Many of my peers have often questioned me: what do you do in your job as a Funeral Director?
To be honest, the term – Funeral Director is merely just that – it’s just a position. But what I really do, and what I enjoy is the serving part of my job. I enjoy it because I see the bigger purpose of my job, I see the tangible effects 0f the things I do in others’ lives. Being humans, we tend to put ourselves first and that’s perfectly understandable. However, in my current role, I must say it has molded me into a better person by challenging me to put others’ (the bereaved family members) needs first. In my line, their needs come before me, regardless of what time of the day it is. People are not always nice when they are emotional; guilt of not spending enough time with someone they just lost can be easily resurfaced as anger and it can be projected onto service providers like us. I’ve to learn that if we learn to see where such emotions stem from, we would be more understanding and on the upside, it is when we know the why to the symptoms that these family members portray that we can serve them better.
Not many of my age would voluntarily undertake this job. This fuels my enthusiasm of taking a role in the death care trade where most people would shun from. My thinking would be: since there’s an alarming lack of youths in this trade and it would come a time where there would be lesser and lesser people doing this job which some people would term as “dirty”, even more so I should enter this trade and fill this gap.
To answer you guys the question of what i do at work merely with words would not be as helpful as creating a video where snippets of myself working is captured. Thank to my dear Nicole, this vlog series is made possible!
Please note that in this video, scenes from a Buddhist Funeral would be shown. A small disclaimer here: Yes, I am a Christian but I help to coordinate Funerals of different religions in Singapore so as to cater to our multi-racial and multi-religious Singaporeans. Some might not share the same opinion as me; but personally, I would help coordinate the funerals of other religions. In fact, I know the rituals and logistics needed for the different religions; I even understand the significance behind them. Why so? Just like how in the bible, Jesus reaches out not just to the Jews but the Gentiles as well, I see no reason why we should be serving only the Christian community in Singapore when love is universal, when we should be reaching out to all. In fact, it is those who aren’t yet saved that we should be reaching out to. If even as Christians, we discriminate against other religions and think ourselves as better than others, what kinda Christians are we? I still believe there is only one truth and one God. I do not idolise other deities – I think people who know me and have spoken to me knows that I am really convicted in my faith. I merely help in the coordinating and serving part. Hence, I do not see any wrong in this. As much as you do not like my way of though, this is still a platform where we get to serve non-believers.