What you need to know before buying a funeral home

If you are one of the rare private buyers, you may often have worked serving the community and “are not going to be frightened by bodies” – so, “ex-police, ex-army, ex-ambulance” – said Nigel Davies, managing director of Lonergan and Raven, Melbourne’s oldest funeral home, and the director of the National Funeral Directors Association.

Mr Davies said such buyers entered the industry with a desire to support communities in new ways. Financially,”if you’re in a small enough market, and you can charge a premium, you can do fairly well out of it, but no one gets in to make a fortune”.

Legally you don’t require any specific qualifications to run a funeral business. “Anyone can call themselves a funeral director tomorrow,” Mr Davies said.

Nigel Davies at the funeral home Lonergan and Raven, where he is managing director. Photo: Josh Robenstone

The Australian Funeral Directors Association states that the industry is largely “unregulated”. In practise, experience is vital, and the association says that “formal training can help build your skills and your career options.” In Australia, several courses are available, including certificates in grave-digging, embalming and funeral operations.

Mr Davies said there were no ordinary days in the industry. “The phone calls come in from the bereaved, or nursing homes, anytime in 24 hours, and we have to get people out of bed in teams to go and collect people at any time.”

When someone dies, if a doctor has seen them in the last three months, and can be certain of the cause of death, the funeral home can immediately collect the deceased.

If there are suspicious circumstances – or myriad other reasons – the coroner will collect the deceased first and ascertain the cause of death before the body is released to the funeral home. But “often we can arrange all the details with family while the coronial investigation is going on,” Mr Davies said.

There is no legal time limit between death and burial. Embalming – replacing the body’s fluids with formaldehyde – is very rare in the industry now, but “I have to embalm them if we’re keeping them long-term,” Mr Davies said. Once, “we kept a person in the fridge for 8 months” waiting for the deceased’s mother to reach Australia.

Besides, “there are enough preservatives in the food we eat these days that you’re not going to go off as fast as you would a century ago.”

Mr Davies said that mornings in a funeral home typically started with “frantically rejigging the roster”, allocating staff to “prepare vehicles, prepare the deceased, prepare coffins, head out on funerals” and to collect flowers, catering and medical certificates.

Music must be planned, slide shows created, simulcasting produced – many funerals are now video streamed across the globe so that far-flung loved ones are able to participate – and “the weird and wonderful requests people come up with” must be supported.

Planning a funeral is a “complex juggle” that has to done in a very short space of time. Photo: Joe Armao

It’s a “complex juggle” he said. “It’s like planning a wedding, except instead of having 8 months to plan in, we’ve got 72 hours.”

The work was often emotionally stressful and he warned that people didn’t last in the industry unless “they get some decent satisfaction from helping people and grieving families go through this”, and “feel like you are giving something that is valued and you are being valued for what you are giving. You don’t do it for fun.”

It’s the dichotomy that can make the funeral industry interesting to work in. “I go from standing in a beautiful three piece suit and signing stat-decs with people, to putting on overalls and rubber boots,” Mr Davies said.

In the very rare, horrific cases – his company did the Hoddle Street massacre – “you start by carrying the police out of the room so they can throw up outside so you can get on and deal with it.”

But the variety of mourning practises in the funeral industry, particularly with increased multiculturalism, is “delightful” he said. From Buddhist funerals where you are given a lolly and a coin – to remove the sour taste of death from your mouth and to buy something to make you happy – to Irish wakes where, “the first job is to wash down the coffin lid to get rid of all the beer rings from the beer glasses on the coffin lid where people have been standing chatting to the deceased”.