fiRst eveR soliDifieD Remains containeR RevealeD by aRil

Parting Stone solidified remains are quickly becoming an expectation of families across the United States. This company’s April 2023 appearance on ABC’s Shark Tank is partly driving this success. Parting Stone reports that over 5,000 families have chosen to receive stones over ashes in the last three years. The company’s founder Justin Crowe shared that this volume began to reveal trends in what families have done with Parting Stone’s new form of remains.

“We began to read dozens of letters from families describing how they were searching for beautiful containers to store the stones in,” says Crowe. “We realized inventing a new form of cremains created an entirely new merchandise market. Traditional cremation containers hide and conceal the unsightly ashes, but families that chose solidified remains seek ways to display, hold, and share them.”

Aril Memorial LLC is a cremation merchandise company launched in 2012 to provide products that focus on design simplicity and reverence for materials. Their products feature wood as both subject and palette, with particular attention to texture and natural hues. Aril, previously Memento Memorials, gained recognition in 2017 after launching the Meta Cremation Urn, the company’s flagship product.

“Modern life surrounds us with objects of planned obsolescence, poor craftsmanship, and inconsiderate use of materials,” explains Aril founder Chris Harvan. “Shouldn’t our rest and remembrance be honored with durability, a loving touch, and quality?”

With the unique design challenge of containing AND displaying remains rather than hiding them, Harvan worked through dozens of concepts and prototypes to arrive at a design he calls “Stay.”

“When kept in the home, our products visually stand out among other decor, but what makes our work special is the generosity of materials and attention to texture,” says Harvan about Aril’s aesthetic. “This creates a space for a loved one’s remains that is austere and calm. With the Stay, the growth rings of the wood create a liminal space, a transition, between the living and those they are honoring. Accessible, yet protected.”

At the top of the Stay solidified remains container is a hollow in the red oak intended to display a handful of the family’s favorite stones. The interplay between the natural wool and variation within each stone creates harmony and integrates into daily life with a Zen feel. The powder-coated metal vessel interior can hold the majority of a loved one’s Parting Stones. (a “full amount” set of solidified remains is typically 60-80 stones).

Out of consideration for the planet and the health of the craftspeople making Stay, the wood is protected with a nontoxic, vegan wax that is hand applied and buffed. Aril relies solely on recycled and recyclable packing and shipping materials for all its product lines.

“Every person’s stones come out different hues, textures, and colors,” explains Crowe. “Now there is a beautiful way to highlight the uniqueness of our loved ones in daily life while keeping them close enough to hold.”

“We are excited to have the Stay container available for all families and funeral homes we serve. This is a perfect opportunity to bring more value to the cremation experience.”

fema funeRal ReimbuRsement to enD sePtembeR 30, 2025

Since FEMA began accepting applications for COVID-19 Funeral Assistance in April 2021, the agency has provided nearly $3 billion in assistance to more than 438,000 people, with an average award of $6,400.

As you may have heard, the COVID-19 public health emergency ended on May 11, 2023. FEMA has announced that it will continue to provide funeral assistance until September 30, 2025, to those who paid for the funeral of a loved one who died due to COVID-19.

Please continue to encourage families you have served who experience the death of a loved to COVID to apply for FEMA COVID-19 Funeral Assistance. Information about how to apply can be found on FEMA’s website.

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While funeral director and author Caleb Wilde’s first book was a memoir about his life around death and the ways that he fulfills his role as the sixth-generation funeral director of his family firm in Pennsylvania, his newest book, All the Ways Our Dead Still Speak, goes even further to explore the traumatic stresses of the job and leads Wilde to ultimately face the biggest question: should I continue in this career?

Wilde, who first built a social media following through viral tweets and later an insightful blog about death and our relationship with it, has followed up his successful first memoir, Confessions of a Funeral Director, with a 200-page discussion about varied funeral rituals, direct cremation, neuroscience, the weight of racism and ancestry, Christian views of heaven and hell, and the effects of secondary trauma. More personal than his first, this book confronts these difficult topics with contemplative consideration and the patience of a funeral director who’s seen a lot during his short few decades but bears the history of five previous generations of funeral directors in his family.

It should be noted, before we delve deeper, that Wilde is tilling in a wide field that has seen precious little cultivation. With the notable exception of Thomas Lynch, few funeral directors have found a national stage to share their experiences and even fewer have laid bare the emotional realities of someone serving client families day to day. In his first two volumes, Wilde has chronicled the daily life and inner thoughts of a generation of caregivers. Having just turned 40, he may also be revealing to an older generation of funeral professionals what their younger counterparts are dealing with on a daily basis.

Wilde focuses much of the book on an exploration of how we interact with death and our dead. Through composite characters, Wilde tells common stories from his funeral home experience to elucidate what funeral professionals experience and how they interact with grieving families. He also uses these stories to share his own fears and hopes. Like in a short aside in a story about a couple who die within weeks of each other, where he describes the “recurring nightmare that I show up to work a funeral with no clothes on.” While mining it for some humor, Wilde spins the story into a discussion of the decorum woven into funeral services, from the color of dress shirts and the way you hold your hands to the accepted expressions and tone of voice when talking to the grieving public. “Being naked” in his dream equals “not being prepared” for the proper role and decorum required for the profession.

Wilde also sheds important light upon the skills required to be an effective funeral director, including listening, reading non-spoken cues, and oftentimes putting words to a grieving person’s feelings. Describing both his father and his grandfather, whom he calls Pop-Pop, Caleb paints portraits of men who give up their Christmas Days to do removals during a snowstorm, who work into their eighties, and who strive to treat everyone “like he’s our family.”

While he shares several stories about grieving families and how their reactions help him to reconcile many of his own questions about death and life, Wilde does some of his best writing as he describes the weight of six generations of funeral service and his own obligations to that legacy.

In a chapter titled “A Small Part of a Bigger Story”, Wilde traces his own family roots in funeral service to events leading up to the American Civil War. Recounting the details of the Christiana Resistance, which saw undertaker Isaac Wilde provide services for the man who touched off the resistance by attempting to recapture runaway slaves in Ohio, Wilde connects his family’s own start in the funeral trade with the beginnings of the Civil War and the introduction of embalming and modern funeral practices in America.

From commiserating with a minister about the “scars on the stairway walls from caskets” at the local church to a shoutout to industry answering service ASD (Answering Service for Directors) and a rational explanation that no-funeral disposition “grates against our humanity,” Wilde brings a contemporary and relatable flavor to what is, in the end, a rumination on how we speak to and hear from our dead.

Perhaps most important for a history of funeral service today, Wilde rounds out the book with a discussion of the COVID pandemic and how it affected not only his 170+ year old family company but how it shaped his own future plans. Recounting the way the early directives for COVID prevention limited funeral sizes and reduced funeral directors to sterile disposers of potentially-infected remains, he shares that “the pandemic stripped away the parts of our job that made it meaningful.”

With the funeral home turned into a “dead person factory” due to the increased workload, the pandemic threatened to take away the deeply personal interactions that inspired Wilde and his employees to remain in deathcare. As he looked to his family’s history for guidance, old records showed that during the 1918 Spanish Flu Epidemic, the firm had gone from averaging 40 calls a year to more than 100. Could his own 300-call firm handle even a 50% increase, let alone a 100+ percent rise in volume?

Wilde’s book is certainly infused with death, but at the same time, he find a renewed sense of life by considering what it means to be a funeral director and a discovers a way to reconcile a long family legacy of funeral professionals while finding his own path forward.