A friend of mine recently told me about the calls he made when his aunt entered hospice. He knew the end was coming. He wanted to be prepared. So he called several funeral homes, explained the situation, asked about prices, and then asked the question he really called to ask.
What are the next steps?
In every case, the answer was the same.
Call us back when she passes.
He wasn’t angry about it. He understood that nothing had happened yet and that there were no arrangements to make. But the answer left him exactly where he started, sitting with a dying aunt, no clearer on what the coming weeks would look like or whether anyone could help him through them.
That question, what are the next steps, was not logistical. It was human.
He wasn’t asking for a price list. He was asking if someone could help him.
Nobody could. Not yet. Not until she died.
I know a funeral home owner in Sydney, Australia who understood this differently.
She kept a library of articles on her computer. When a family called during the final season of a loved one’s life, she listened carefully to what they were dealing with and suggested a specific article that might help them in the weeks ahead.
A family navigating a parent’s final days might receive an article about how to talk to children about death. A spouse caring for a terminally ill partner might receive something about what to expect in the final weeks.
She wasn’t pitching services. She wasn’t closing a sale. She was helping.
When I asked her about the approach, she said she believed that whoever helped first would eventually earn the family’s trust. Every time she sent an article to a family, they called her back when the time came.
But that framing undersells what she was actually doing.
She was recognizing that the family was in a real season, one that deserved attention and guidance rather than a request to call back after the death occurred.
My friend’s calls didn’t fail because the people who answered were indifferent. They failed because nobody had a framework for the season he was actually in. Death hadn’t occurred yet, so there was nothing to arrange.
He was in the final season of his aunt’s life, reaching out for help while there was still time to prepare.
What he needed was not a price list or a request to call back later.
He needed someone who recognized what season he was in and had something useful to offer before the crisis arrived.
More soon,
John H. Callaghan