Everyone dies.
That’s a fact John-Bryan Gardiner knows all too well.
The 50-year-old president of Everest of Thunder Bay funeral services has helped plenty of people pay their final respects. He’s no stranger to seeing a dead body or witnessing loved ones grieve.
But when his father, Allan, passed away last June, being in the funeral services business only seemed to make it more difficult.
“You know everything at a psychological level, but you tend to go on autopilot or you deal with things in a more clinical fashion and you don’t allow yourself to grieve,” Gardiner says.
“Being in the business makes it harder. I’ve done services myself for grandparents and friends that maybe I should have turned over to my staff. It was important to me to do it. For those reasons when you are in the business you tend to shortchange yourself.”
He says sometimes family looked to him to handle things and that makes it even harder to step back.
But then again there’s a sense of self-satisfaction in the thought that it is the last gift that he can give, he says.
“I’m not out of the grieving process,” he says. “It hit me this morning up at St. Anthony's because it was nine months ago that he had his surgery and that’s the last time I talked to him.
“The funeral process helps sets you on the stage for good and healthy grief so you can work through that.”
The Gardiner family has spent several decades in the funeral service.
It started with Gardiner’s great grandfather, who was a cabinetmaker who came to Canada from Ireland in the 1860s.
He would build the boxes for the recently deceased, but later on he took over all the arrangements from the families.
He passed on that knowledge and skills to his son, who then passed it down to Allan, who purchased Everest in 1979.
“As my father always used to say ‘cemeteries bury the dead, we’re here to look after the living,’” Gardiner says.
“Funeral service is a profession that everybody ultimately is going to need. Regretfully but that’s the fact of life. It’s a professional that a lot of people don’t want to know about. We do our best to be proactive and tell people about what goes on because it makes our job easier when the time comes and it makes things a lot easier for the family.”
Gardiner says it is a business and he has to charge a fee for his services. Normally,
He says a funeral is the last celebration for that person and suggests people work within a budget. At the end of the day, people should be getting value for what they are paying for, he says.
“At the end of the day if receive value for what you are getting then that’s what it should be all about.
“In this business, there’s a high over cost whether we’re doing anything or not,” he says.
Things have also changed a bit since Gardiner’s father worked at the funeral office.
For starters, while the staff is on call at all hours of the day, they don’t sleep at the office building anymore and the building isn’t open 14 hours a day.
But at the bottom line, it’s about good customer service because it’s one of the last services some people are going to get.
