I am being asked to embalm, dress and casket a body and then ship the remains to a Native American reservation in Nebraska. In my initial conversation with the tribal administration, I learned that they have no registered mortuaries or funeral directors to whom I can transfer the body when it is shipped. How can I handle this situation without running afoul of New Jersey laws and regulations which say I must transfer remains to a registered mortuary or licensed funeral director?

Read the answer here.

A family in New York City discovered that a funeral home had placed the wrong decedent in the casket meant for their father. More people in Jamaica are looking into greener funeral options. And a Wisconsin man travels the country playing Taps at the funerals of veterans–for free. These stories and more are in the week in funeral news.

NEWS

Family Shocked to Find Stranger in Dad's Coffin in New York City Funeral Home Mix-Up
By Lynda Baquero (4 New York)
A family mourning the loss of their father was shocked when they went to attend his wake and instead found a stranger lying inside his coffin. Read more here.

Human Composting Turns Bodies to Soil–and the Trend Is Growing
By Dana Hedgpeth (The Washington Post)
From the outside, the grocery-store-size facility that sits off a highway a short drive from Baltimore, MD, looks like a Costco store. Inside is the equipment for one of the funeral industry’s fastest-growing trends: human composting. Read more here.

Wisconsin Man Travels Across Country Sounding Taps at Veterans' Funerals for Free
By James Groh (WTMJ)
To honor veterans in the best way he knows how, one Wisconsin man has traveled the country sounding taps at military funerals for free. “I always close my eyes, and I try to go somewhere else in my head and concentrate on what I’m playing," Bill Seaman, a bugle player, said. Read more here.

Giant Stone Urns Hint at the Death Rites of a Lost People in Laos
By Franz Lidz (The New York Times)
For nearly a century, thousands of massive stone urns scattered across north-central Laos have stood as one of archaeology’s most baffling enigmas. Local folklore said ancient giants had carved the hollowed-out megaliths to brew celebratory rice wine. Read more here.

Final Account: Direct Cremation Route
By The Scotsman
Nowadays, direct cremations make up 20 percent of all funerals in Scotland, up from 3 percent in 2019. Although available to families for decades, Google searches for the term have increased by 10 percent since the start of the year. This highlights the growing appeal of this cheaper, “no fuss” funeral option to a progressively secular public heavily impacted by the cost-of-living crisis. Read more here.

More People in Jamaica Are Considering “Greener” Death Options
By The Gleaner
After Moira Cathleen Delaney of Jamaica was diagnosed with an aggressive form of intestinal cancer, her thoughts eventually turned to her eventual death and what she wanted done with her body. Delaney’s love of gardening, birds, and the forest inspired her decision to be transformed into soil–literally–through a process known as natural organic reduction. Read more here.

A new scam in which funeral homes are being prompted to download programs that can then access all information on the device or network has been reported.

Two funeral homes in Ohio experienced situations in which the facility is contacted via email in which the scammer requests information on services and pricing. Once the funeral home responds with the information, the scammer requests a virtual meeting to discuss arrangements and sends a meeting link to the funeral home, the Ohio Funeral Directors Association reported.

When the funeral home clicks on the link, the facility is guided to a web page where they are instructed to download an update to access the software used to establish the meeting connection. That link instead downloads a program that provides the scammer access to all data stored on the device.

New Jersey State Funeral Directors Association member firms are urged to be wary of any effort to encourage the downloading of software or the clicking on links contained in emails.

Email and online scams are proving to be lucrative crimes for perpetrators. According to a recent report, New Jersey ranks sixth in the nation for losses resulting from online scams and crimes with an estimated $3.1 billion in assets lost to various schemes and illegal activity in 2024.

If you believe you are the victim of an email or internet scam, you can file a complaint with federal Internet Crime Complaint Center here. You can also call your local police department or the state Office of Attorney General.

George R. Kelder Jr., CFSP

Memorial Day has always occupied a strange place on the American calendar.

