FOUR FUNERALS IN ONE

When I responded to a line-of-duty death, I had to understand that I was expected to plan not one funeral but four. I had to plan and manage one for the surviving family, one for the agency, one for the law enforcement community, and one for the community the agency served. Each of these entities had their own needs that needed to be identified and met. Many aspects of each funeral would be similar but some would be unique to aparticular group and everyone’s needs, hopefully, could be identified and integrated into the serv ice and ceremonies. This is why a funeral coordinator has to be task oriented as well as people oriented.

The funeral process establishes personal significance of the person who has died. Everyone needs to discover how important their loss is before they can grieve it. This is why there are four funerals that need to be planned and combined into one comprehensive service and ceremony.

Everyone will grieve the loss differently; the spouse differently than the children and the parents and other family members, the officer’s actual partners differently than other co-workers, neighboring agencies differently than more distant members of the law enforcement community, community members and organizations that knew the officer differently than the general public. The only common denominator is that they all are grieving and they all have their own personal needs, individual and group, and these needs should be identified and met.

So how are these needs identified and met? As a funeral coordinator I have to reach out to everyone impacted by the death and try to learn what they need. I can’t do it all personally but I can establish an open line of communications so that what I don’t learn myself I learn from others.Obviously I need an open door policy and I must be willing to listen to people’s questions, wishes, desires, and needs. I need to listen to their complaints because somewhere in their frustration and anger may be a true need, disguised in all the rhetoric, may be the message I need to hear.

While planning a funeral, I was stopped in the hallway and introduced to the wife of an agency officer. After exchanging pleasantries I asked her if there was anything I could do for her? To my surprise, she said yes. She explained how she, and other wives, wanted to sit with their husbands in the church during the funeral service. Initial inquiries to have this happen were refused by the church coordinator, who was responsible for the church seating plan.

 I thought the request was reasonable. The need to sit with their husbands was an integral part of their, and their husbands, grieving and support process. When I went to the next planning team meeting and explained what I thought should happen and why, I encountered several team members who strongly disagreed. But their disagreement was more with how could we make it happen, because the officers were going to march in behind the casket and file into their seats and we couldn’t integrate the wives into the formation without disrupting and detracting from the military style formation and seating plan.

I explained that it would be possible to discreetly integrate those wives who wanted to sit with their husbands by inserting them into the line of officers from a side aisle as the officers entered their assigned pews. And that is what we did. And the needs of the wives were met. But if I hadn’t asked a simple polite question, it would not have happened. The church coordinator had not shared the request or his response or his reasoning for his decision. The lines of communication need to be open and these types of inquiries discussed at meetings or brought to the attention of the funeral coordinator.

At another funeral I was assisting with, an officer stopped me with a complaint. He had asked the honors coordinator if agency members could fold the flag, since an outside agency honor guard was going to perform the honors ceremony, and he had been told no. At the next planning team meetingwe discussed the issues involved and we determined there were sufficient agency members interested in being part of the flag fold detail and that we had the time and resources to train them. So we did, and they did. But I had to listen to a complaint to learn what the issue was.

I always insure that every agency manager and supervisor and every member of the planning team does not arbitrarily ignore or deny a request from anyone to be involved in the services or ceremonies or have a suggestion or inquiry or a complaint. All this information needs to be brought back to the planning team and shared and possibly discussed. Peoples needs need to be identified and evaluated.

Outside the agency the surviving family’s needs, the parents and family of the deceased officer, friends, community members and organizations etc. all have potential needs and they need an opportunity and a resource to share that information with. As the funeral coordinator I have a responsibility to insure the lines of communication are open and that their needs are identified and hopefully fulfilled.

Planning a line-of-duty funeral involves more than following a pre-determined operational plan or guideline or protocol. It requires identifying the people issues, all the peoples’ issues involved, and determining if they can be integrated into the master plan. Communications is critical and that includes every supervisor or coordinator sharing what questions, inquiries or complaints they have received and what their responses were and why. There are no guarantees and there are requests that cannot be met. But, there are things that can be done and should be done but can’t be done if the coordinator doesn’t know about them.

John Cooley

Policefuneals.com