Hitting the Runway: When Funerals Get Creative
GAIL MARQUARDT:
Welcome to the Remembering Life podcast. I'm your host, Gail Marquardt. Every month I talk to people in the end-of-life space about life, death, and how we want to be remembered. My guest today is Lanae Strovers. She is a trainer for the National Funeral Directors Association, and in that role she teaches funeral directors how to work with families when they come in and want to arrange a meaningful service. She is a first-generation funeral director and really strives to help families personalize services honoring their loved one, and that's what we're going to mainly talk about today. She was called to funeral service after the death of a close friend whose cookie cutter funeral didn't quite tell his story as she may have hoped. She knew there was a better way. She graduated from Des Moines Area Community College with honors in 2012, and has served at Hamilton's funeral home since then. During her time at Hamilton's, she initiated a program for unclaimed remains gaining national attention. Lanae is also known for her personalized touch for each family she serves, turning the funeral home into a baseball field, a gaming room, or a classy runway show with a pianist. Lanae will do whatever she can to help make that service unique and special. Reflecting who that person was in life.
Lanae, we teased it a little bit in the intro that an experience with a funeral led you to this career. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
LANAE STROVERS:
Sure. Yeah. Most people, when I was sitting in mortuary school for the first day of class, they were going around telling about why they were in funeral service, and everybody was like, “Oh, I had this great experience. The funeral director that helped me when my grandpa died was so wonderful. I wanted to do that when my mom died. They just were so great.” And I'm sitting there in class thinking like, “Ooh, this is not my story.” My story started from a very tragic event. I had a very good friend who passed away in a car accident, and there was some unusual circumstances with that car accident, and unfortunately it took quite a while for his remains to be identified. And so we had this three-month timeframe where we were just like, “Well, what do we do?” Because there wasn't a funeral, there wasn't a memorial.
We knew it was him, even though legally they needed to get some verification. And then we finally got moment, they released his remains. We were able to have a service for him, and we needed this so bad. The last three months had been this haze and we walk into the funeral home and we thought we were in the wrong place. My friend Jeffrey, who had died was just this beautiful, vibrant human being. He was a hairdresser. He was somebody that when you went out, everybody knew he was there. He had this huge personality and we thought we were at a funeral for a really old person, and Jeffrey was in his forties, and so we just kind of thought it was strange. There wasn't really a lot of personal items out. The music playing in the background was very strange, just kind of old organ music, and it was just like, oh, that's not very personalized.
And then the next day we went to the church and it was the same thing. The funeral there had very little to do with him, didn't really let people talk about who he was and his life, and it just felt like we had anticipated and needed this closure so badly, and then we didn't get it. And so I went home and was kind of angry about the situation and just felt like, gosh, this isn't the way it was supposed to be. And had a couple glasses of wine maybe. And then I googled how to be a funeral director and it just showed up. You could register and go to DMAC and they had a mortuary science program, and I registered and sent in all my stuff and next thing you know, I was accepted and pretty much didn't look back.
GAIL MARQUARDT:
So were you established in a career already and switched careers?
LANAE STROVERS:
I was single mom and I was working full-time, waiting tables, bartending, all of that kind of stuff. So just kind of making ends meet. So I wasn't in a professional career, but definitely working probably 50 hours a week and figuring it out.
GAIL MARQUARDT:
Wow. How did that prior experience influence the kind of funeral director you wanted to be? How did you approach it so that you would be the funeral director who could have given Jeffrey a beautiful meaningful service?
LANAE STROVERS:
So I challenge myself, and I still do to this day, and I tell the students that I teach at the arranger training is if you take the name off of the door and the picture off of the memorial folder, can the family tell that that room was set up specifically for that person, that they know that you took the time to know what they loved, things that were special about them, that you set that room up specifically for them? And that's how I go to that is knowing that it can be a huge thing, like you said, setting up the baseball field, but it can also be as small as, let's say grandpa always had a Snickers bar at night right before he went to bed or a piece of dark chocolate or whatever, and having those there. So it can be a small thing, it could be a huge thing, but just being very intentional of how you're setting that space up for the family.
GAIL MARQUARDT:
That sounds great. I do want to hear about the baseball field though. Tell me about that.
