Dignity at Work - How Americans Experience Work

Helping people at their worst time by being the best type of person

Joseph Finocchiaro - Funeral Service Educator, Miami Dade College, Miami, Florida

Feature | 29 July 2020
Funeral directors need to be good communicators, empathetic and to remain a source of hope to the deceased’s family. ILO Photo/John Isaac
“Something that people just don't hear enough about is how caring, compassionate and wonderful people who go into this industry are,” says Joseph Finocchiaro, a certified mortician and embalmer, and associate professor at Miami Dade College in Florida.

As an educator, Joseph trains people who want to go into funeral service, giving them the skills and the guidance they need to navigate both the positives and the negatives of the profession.

“You need a person who is going to excel at what they do and not see this as just another industry,” says Joseph. “This is an individual who is both very empathetic and can also maintain a certain professional distance. It’s very similar to what doctors and nurses have to go through when treating patients, especially those who are dealing with end-of-life care.”

To understand and acknowledge that a person has passed away, Joseph says families need to see their mortal remains in some way, shape or form. “You never dehumanize the process,” he says. “The goal of restoration when you embalm is to try to get the body as normal looking as possible. We can't erase what disease has done, but we can lessen the impact of it.”

A lifelong liturgical musician, Joseph earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in operatic music, has sung in Ireland, performed for an audience of 15,000 at the University of South Florida, and even in St Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican. And even though Joseph wanted to be a professional singer the “overwhelming lack of support of the arts”, the fact that only a “handful of singers make it to the operatic circuit”, and big development in his life made him change direction.



“ When I had my daughter that kind of shifted my priorities. I could not go on being the starving musician like I was as an undergrad. I did just about every type of job you can imagine like a waiter or a security guard. So when you are faced with the need of having to make a paycheck you have to be honest with yourself and make a paradigm shift of philosophy and goals,” said Joseph.

One day a college friend told him the local funeral home was hiring. “I put on my suit and went over there,” remembers Joseph. “At that time, I had only sung at one funeral, as a choirboy.” The owner asked him if he had a problem dressing a corpse. “And I said, sir, if your check doesn’t bounce, I will do whatever you want me to, today. And so I started dressing bodies.”

Biology, math and chemistry are very important to students when learning to be a mortician. ILO Photo/John Isaac
After a career as a mortician and embalmer, Joseph made the transition to education. As program coordinator of Funeral Service Education at Miami Dade College, he trains people as funeral directors, embalmers or a combination of the two. “What’s unique about the program at Miami Dade College is not only do we produce for the State of Florida, but for other states as well as the outlying islands. It's not uncommon to have students come to us from the Bahamas, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Haiti or even Latin America.”

Funeral service is a very consumer-driven industry. And as consumer trends change, people are seeking out new technologies. Joseph predicts video streaming will be an important part of the future. “The pandemic prompted an immediate need for streaming, which was once considered a premium service. Now funeral directors need it just to keep the doors open. We are going to see a lot more engagement with the technology.”

There’s a large movement away from the traditional concept of what funerals are to what they might be, says Joseph. Several new approaches are evolving in the business such as alkaline hydrolysis and deep-freezing human remains into a particulate. The first “green cemeteries” featuring the composting of human remains are also starting. Families can take the material created in the composting process home and place it in the garden.

During the pandemic, one of the toughest things for grieving families to bear is no longer being able to gather together at funeral services. “We are in the people business and we are also a service business,” says Joseph. “When you remove that, something is lost.” But Joseph believes there may actually be a positive response. “People will realize that the need to memorialize a loved one’s death is very important and very valuable.”

The compassion and empathy that help funeral directors connect with grieving people goes along with significant pressure, says Joseph. “The very thing that allows them to connect with people can result in overwhelming stress afterwards, when they decompress. How to handle that is something that professionals have to develop for themselves.”

As part of the grieving process, Joseph describes the special care that goes into attending to a loved one before they are presented to their family and friends. ILO Photo/John Isaac
The funeral services industry is unlike any other, he says. “There’s the science, there’s a business aspect, there is a religious aspect, there is a merchandising aspect and there are the specifics of the funeral service. I don’t think there is any other field where you can find all that.”

Educating future funeral directors, Joseph reminds his students how exceptionally rewarding the profession can be. “You will see some of the most beautiful things ever. You start learning a lot about people and how we can come together in grief. Funeral directors see Catholic funerals, Muslim funerals, Hindu funerals, and Buddhist funerals." 

“You learn so much about the beauty of these different faiths together,” he says. “When you get to lead and be a part of that, it resonates strongly with your soul.”