Gordon Walker was 14 when he got his first car, a 1962 Cadillac hearse.
Long before Walker became the funeral director at Kelly Funeral Homes, he would drive and deliver newspapers in a small town outside of Ottawa.
“I remember delivering to the local funeral home,” he says.
“I found it so strange. The funeral would have just left or were arriving, and people were laughing and crying and there was all this commotion.”
Kelly Funeral Homes, located at 585 Somerset St. West, is one of six in the Ottawa area. It assists between 350 and 400 families a year.
“There are days that are terribly quiet and there are the crazy busy days. But the thread that goes through each day is we are typically helping people at some of the darkest times in their lives,” Walker says.
Walker, a Carleton University graduate with a degree in psychology and world religions, says most funeral directors have a university education or life skills they can use to help families understand and cope with death.
Walker says he wanted more after working years as the head shipper of a large bakery and in the construction business.
“I made copious amounts of money, I was travelling all over, I had a stable of cars and vehicles in the garage, and had everything that most people say they want. But at the end of the day I really was miserable,” Walker says.
Funeral directors are like caregivers or social workers, and he says it was that aspect of the profession that interested him.
When Walker was in his mid-20s, Lorne Kelly, the founder of Kelly Funeral Homes, convinced Walker to take the job.
“I was so impressed [after meeting Kelly] that I decided this was what I wanted to do,” he says.
Kelly passed away this year from a stroke.
For the first five years Walker says he lived in the funeral home and worked between 80 and 100 hours a week.
Since then he says he has had more time to volunteer for charities and community organizations, such as the Chinatown business improvement area, and spend time with his wife and two sons.
Walker says one of the reasons people are drawn to the job is the amount of variety in each day.
A typical day starts with the funeral director arriving before eight in the morning. The first priority is to check the deceased bodies that are in the funeral home.
Then they make calls to any family that has contacted them over the night.
Afterward the director may have appointments for funeral arrangements, or funeral services that need to be carried out.
Walker says the biggest challenge is working with the grieving families.
“Every family has unique dynamics, they have very different personalities and very different perspectives on the person who has died,” he says.
Angry feelings towards the deceased can cause anxiety. Other times families argue over the wishes of the person who died, like whether they preferred burial or cremation.
“We try to be ambassadors to find the neutral ground that is going to honour the person,” Walker says.
He also says working this job has heightened his resolve to enjoy life.
“When you see so many people of all ages dying for the most bizarre reasons, and when it is a death of somebody that is in my own family or a friend or somebody close, I can say that it absolutely hurts just as much as for anyone else.”
This story appeared in the January 2011 edition of the Charlatan magazine. For more stories from this issue, please see: