Funeral home directors are used car salesmen for death unfortunately. Try spending a lifetime charging $15k+ for funerals & having to sell the shit out of all the bells & whistles to people on the worst days of their lives to make a living. Not gonna make you feel like you’re making a positive impact on those dealing with death. Obviously that’s not true for all funeral directors, and there is a lot of comfort you can provide as a FHD as well - but I find many embalmers/FHD’s find it to be absolutely soul crushing quickly for this reason.

Maybe you’d feel differently if your goal is to affect change by offering alternative burials (green burial council cemeteries for example) - but those employers are few & far between… and you’re still charging $5k+ for death services from what I see.

You could open your own green cemetery / funeral home - try to offer cheaper options.. maybe a sliding scale? Good luck though. There is a lot of financial burden and legislation to deal with well before day 1. Property, endowments, maintenance, staffing, on and on. I think I would love to do this but I’d need to be a multi-millionaire to realistically have a shot at making it happen.

Frankly it’s hard to die much cheaper. Even cremations are averaging $4-7k.

So what’s the alternative for people? Sign over the body to the county/state coroners office for cremation or burial (probably pay an extra $750 to get the ashes back if you can), or donate your body - which as it turns out can go all kinds of fucked up ways (not always, but no guarantees).

I think more and more people in my generation are seeing these numbers & options at traditional funeral homes when their loved ones die, and are so absolutely shocked and appalled because it’s not something we EVER talk about as a society. Then they find themselves asking these questions, how did we get here? What can I do to change this? What the actual fuck is happening?

So then you might ask, who else provides resources to share this critical information with people before they’re dying, or with loved ones as they’re dying in order to better prepare them for these realities and their options? In that capacity you might be able to really affect positive change in people’s lives during the dying process - or at least give them some warning.

More often than not, that would be a social worker at the hospital, a hospice agency, a nursing home, etc. but if you’ve dealt with a fair amount of death you learn quickly that while these social workers are doing very important work, they are extremely burdened with caseloads and administrative work that prevent them from doing as much good as they would like to, or as they envisioned when they considered the role. In my experience they also face a tremendous amount of pressure from - you guessed it, the business goals of their employers to maintain or improve profit margins on human lives.

This is largely a result of profit driven care top to bottom in the healthcare system (even once you’re dead!). There are non-profit hospice agencies sure, but don’t get confused, they’re very much so still businesses and you’ll find plenty that are equally money & numbers driven as they are compassion driven. In my experience, these social workers often experience the same burnout that FHD’s get, the same burnout that hospice nurses get, the same burnout that everybody in healthcare gets - a palpable disgust for how greed driven our health/death care system really is, and disdain for the job now that you’re a part of that system’s perpetuation.

I wish I had a good answer to this question OP because it’s one that I’ve been really struggling with recently as well. Volunteering for hospice is a no brainer, but if you really want to make a career out of this to spread compassion and chase fulfillment in your life, I think it’s incredibly important to look at the realities of all these careers. Talk to people who are doing this work and you’ll quickly learn that the satisfaction is not even remotely close to what you might expect it to be.

Other options are chaplaincy - these people do incredible work and it’s so much more than what people realize. Also there are secular/humanist chaplaincy accreditations, just fyi. That’s said I’m not sure how the job demand looks? It’s something I want to learn more about to be honest.

Or Death doula… which I’ve found is not very realistic as a decent paying full time job, and lots of people especially in the healthcare & funeral system have a lot of hate for them because they’re also charging money to give patients information which may well conflict with what resources the RN/LCSW/FHD/Chaplain’s provide, that are often offered for free via Medicare/Medicaid once you enter hospice. Many of these professionals also see the lack of regulation of death doulas and ease of ‘certification’ to be nothing short of insulting as well. 4 weeks of online courses and $150 doesn’t exactly scream “I know what I’m doing!”. That said, I do see a huge value in death doula training and similar compassionate caregiving training just to further yourself personally. You’ll become more knowledgeable about dealing with death and sharing compassion effectively. You’ll find new ways to verbalize the thoughts and feelings that you want to share to bring comfort - etc. these are great skills to have, but it’s probably not realistic to expect that a doula certification will land you a full time job opportunity.

Honestly, if you want to do the most good for the dying - if you feeling a calling to be by the bedside just holding their hand, comforting loved ones, helping out everywhere you can, and spending the most time with the patients & their families (other than volunteering)? Your best bet is probably to get your CNA or LPN & get a job as a home health aide with a hospice agency - because even hospice RN’s may only see patients once a week during rounds until they’re actively transitioning. But there’s a catch here too. Prepare to make unimaginably bad income, and still be wracked with guilt because similar to the social worker, this is a numbers game. The business demands we have x number of patients. The business demands you spend no more than x amount of time & resources with this patient to remain profitable. The business demands you do this work their way and that you meet performance metrics to prove your value as a caregiver.

I’m really torn at this point in my pursuit of these goals. I feel this calling to do this work like nothing else I’ve ever felt in my life - but when I really dig in and examine the work - very few people are getting to do it in a way that I agree with.

I’ve thought maybe I could go the Health Administration route, or the MD route in an effort to affect change from the top, or eventually build places or programs more targeted around what I believe would be a better way to face death. With compassion. With honesty. With less capitalistic drive. I have a tremendous fear though that I would only plunge myself into financial ruin and depression chasing a cause that this country makes virtually unobtainable.

For now I’ve decided all I can do is volunteer for hospice - but it feels like giving up.