It arrives wrapped in sunshine, long weekends, shore traffic and backyard invitations. Retailers trumpet mattress sales with the same urgency they use for Presidents’ Day. Television commercials blur into one another with flags waving, burgers sizzling, pickup trucks racing down dusty roads until Memorial Day becomes little more than the unofficial starting gun for summer.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped remembering what the day was actually meant to be.

Memorial Day is not a celebration. It is not America’s birthday. It is not a festival. It is not a day designed for fireworks and spectacle. It is a national pause meant to honor the men and women who died in military service to this country, people who forfeited every future holiday, every family barbecue, every summer vacation, so the rest of us could continue enjoying ours.

That distinction matters.

There is nothing inherently wrong with gathering with friends or family. In fact, perhaps there is something beautifully American about spending time with those we love under the freedoms secured by others. But somewhere between the advertisements and the distractions, we have drifted dangerously close to forgetting the service and sacrifice beneath the surface.

Watch commercials and you will see endless reminders to shop. Buy appliances. Buy patio furniture. Buy cars. You will hear very little encouraging Americans to stop for even a moment of solemn reflection. There was a time when communities instinctively understood Memorial Day rituals–cemetery visits, parades with veterans, church bells, moments of silence, the quiet placement of flags on graves. Those traditions were not performative patriotism. They were collective acts of remembrance.

Today, remembrance often feels secondary to recreation.

Perhaps that is because genuine remembrance is uncomfortable. It forces us to confront the cost of freedom, not in abstract political slogans, but in names etched into marble, granite and bronze and photographs left on mantels. It reminds us that countless families received folded flags instead of reunions. It asks us to acknowledge that liberty has never been free, no matter how casually that phrase is tossed around.

And maybe that is why Memorial Day deserves more from us than simply treating it as another long weekend.

The irony is difficult to ignore. Americans will spend the day enjoying the very freedoms secured by those who never made it home, while many never once consider why the holiday exists in the first place. We have become extraordinarily skilled at commercialization and increasingly uncomfortable with reflection.

But Memorial Day should demand such reflection.

It should be acceptable, even expected, to lower the volume for a few hours. To explain to children why flags appear in cemeteries. To tell stories about relatives who served. To attend (or better yet, host) a local memorial ceremony instead of racing immediately toward the Shore. To recognize that gratitude is not weakness and remembrance is not outdated.

A barbecue may still happen. Laughter may still fill the backyard. Life should continue because that is precisely what those service members died protecting. But before the hamburgers hit the grill and before the coolers are opened, perhaps America could rediscover the simple dignity of pausing first.

Not for spectacle.

Not for sales.

Not for fireworks.

But for remembrance.

Because Memorial Day was never intended to celebrate war. It was intended to honor sacrifice.

And if we lose sight of that, then we risk turning one of the nation’s most sacred observances into just another Monday off from work.

Ryan Buckland, President

There is a particular kind of strength required to walk into a room where grief has taken up residence. It is not physical strength or intellectual dominance. It is something quieter and more deeply rooted.

It is the strength of a person who has looked honestly at what they are called to do and decided, sometimes against every impulse of self-doubt, that they are enough to do it. For the funeral service professional, that decision must be made daily, in the parking lot before a difficult arrangement conference, in the corridor before entering a chapel full of weeping strangers and in the silence after a long week when the weight of other people's sorrow has settled into the bones.

What sustains a funeral professional is not a productivity framework or an inspirational podcast. It is a deeply held conviction that the work matters, that the families being served deserve the very best of what one can offer and that one's own presence and compassion make a real difference in how a family survives the hardest day of their lives.

Motivation rooted in that conviction does not evaporate when the work is difficult. It deepens. It becomes the reason a professional arrives early, stays late and refuses to offer anything less than full attention to a family that has nowhere else to turn.

One of the most honest conversations the funeral service profession needs to have with itself is about the cost of the work. Compassion fatigue is real. The cumulative weight of walking alongside grief, day after day, without adequate space for one's own processing, takes a toll that is rarely visible to the outside world.

The funeral director who appears calm at every arrangement conference may be running on emotional reserves that are dangerously close to empty. Genuine self-belief, in this context, is not denial of that reality. It is the commitment that says, I know what this work costs me, and I am determined to care for myself so that I can continue to offer something worth giving.

