By Thomas A. Parmalee
Carriage Services invites the entire death-care community to commemorate the hard work of its professionals Jan. 20.
Thanks to the hard work of the Carriage Services team, the day has been designated as National Last Responders Day.
Shane Pudenz, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Carriage Services, said the company chose the date to recognize the hard work of death-care professionals as it marks the discovery of the first official case of COVID-19 in the United States.
While the occasion will serve as an opportunity to remember the hard work of death-care professionals during the pandemic, it is meant to honor the care and devotion they show to their communities each and every day.
“This pandemic profoundly impacted the funeral and cemetery profession and highlighted the indispensable role of last responders,” Pudenz said.
The team at Carriage Services wrote a two-page paper and submitted it to the National Day Archive Committee in an effort to establish the day, Pudenz said.
The company was thrilled when it received word last month that moving forward, the day would be recognized as National Last Responders Day. “We were actually surprised that there was not already a national day for the industry,” Pudenz said, noting that the committee sent Carriage Services a certificate recognizing the designation.
The public at large should stop to think of how important death-care professionals are to their community every Jan. 20, Pudenz said.
“The importance of this date is to showcase just how important our profession is in this world, and more importantly, the sacrifices we go through,” he said. “Even though the government was telling everyone to stay home during the pandemic, members of our profession were still out there serving families.”
During the pandemic and as a regular course of doing business, funeral professionals sacrifice time with their families to serve others, Pudenz observed. When COVID-19 was at its peak, death-care professionals put themselves at risk to take care of others, including many who were exposed to loved ones who died of the virus.
While it was a challenging time, it also brought the profession together, Pudenz said. “We all reached out to each other,” he said, observing that it was not uncommon for firms with an ample supply of personal protective equipment to help other firms — even competitors – that did not have adequate supplies.
At Carriage Services locations, managers will be taking time on Jan. 20 to recognize the hard work of funeral professionals – and Pudenz hopes that other funeral homes and cemeteries throughout the United States will mark the occasion as well.
“It is a day of acknowledgement, for us to understand how important we are to the industry and society as a whole,” Pudenz said.
He hopes the day may get more people interested in funeral service as a career. “It is, unfortunately, getting more and more difficult to get people to want to become funeral directors – and it is an absolute necessity,” he said.
So far, Carriage Services has received positive feedback on its effort to recognize death-care professionals on a designated day.
“We can’t be at all our individual locations, but we’ve encouraged all of them to make sure they set aside some time – whether it be at lunch or breakfast – and throughout the day to acknowledge their employees and to thank them, so they understand how important they are,” he said.
Moving forward, the company aims to build awareness of the day externally, Pudenz said. “The goal is that we all come together – this is not just Carriage, it is the profession as a whole,” he said. “We are proud that we have been able to be at the forefront of it, but that is not what this is about. We hope that no matter what the company, brand or logo, that they take time to recognize the individuals in our profession.”
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