LANAE STROVERS:
Sure. Yeah, so that was a family. Unfortunately, the gentleman passed away very young from a heart attack, and he had young kids, but he was also a little league coach. And so we knew that a lot of the attendees were going to be from the little league group of people. There were some pretty young ones coming in. We knew that standing in line at a funeral can get kind of antsy for adults, let alone a bunch of children. I was thinking, how are we going to keep everybody in line still pretty traditional with that here in Iowa, and how are we going to keep all these kids? And all of a sudden this idea popped in my head and I said, well, why don't we put bases and take a white duct tape that is the baselines, and people can walk the bases while they're standing in line, and each base can have a different part of his life. So first base was about his family and kids. Second base was about his involvement with Little League. Third base was more professional career, and then his casket was at home plate, and we had popcorn. The memorial folders looked like baseball tickets. And so we really just tried to transform the funeral home into a more welcoming space that wasn't going to be so scary, but also helped us with the large crowd that was attending.
GAIL MARQUARDT:
That sounds perfect, not only for the children, but for the adults as well. I bet. It really transformed the environment, and while it was a sad occasion, it also recognized his contributions to the community.
LANAE STROVERS:
We heard a lot more laughter than we did tears, even though it was horribly sad, and he was very young and tragic, but it really opened up the space to allow for that laughter, allow for those funny stories, allow for the memory sharing because they didn't feel like they had to be very, very quiet. We turn the lights pretty bright, things like that. So we wanted to encourage an inviting environment for people to share those stories and not be like, oh, shh you're in a funeral home. Please be quiet.
GAIL MARQUARDT:
Right. So it sounds like, correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like creating this kind of meaningful tribute also doesn't have to cost a lot of money. It sounds like it's based a lot on the creativity of the funeral director you're working with.
LANAE STROVERS:
Oh, absolutely. It's always an interesting conversation when I go out and I share ideas and stories with other funeral directors and just like everybody else, everything is right now on that bottom line and figuring out the financial component. And that's what I tell directors is it doesn't have to cost you a lot of money. One of the things I tell people to do is start small. I have what we call a props closet. And so let's say we help a family of a teacher and maybe we go and get a couple items, some rulers, pencils, books, things like that. Then we'll put those in a tote that's labeled teacher, and then maybe we help somebody who, they are a huge football fan. So you gather a couple of football things and then as it goes, you just kind of keep collecting these things, putting them in the totes, and then you can pull them out and use 'em. I love going and hitting sales after certain times of the year and you just kind of collect these different items that you can personalize things and you already have 'em there. So when you go to set up for visitation, you read through the obituary, you go pull the tote and you can just do those little touches.
GAIL MARQUARDT:
Oh, that's great. So if a family comes in and they don't know that they have this ability to really personalize their funeral, what should they do? What do you recommend they do when speaking with a funeral director to ensure that the service is really meaningful?
LANAE STROVERS:
So it's always important to have a good relationship with your funeral director. And I always tell people ask, you don't know what they can and cannot do until you ask. So funeral directors for the most part, want to do creative things. They want to be able to make this special for you. As the family, we can only work with as much as the family gives us. And so if there is something that you've seen pictures of or you heard somebody else did it, just bring it up with your funeral director. And they'll either say, yep, that's something we can definitely do, or maybe we can't quite do that, but here's something we could do in the meantime. So just don't be afraid to ask your funeral director. We're not as scary as people as what people think we are. We love being able to have these open conversations. I had a family one time that we were all done with arrangements. I think they were nervous to ask me this, so they waited to the very, very end, and they're like, so one more thing. Can we bury dad standing up? And that was where, and I was like, well, maybe let me make some phone calls. But I could tell that they had waited till the very end because I think they were nervous to ask me that. But it was great. We were able to do it for 'em.
GAIL MARQUARDT:
Wow, what a different kind of request and so amazing that you were able to fulfill their request. That's really wonderful. I do have to ask too about the runway.
LANAE STROVERS:
Yes. So this is a service I did very, very early on in my career and I kick myself because I didn't think to take photos of it at the time, and I wish I would've. It's probably one of my favorite services. We had a lady who passed away. She was in her eighties. She very much did not want her body to be viewed. She didn't not even want her cremated remains present at the service. She was very, very particular about that. When she was younger, she was an absolutely stunning clothing model. I mean, just beautiful. And you just picture those very, very classy black and white portraits from the 1940s. That's what she did. I mean, just breathtaking. She also designed clothing. And so when we were talking about how to set things up for her, we decided that we needed to make everything about her because she was wasn't going to be there.
