Memorial Counselor, Denise V. Murphy [feel good books to read TXT] 📗

I answered an add for a life insurance company and soon found myself studying and taking the life insurance test to become a preneed funeral sales agent for a funeral home that held a huge territory of funeral homes. It came with a huge office, leads and a company car. It sounded like a position that I would do very well at. I was excited and passed the exam to become a licensed agent the first time I took the test.

My office was beautiful and the leads came in like clock work. I met with families that had recently lost loved ones and gave them a beautiful poem with a picture of their loved one that they had lost. It was the lead in to try and convince them to buy a prearranged funeral contract through an insurance product. Death came to us all and being prepared for it lessened grief for the loved ones left behind was the motto of my business.

Little did I know that grief would come at me so quickly from every corner of my world. I accepted the position on July 19th, my birthday. It turned out to be the funeral home that had taken care of my Father's death just six months previously. In order to get to my office from inside the funeral home I had to walk past the mortician's office where the bodies were prepared before they were laid out for public or family viewing. Many times I had to go around a body to get to the stairs that led to my upstairs office or I had to go outside and climb the enclosed staircase to get to my office.

I went to a seminar in Omaha, NE with the mortician's staff and rode in a limo and thought how cool. Riding in a limo with a morbid staff and listening to the horrors of preparing a body who was riddled with diseases of the aged was enough to give me nightmares for months. I kept wondering if my Father had been one of the horrible bodies that just wouldn't cooperate with the embalming techniques. When we got to Omaha I was put on the spot as the leading new agent and was asked to role play on stage as the selling agent of a preneed funeral to a couple who didn't know if they wanted to buy a contract to take care of their funeral needs.

I managed to make the Memorial Counselor position work for me and life resumed as normal. Then the other shoe fell so to speak. I sold a preneed contract and made an enemy with one of the morticians at the funeral home. It turned out that he had been working on selling them a preneed contract for the past six months and felt I had stolen his contract out from under him. I made the sale but he ended up with the commission. Suddenly the company car was never available when I needed it.

My sister-in-law's mother passed away from cancer and I was asked to help seat family members at the funeral. My brother and his family came to the funeral home and trying to work as an funeral home counselor was almost impossible for me. They had also recently lost a still born daughter. Everywhere I looked grief was staring me in the face. After a year working as a Memorial Counselor I had decided that enough was enough and left the depressing situation behind me and went into another avenue of life as an insurance agent.

Publication Date: 08-03-2010

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