Four stories crossed my desk this week that look completely unrelated until you put them side by side. And when you do, they stop being four stories. They become one.
Start in Illinois, which is, as of this writing, the only state in the country with zero mandatory funeral home inspections. That fact alone should give you pause. It gave a lot of people pause after 56 decomposing bodies were discovered at a South Chicago chapel. Now legislators are moving toward quarterly inspections, which is probably overdue, but also tells you something about how long the industry can operate without accountability structures until something terrible forces the issue.
Meanwhile, NFDA and Selected Independent Funeral Homes are heading into their September annual meeting with a proposed merger on the table. The criticism isn’t that collaboration is bad. The criticism is specific: Selected has been, for a long time, the one organization that actually spoke for independent operators, and there’s a real concern that a merger absorbs that voice rather than amplifying it. The independents who’ve relied on that organization to represent them at the table are watching carefully.
And in Louisville, a nonprofit stepped in to acquire Herman Meyer and Son, which has been serving the Jewish community there since 1888. The explicit reason was to keep it out of corporate hands. That’s the third story. A community taking affirmative action, through an unconventional ownership structure, to preserve something that would otherwise likely have been acquired and optimized for margin.
Read those three together and the picture is clear. The regulatory infrastructure around funeral service, the associational infrastructure, and the ownership infrastructure are all shifting at the same time. And the direction isn’t reliably toward the independent. That’s the honest read.
Now add the human cost when none of those structures have a real safety net built in.
A mother in Richmond is running fish fries and a GoFundMe to bury her 23-year-old son. Somewhere in California, a hospice owner just pleaded guilty to $2.27 million in Medicare fraud, billing for patients who were never actually terminal. And new research confirmed something that most people working in this space have suspected for years: families who receive grief support before a death, not just after, have measurably better outcomes and higher satisfaction.
Those three stories are also one story. Families arrive at the worst moment of their lives with almost no honest guidance about what’s coming, what it costs, what it means, or how to carry it. The Richmond mother shouldn’t be frying fish to cover her son’s burial. The hospice fraud is partly a symptom of a system so confusing that it creates gaps people exploit. And the research on pre-death grief support is really just confirming that preparation matters, that being walked toward a hard thing before it arrives is fundamentally different from being handed it cold.
That gap, between what families need and what they actually receive, is the whole reason pre-need work exists. And it’s also, in very practical terms, exactly what a well-executed pre-need conversation is designed to close. A family who has made arrangements isn’t just protected financially. They’ve had the conversation. Someone sat with them, answered their questions, and helped them think it through before the worst day arrived.
Dr. Cindy Pinson, a physician at Valley Health, put it plainly in a recent segment aimed at families: having a plan removes stress from those left behind, and the conversation itself, however uncomfortable, is an act of care. That’s not marketing language. That’s a doctor describing what she watches happen when families do and don’t have those conversations in place.
The research on grief support before death points the same direction. Families who get that kind of early, honest engagement do better. They report higher satisfaction and measurably better outcomes. The mechanism isn’t complicated. A family that has already processed the planning decisions, the financial decisions, the wishes and the documents, arrives at the moment of loss carrying less of that particular weight. They can grieve instead of scrambling.
Estate planning guides and end-of-life documents, the wills, the powers of attorney, the beneficiary designations, all of it matters. But the families who most need that preparation are also the families least likely to seek it out on their own. Which is where outreach comes in. Which is where the seminar model comes in. Which is where SCI’s earnings data becomes worth paying attention to.
Thomas Ryan reported on SCI’s April 30 earnings call that non-funeral-home preneed production grew 9% over the prior year quarter. The mechanism was an expanded seminar strategy, agents going out into the community instead of waiting for families to come to them. Homesteaders Preneed Motivators data still shows that 83% of buyers prearrange at the funeral home itself, so the funeral home setting isn’t going anywhere. But the agents growing the fastest right now are running both. They work the funeral home setting and they work the community at the same time. The system feeds both channels at once.
Here’s the connection I want you to sit with. SCI is doing that on purpose. They are identifying the families who need this conversation, going to where those families are, and building a system around the outreach. That is the same gap the Richmond mother fell through. It is the same gap the research on pre-death grief support is describing. The families who plan ahead are the ones who had access to the conversation. The families who don’t are the ones nobody showed up for.
That’s your opening. And it’s also your responsibility, if you want to think about it that way.
One last thread before I head to the pool. Forbes’ coaching roundup and a new Concentrix paper both landed on the same point this week: AI can screen a resume, but it still can’t identify the seller who can read a room, adapt when the conversation shifts, and know when to push back gently on a family’s thinking. That’s an abstraction until you put it in context. The family sitting across from you after a loss, or the family you’re sitting with to talk about pre-need, they’re not a lead. They’re people in a complicated emotional place. The person who can hold that space, who can have the insurance conversation with a grieving or skeptical family without turning it into a recitation, is operating in a skill set that no screening tool has figured out yet. That matters for hiring. It also matters for how you show up yourself.
Put all of it together and the picture is this. The structures around this industry are shifting fast, and they’re not reliably shifting in the direction of the independent. Families are more exposed than most of them realize, and that exposure is measurable: in court records, in GoFundMe campaigns, in research papers that say early support produces better outcomes and yet early support remains rare. The advantage on both sides of the desk still goes to the person who shows up before the moment arrives, with the infrastructure already in place to do something useful when they get there.
The gap between families who should have a plan and families who actually have one is wide enough to drive a truck through. What’s less clear, and what this week kept asking, is who’s going to close it.
-John