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I'm crazy excited to announce that I've changed positions at Memorial Park Funeral Home and Cemetery (NorthStar Memorial Group), in Memphis and am now serving as a Family Service Advisor. That means that a huge part of my job is helping people ahead of time with their funeral/cremation and cemetery plans which is my favorite part. So, Memphis folks, if you need that, I'm your guy. That was the short version, so if that's the information you were looking for, you may stop reading. If you want more, here we go! I spent 13 years as a funeral director for my family's funeral homes, and while I love that job, it wore me down. My assumption was there was a two-headed problem: 1) as family, I had extra skin in the game and, therefore, a ton of extra stress, and 2) I was living in a place I didn't like very much. Then we moved, and I left funeral service. After some maneuvering, I ended up back but on the pre-planning side, and I loved it, spending nearly six years doing that job. The whole time, though, I felt like I was a second-rate funeral professional because I wasn't acting as a funeral director like I was "supposed" to be. In September 2024, I took a funeral directing job at Memorial Park--returning to my roots, to what I should be doing with my life. Guess what I learned, that two-headed problem above was not accurate. My location and connection to the business had nothing to do with how happy or unhappy I was. The stress was the same. This was just who I was as a funeral director. Skin in the game or not, I was going to obsess over it. I was going to drive myself nuts because my ADHD brain (diagnosed at 40, but that's another conversation for another time) doesn't work the way it needs to for funeral directing, and the systems I created were great but left me drained and mentally exhausted, and that's not great for home life. Then I realized something: There's no job I'm "supposed" to do. We're "supposed" to do what's best for us and our families (if applicable), and the happiest I've ever been professionally was on the funeral pre-planning and cemetery side of the business. Plus, I was already working in the best (in my opinion) funeral home and most gorgeous cemetery in the city. Why not do that job where I already was? Now here we are. At 43 years old, I've learned the lesson that the burdens we place on ourselves are imaginary. The constraints don't exist. We make them up which means we can make them go away. It took a couple of decades and a lot of failed experiments, but as far as jobs go, this feels right. This actually feels like I'm where I'm supposed to be. #memphis #funeralservice #cemetery #preneed