That commitment looks different for every professional. For some it is prayer and sabbath rest. For others it is exercise, creative outlets or honest conversation with a trusted colleague who understands the particular pressures of this vocation.

What all these practices share is a refusal to treat oneself as expendable. A professional who does not believe they are worth sustaining will eventually have nothing left to offer the families who depend on them. Resilience in funeral service is not toughness. It is the wisdom to replenish what the work draws out, consistently and without apology, so that the next family through the door receives the same quality of care as the first.

Every funeral professional will face moments of doubt. A service that did not go as planned, a family that was not satisfied, a word said in the wrong moment that could not be taken back. The professional who allows those moments to become the defining narrative of who they are will eventually be paralyzed by the fear of repeating them. The professional who treats those moments as honest information about where growth is needed, without surrendering their fundamental belief in their own worth and calling, is the one who continues to improve and continues to show up fully for the people they serve.

The funeral service profession occupies a sacred space in the human community. It is not glamorous work, and it is not well understood by those who have never done it. It requires a rare combination of tenderness and steadiness, technical precision and emotional availability, professional composure and genuine humanity. Those who do it well are answering a call that most people are not equipped or willing to answer.

Believing in oneself in this profession is not arrogance. It is gratitude for the calling and an unshakeable commitment to honor it, because the families walking through the door on the hardest days of their lives deserve every ounce of what one has to give. And what one has to give, at its best, is more than enough.

As we head into summer, I originally thought this article would focus on seasonal safety tips surrounding beach trips, barbecues, fireworks and all the activities that come with this time of year. Instead, I wanted to take a moment to address something equally important to your business: timely insurance payments.

Summer is also a time when many of us become distracted from our normal day-to-day responsibilities. Among vacations, long weekends, family events and the overall pace of the season, it becomes easy for important notices, invoices and deadlines to get overlooked. Unfortunately, insurance carriers do not pause cancellation timelines simply because it is summer.

At our agency, we spend a significant amount of time following up on notices of cancellation, pending cancellations and reinstatement requests. While we are always happy to help our clients, these situations take time away from proactively servicing accounts and helping businesses manage risk.

More importantly, repeated late payments can create poor payment history with insurance carriers. That history matters. Carriers closely review cancellation activity, reinstatements and payment habits when evaluating accounts. In some cases, a carrier may decide not to renew coverage altogether. Once coverage is lost, returning to the same carrier is not always possible, and replacement coverage can often mean higher premiums, stricter terms, added fees or fewer coverage options.

Insurance billing has also changed. Many carriers now offer online portals, automatic payments, QR codes and mobile payment options directly on invoices and renewal paperwork. We even include QR codes with renewals whenever possible to make the process easier for our clients.

While traditional mail still has its place, relying solely on mailing checks can create timing and delivery issues. This is not a criticism of the postal service, but simply an observation based on what we have consistently experienced over the past year. Delays in mail delivery can quickly lead to late payments, cancellation notices and unnecessary stress.

As we move through the busy summer months, we encourage clients to review invoices promptly, take advantage of electronic payment options whenever possible and communicate with us early if there are billing concerns. A proactive step today can help avoid much larger issues tomorrow.

Have a safe and enjoyable summer.

Do you have questions about your premium costs? Please contact one of our Thanexus Financial Services, LLC insurance agents at 888.483.5138 for more information or a personalized quote for your individual insurance needs. All funeral directors have access to insurance coverage. This is not a benefit limited to members of Thanexus, Inc.

Thanexus Financial Services, LLC is staffed by salaried, non-commissioned producers with no personal financial interest in your decisions regarding coverage. By using salary-based compensation, our agency force focuses on service rather than volume. Our staff members are licensed in New Jersey, as well as Connecticut, Florida, New York and Pennsylvania.

Thanexus, Inc. is a funeral service cooperative and economic development initiative of New Jersey Funeral Directors Services, Inc. For more information about joining Thanexus as a shareholder, contact our Agency Manager, Jonathan C. Krowicki, at 732.282.5117.