So we rented some mannequins. We built kind of a temporary little runway and put her clothing designs on the mannequins, and then we had a baby grand piano. So we hired a pianist to come in, and then we ordered some very high, high-end appetizers, and we had some people wear black suits that walked around with those. So it was kind of like a cocktail hour that people came. They were very dressed up for this event, and nobody ever questioned where's her urn or where's her body, because the whole room was filled with these beautiful modeling photos of her artwork, her designs. And so nobody even realized that she wasn't even there.
GAIL MARQUARDT:
Well, they felt her presence through everything that was in the room, I imagine.
LANAE STROVERS:
Oh, yeah. Yep. Absolutely.
GAIL MARQUARDT:
What a beautiful idea. So are there other funerals that you'd like to talk about special, meaningful funerals that really had an impact on the family and attendees?
LANAE STROVERS:
I think the biggest one that sticks out to me was probably the hardest funeral that I've ever done in my life. I helped a mom who unfortunately lost her three daughters in a single vehicle accident, and they were very young, five, seven and 12. And with making those decisions, we decided to have a group service. So all three girls with service was going to be together. And then we also knew that all of their classmates were coming. And for many of the classmates, this was going to be their very first experience with death and coming to a funeral. And we took that into a lot of consideration. So what we did is we ended up teaming up with the school and we were able to go and talk to the school and send out handouts about what the kids could expect before they came to the funeral home, so that there was some discussion with parents and teachers before even getting to us.
How we set the visitation up was we wanted it to not be scary. So we turned the lights up super bright. We had bubbles outside. We had sidewalk chalk outside. So even as they were walking up to the building, they could kind of see, oh gosh, look, they have bubbles or they have sidewalk chalk and kind of help relax that tension a little bit. And then inside we had craft tables that they could make cards to give to the girls' mom. We had some volunteers from the school to be at those craft tables, so familiar faces. We had a candle lighting station, we had a cookie decorating station. And we really just tried to create this very safe and welcoming environment for them to grieve on their level of their age.
GAIL MARQUARDT:
What an incredibly tragic circumstance and how beautiful that you were able to turn it into something that would really help both young and old start to heal from something that is incredibly difficult to process.
How do meaningful funerals help families and friends as they move forward on their grief journey? How does that grief journey change when they experience a funeral that was really reflective of the person they loved?
LANAE STROVERS:
I think it helps bring closure. You always kind of have that when I've had that three months of waiting for my friend’s service, it's like, what do we do now? Do you have to go to a funeral or you have to do something? And then if you go to one, that really is about the person. I think for me and seeing how other people react, it's to see how other people are also honoring them and that you're not alone in this grief journey, that here's this whole room full of other people that are also struggling with grief for the same person. But it's okay to grieve and it's okay to be sad. And I think just giving a safe space to do that really can go a long ways.
GAIL MARQUARDT:
I would imagine too that it also encourages conversation after the service when you've been to a service that's really meaningful. I imagine people reflect on that in the months and even years afterwards and that it can spark other conversations about the person who died.
LANAE STROVERS:
Absolutely. This happened to me this weekend. Going back to it can just be the simple things. I went to a little local bakery to pick up some cookies, and the lady at the front desk, she looked kind of familiar to me, but not super familiar. She's like, oh my gosh, you're Lanae. She's like, do you remember in 2016 and you helped my mom's friend? And I was like, oh, because you help so many families over. And she's like, I just remember, she goes, remember, her hands were kind of stuck and you put flowers over, so we couldn't see that she had severe, severe arthritis looking back at the file and putting it together. But that was something that happened almost 10 years ago, and she still was so appreciative of just that little touch that you do. So I do think people talk about the positives. They talk about if you just go to a funeral's funeral, they're not going to talk about it. But if you do that extra touch, they tell the next person and the next person, and then they can start talking about that person and having those further conversations.
GAIL MARQUARDT:
That's wonderful. It really keeps that person's memory alive. I love that. Now there is unfortunately another side to this coin, and there are also people who die and often their bodies are cremated, and those cremated remains go unclaimed.
