A funeral director’s story BY KRISTIN YOUNG

For a culture where death is one of the few certainties of life, many of us are inherently squeamish when it comes to facing the topic head on. Not so, Brian Walsh. He is both matter of fact and philosophical about this particular subject. He is, after all, a funeral director.
Brian has been running his business in the town of Cobram, in central Victoria, for the last ten years. He works from home, where he lives with his wife and three children. He also works part time for a security firm and is studying accounting.
He initially began working for a large funeral director in Melbourne, coordinating arrangements by phone, but he found the corporate way of doing things wasn’t for him. “It’s far more personal to do it on a smaller scale,” he says. So Brian and his family moved to Cobram where he set up his own business as a funeral director. His job involves everything from visiting the family of the deceased, organising the church, cemetery, flowers and death notices, to storing and preparing the body. Like any job, being a funeral director has its rewards and challenges. According to Brian, the most rewarding aspect of this job is that, “in the space of two to three days you can make a bigger positive difference to someone’s life than at any other time”. Brian says that one of the most difficult things can be dealing with car crash victims where you have to do the “Humpty Dumpty thing and put them back together again”.
However, it can also be rewarding to be able to repair the body in a way that the person’s loved ones can come and see them and say goodbye.
Brian explains how important this can be for the family and how it can help them to deal with the death in a healthier way. He says in this situation “most people’s imagination is far worse than the reality”. So being able to see their loved one, hold their hand and say goodbye often “means an awful lot to them”.
Another challenge is the clock. There is often only a couple of days in which everything has to be done. In this industry, “you’ve got to have it ready a hundred per cent of the time, on time”.
Also dealing with conflict in the family of the deceased can be difficult. Although the focus at a funeral is on the person who has died, Brian believes, “Funerals are actually for the living, not the dead”. He explains that funerals are “so the people who were close to you, and knew you, can come and say goodbye and deal with it”. People who say just “put me in a box and throw me in the hole”, often have the misguided intention of saving people pain. They fail to realize that this can create a different sort of pain that can last a lot longer.
Brian says he is not as close to death as people like doctors, nurses or ambulance drivers. By the time he steps in, death has already occurred. He tends to deal more with the emotions of the family afterwards than with the death itself.
One of the drawbacks of this line of work is that people often have very stereotypical and clichéd ideas of what a funeral director is like. Brian says he tends not to tell people what he does because of this. They expect you to be “pasty faced with Dracula fangs” or to always be serious and to wear a suit all the time. This can be especially difficult in a small town where “you’re expected to play the role 24 hours a day”. For the record, Brian is not only healthy looking as you can see in the pictures, but also friendly and pleasant with a good sense of humour.
Working with death can make you more matter of fact than the average punter. It can also affect how you view life. It can make you realize that “there’s worse things in life than death”. It can also give you an insight into how different people deal with their emotions.
Like any occupation, there is the potential for humour. Brian gives an example of driving the hearse in a big funeral in the city without knowing the area well. As he drove from the church to the cemetery he accidentally took a wrong turn, leading the entire procession, of about forty cars, into an industrial estate. It wasn’t necessarily funny at the time, but in hindsight it’s easy to see the lighter side. Brian describes himself as a chameleon who “changes colours depending on what the background is”. He is aware that what people see in him is often just a reflection of their own personality and environment. He is unsure whether this adaptability is “part of the job or part of (his) nature” but it is certainly a helpful quality to have when you are dealing with a large variety of people at the most emotionally challenging time of their lives. Brian has a great deal of respect for both the people who have died and their families. “Finding the right things to say” is not always easy and people react to grief in different ways. “Everyone comes from a different angle,” says Brian. It certainly seems that by working with the dead, one can learn a great deal about the living.