24/11/2025
What Happens to the Grieving Funeral Director?
When your life is dedicated to helping people; not just doing a job or ticking boxes, but actually doing everything you can to help people through their darkest moments, you give all the advice, because you've been there, and you've seen it all. But when grief comes crashing into your own family, it still reaches a place in you that you didn’t know could be exposed. A place you thought your experience might have somehow protected.
I describe it a bit like a kick in the heart, or a constant ball lodged in your throat. The tears welling behind your eyelids, threatening to spill at all the most inconvenient moments.
You’d think we’d be immune, somehow hardened by the sheer volume of loss we witness. But grief doesn’t work that way. Grief happens like a storm rolling in across an open plain; you see it coming, and you know what it is, but you’re still unprepared for the force and brutality when it finally hits. Then you’re changed, suffered, and broken in ways that don’t have words.
Loss happens in my family and in others at the same time. They coincide, waves of grief moving through our home and through the families we care for. Our feelings often stay hidden beneath the surface; a front, or kind of mask, that helps us keep functioning.
We wear it so we can be there for families who are suffering, even when our own hearts are breaking. Because someone has to hold the space. Someone has to know what to do when the world stops making sense, and that someone is usually me.
As a funeral director, eldest daughter, sister, aunty, mother and friend, I am now, and always have been, the one to go to. I’ve done all manner of things within my own family tragedies and balanced on a wire between personal Kristy and Kristy the funeral director - a very hard line to walk. Some days, I don’t even know which one I am anymore. The lines blur when you’re supporting your own family while caring for other families walking through their darkest days.
But it isn't just hard for me. It is hard for our entire family. Our little girls know we help people, but don't understand why we can't help them. How do you explain that to a child? That Mum can be there for everyone else, but some things are simply beyond fixing, and that all we can actually do is hold each other a little closer.
Grief affects everyone differently, and I know that. I’ve watched it transform people in a thousand different ways. I’ve supported countless families through loss, but some losses just rearrange everything. And I feel changed. Because death isn’t for the faint-hearted. It takes everything from you and then asks you to keep standing.
And even after years in this “industry”, a word I hate, because it feels too cold and transactional for what we actually do, I’m still learning important lessons, being shaped by grief and loss.
Grief has a way of showing up in the most unexpected places. It might be in the middle of Soap World, with a poor staff member suddenly faced with a mess of tears. It might be in the middle of a workday, during a service, or when you’re trying so hard to be strong for everyone else. That’s the thing about grief: it doesn’t wait for convenient moments. It just arrives, uninvited, and demands to be felt.
And loss, well, it changes us, fundamentally. It doesn’t just make us miss the person who has gone, or change who we are; it can also make us look differently at the people who are still here. The neighbour who checks in. The friend who shows up. The family we argue with and love anyway.
Loss reminds us that nothing is guaranteed and no one is promised. We can’t change what has happened – if only it were that easy – but we can choose to pay close attention to what, and who, we still have. When we choose to notice, to really see and appreciate the people we hold close, we allow absence to quietly reshape the way we love the ones who remain.
And maybe that’s the lesson I’m still learning. That feeling grief doesn’t make me less capable of helping others. That being broken doesn’t mean I’m not still whole enough to hold space for someone else’s pain. That watching my own family grieve has only deepened the well I draw from when I sit with another family in their darkest hour.
And so I’m here, showing up for families who need someone to guide them through their darkest days. Still answering calls at odd hours and holding hands and saying the things that need to be said when words feel impossible. Because I know that every person we care for is someone’s entire world. Every service we create is for someone who is feeling that same deep sense of loss and despair. And if I can make their journey even slightly gentler, if I can honour their person in a way that brings even a moment of peace, then this weight I carry starts to hold meaning.
In the end, we’re all just walking each other home. Some of us are a few steps ahead, some a few steps behind, but we’re all on the same path. And when you work with death, when you live alongside loss, you learn quickly that the greatest gift we can give each other is to be present, to be honest, and to be human.
I am changed. Not in a loud, dramatic way, but in the quiet places; in the way I listen, the way I pause, the way I notice the people in front of me. And tomorrow, I’ll show up again. For the families who need me. For my own family who needs me. And for myself, who is still learning that needing others isn’t weakness; it’s actually the most human thing we can do.
Because that’s what happens to the grieving funeral director. We break. We carry on. And we hold space for others to do the same.
'Kristy Lovell-Meizer'
https://lmfunerals.com.au/news/2025/november/what-happens-to-the-grieving-funeral-director/