LANAE STROVERS:
Correct. It happens more than you would expect.
GAIL MARQUARDT:
And I understand you do a lot of work to help memorialize those individuals. Tell us about that.
LANAE STROVERS:
Yeah, so we run a nonprofit called The Final Salute, and that started back in 2018. And that came out of a necessity because I had some surgeries that I was on bedrest for a significant amount of time, and I am not a type of person that can sit still very well. And so I had asked the owners at the funeral home, Hey, can you give me a project? I'm going to be stuck in a hospital bed for three months. I'll lick envelopes or just whatever, just give me some busy work. And they came back and said, well, we actually have quite a few urns that are sitting in our basement, and if we just print off their information, will you just call them gently remind them, Hey, will you please come pick up? And so I said, sure, sounds great. So as I was doing that, I got a lot of people that answered the phone and was like a, oh crap, I forgot to do that.
You are right. You do have my dad, or you do have my wife, or a lot of that. I also got a lot of the blame game of my brother was supposed to pick them up or I can't believe that my sister didn't go get her. So we got a lot of that. But as we filtered it down, I was realizing that some of these people didn't have anybody to come and get them for various reasons. Either they were the last living family member of their family, or the person that we had worked with had also died. Or when they did die, they had a guardian. And so I just didn't feel right about them continuing to sit in the basement. And so I decided, Hey, let's have a service and bury these individuals. So we do three separate services. We do one for civilians, we do one for children, and we do one for veterans. With the veteran service, it is very, very important for me that we research each individual and we tell that individual story, not just, oh, date, name, branch. We do a lot of research to be able to tell about these lives. And some of the stories aren't very pretty, but it's important to tell the story to understand why they ended up where they were.
GAIL MARQUARDT:
What incredibly meaningful work. And I understand this just continues to grow. Do you work with other funeral homes around the country on this now?
LANAE STROVERS:
So we're starting to, that's one of the things is my goal is to not have to do these services anymore. We're doing this in Iowa, but I have told funeral homes around the country, Hey, if this is something you guys want to do, our blueprint works. It's not a gatekeeping thing. I'm here to help you, whether it's to help you do research, do you want me to come out there for a few days, get you going, steal all the ideas from me. Please do. It's not about, oh, look at what I'm doing. It's about getting these individuals off the shelf and hopefully next year going over to the UK. The UK has a very, very big issue with unclaimed remains, and so they don't have any legislature in place for that. And so hopefully help them kind of formulate that and get that taken care of.
GAIL MARQUARDT:
Wow, that's great. Is there anything else that you'd like to share about your work and why it's meaningful to you?
LANAE STROVERS:
So I like to challenge funeral directors, especially students as they're getting into this field. Sometimes we can get desensitized to it. We can sometimes forget the sovereignty of what we are doing as funeral directors. And it's hard. You get busy, you get tired, you've got a bunch of things to do, but that is that family's person. And sometimes it's good to challenge yourself mentally to think about, oh, this was my grandma, or this was my uncle, or this was my brother. That any single one of those people could be a family member of yours. And to take the time and to slow down and really understand that even though this might be the fifth family that you've met with this week, this family's only death that they've had, and to just slow down and really realize the sovereignty of what we're doing,
GAIL MARQUARDT:
And that's their person, that's who they're going to remember going forward. And to make that service meaningful helps them remember that in really beautiful ways, even in really difficult circumstances.
So Lanae, who are you remembering today?
LANAE STROVERS:
I would have to say probably my friend Jeffrey. I love being able to tell his story. Obviously it was so sad of how that happened and the recourse of that, but he has continued to influence my life and I get to share his story over and over again. And I hope that because of his life and ultimately his death, we are continuing to change the face of funeral service.
GAIL MARQUARDT:
I think he would be so incredibly proud of everything that you've done. I picture him based on how you've described him. I just picture him smiling and being so happy about everything that you've accomplished in your career that really is still just starting. And I'm excited to see what you do next, because I've known you for about a year now. And no, I don't think I've ever seen you sit down.
LANAE STROVERS:
Probably not.
GAIL MARQUARDT:
So I'm really excited to see where this career takes you, and thank you so much for being my guest today.
LANAE STROVERS:
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
GAIL MARQUARDT:
For more information about creating meaningful funerals and how to remember loved ones, visit rememberingalife.com.