It's a life and death business

To celebrate the fact that my classes begin again two weeks from today, we continue the week of posting pieces written for school that never saw the light of publication. This one is from a writing class I took with Alex Kotlowitz in the winter of 2009. The assignment was to write a profile of someone at work, so I spent a cold January morning with Joe Donnellan of Donnellan Family Funeral Services.

A profile of someone at work

You won’t find a folding chair anywhere on the premises. The rooms are decorated to reflect wealth, with dark wood, heavy furniture, and faded but stately Oriental rugs. Boxes of Kleenex sit on every available surface, and a large bowl of mints – white lifesavers, somewhat ironically – sit on a table to the far right of the door.

Most people only set foot in a funeral home under the unhappiest of circumstances, so it’s easy to forget that the funeral business is indeed a business. Donnellan Family Funeral Services, founded in 1913, has survived war, Depression, and inept nephews to become one of the most well-known locally owned funeral homes on the north side of Chicago, with eight full-time funeral directors. As a child, Joe Donnellan learned to spell his name from the sign outside. More than forty years later, he’s running the business.

At more than six feet tall, Donnellan towers over the other funeral directors, and his thick, white-gray hair is carefully gelled. He moves through the rooms of the funeral home, pointing out all the problems with the building: ugly wiring in this room, water damage in another, misplaced supplies in a third. From his description you would think the place was falling apart, though untrained eyes would not notice the flaws.

Wearing a dark suit with a white tie and crisp white shirt, silver cufflinks and frameless glasses, Donnellan looks oddly modern in a setting devoted to the past. He does not smile often, and his dry and off-putting sense of humor seem as though they would be abrupt when speaking to a grieving family. “Food is a good way to quell emotional problems, if you can’t reach for the bottle,” he says while explaining his business’ policy of providing food at funerals if requested. Still, Donnellan is a businessman in the truest form, and he holds two principles – hard work and quality product – in highest regard.

He stops to discuss with one of his subordinates the funeral taking place that morning. The body of a former Wilmette fire chief lies in the next room, and Gaelic music flows out of the sound system. The daughter of the deceased is stuck on the highway thanks to the heavy snowfall the night before, and Donnellan gives directions to help her circumvent road closures.

Donnellan empties his pockets onto a table – out comes a BlackBerry, some $20 bills, a small ledger book. He finds what he’s looking for and pops a piece of Nicotine gum into his mouth. Donnellan Family Funeral Services handles about 500 funerals a year, and even with eight full-time funeral directors, Donnellan spends a lot of time at the office. “There’s always going to be a golf game,” he says of the long hours. “But there’s not always going to be a time you can serve a family.”

This is the business of funerals – the paperwork, problem solving, hearse designing, arrangement making, talking with people. Donnellan is a licensed embalmer, but he’s never embalmed a body in his life. The company’s crematorium is miles away, and he carries a certain disdain for the romanticized visions of medical examiners and coroners. Joe Donnellan is a funeral director, but his business isn’t the dead. It’s taking care of the living.