contradictory because grief is contradictory. All names have been changed. The stories are real.

1. The family who doesn't cry is not the family who's okay

The ones who cry on the phone, who cry in the arrangement room, who cry when they sign the authorization — those families often get through the next year more cleanly than I expect.

The ones who are composed, businesslike, asking crisp questions about timeline and cost — those are the ones I sometimes get a call from six months later. They want to come in and sit down, finally, now that everyone else has gone home.

I used to think the composed ones didn't need as much from me. I was wrong. They needed exactly as much, they were just better at pretending otherwise.

2. You can tell who grew up with money by how they ask about cost

Not the direction you'd think. The families that have less are the quickest to say this is what we can afford, can you work with us. They're matter-of-fact. The families that have more sometimes negotiate hard, sometimes don't ask the price at all, sometimes split the difference.

I don't charge differently based on this. The $1,195 is $1,195. But I notice.

3. Every culture does death differently, and I've been wrong about most of them

I grew up in a Catholic household. I made assumptions early on about what families would want. Then I learned.

Filipino families often want multiple days of viewing before cremation. Vietnamese families sometimes keep the ashes at home on an altar for weeks before deciding what to do. Orthodox Jewish families will, in a small number of cases, allow cremation when a loved one has specifically requested it, but the funeral itself follows different timing and ritual. Armenian families in Glendale and Pasadena — many Armenian families — want a priest present, want an open casket period, and have specific traditions about the ashes.

I now ask, early, are there any customs or faith traditions we should know about. I do not assume.

4. The person who answers the phone matters more than the person who owns the business

For a year after I opened, I handled all incoming calls personally. I thought it was important. It was. But not because I was good at it — because the alternative was worse.

I've now hired two counselors who are both better on the phone than I was. One, Marissa, has an ability to make a person feel heard in fifteen seconds that I will never match. I pay them accordingly. It is the single highest-leverage hire you can make in this business.

5. The cremation itself is the least important part of the week

The paperwork, the transport, the conversations — those are where the service lives or dies. The cremation itself is a four-hour mechanical process at a crematory. It is sacred and I do not say that lightly, but the family experience is built in the twenty hours around it, not during it.

6. The urn almost never matters as much as you'd think

Families agonize over the urn choice. Then they get it home and it sits on a shelf. Six months later they can't remember what it looks like without looking at it.

What they remember is the conversation they had when we handed it to them. Whether we made eye contact. Whether we said his name right.

7. Scattering ashes in California is more legal and more common than people believe

You can scatter cremated remains on private property with the owner's permission, in uninhabited public lands under state code with a permit (which is more a formality than a fight), at sea beyond 500 yards from shore, and — in a growing number of memorial gardens — under a tree or beside a bench.

Families in LA ask about the Santa Monica Mountains constantly. It's legal with the right permit. Rose Bowl, Mt. Wilson, Griffith Park — all have specific rules. I keep a one-page cheat sheet in the office and we hand it out when a family asks.

8. Preplanning is kinder than people realize

I used to think preplanning was a cold-feeling thing to bring up. I thought the family would read it as me trying to sell the future.

Then I watched three different families go through the worst version of not having planned, and I changed my mind. Not having a plan means the surviving spouse makes a dozen decisions under grief. Having a plan means the surviving spouse signs one sheet of paper.

We don't take money for preplans. Nobody prepays here. We just document the wishes and keep them on file, and when the call comes, we already know what to do. It's one of the cheapest and kindest things a person can do for the people they love.

9. Lying for money is not a victimless crime, and the funeral industry does a lot of it

I'm not going to make this part diplomatic. The industry I came up in sells caskets with markup that would embarrass a jeweler. It sells "protective seals" that don't protect against anything the laws of thermodynamics care about. It upsells grieving families on vaults that aren't required by law and urn-upgrades on a timeline too short for anyone to think clearly.

I ran one of those rooms for eight years. I know how it's taught. I know the scripts. I know the body language.

What I've learned is that families can feel it. Even when they can't articulate what's wrong, they walk out of a funeral home feeling vaguely used. When they call me afterward, I hear it in their voice.

The honest version of this business costs less and feels better. It's not complicated.

10. This work doesn't get easier. You just get better at carrying it.

The first call I took after opening, I didn't sleep that night. I kept replaying what I'd said, worried I'd gotten the tone wrong. The hundredth call, same thing but shorter. The three-hundredth, I slept.

What's changed isn't my sensitivity. What's changed is that I know I'll show up in the morning and do the next one, and I know that's the only thing I can promise anybody.

Five hundred cremations in, and I still don't have a system for grief. The families don't either. We're all just doing the next thing, together, for a few days.

Bonus thing I've learned: the hard families almost always become the best callbacks

The family that argues about the invoice, the brother who thinks we're hiding a fee, the daughter who wants everything itemized three different ways — those families, when I get it right, become the most loyal. They tell their friends. They come back for the parents a decade later.

I don't love the conflict. But I've stopped flinching at it. It usually means somebody is scared, and scared is a reasonable thing to be in this business.