An ESFJ man’s instrument takes the state of a room as its information and returns the state of the room as its signal, so it has no channel independent of the room. That is one incapacity. Being unable to deliver hard news is a different one, and merging the two cost him thirty years.
The Prosek arrangement went two hours and nine minutes and I sat in the corner of it because I was twenty-four and learning, and what I watched Everett Kubes do in that room I have never managed to teach to anybody.
There were six of them at the table. Two daughters who had done everything for their mother, a son who had come in from out of state, an aunt, and two spouses. The son wanted a full service and burial in the family plot. The older daughter said her mother had told her, more than once, that she did not want a fuss.
They had been having that argument for about nine minutes when Everett put his pen down.
“Can I ask what she said, exactly? The words.”
The daughter said her mother had said she didn’t want anybody making a fuss over her.
Everett looked at the son. “And what did she say to you?”
The son said she’d told him she wanted to be with his father.
“So she told you where,” Everett said, “and she told you how.” He picked the pen back up. “The plot’s already there and it’s paid for. Nobody has to decide that today. What we’re deciding is the visitation, and I’d say what she meant by fuss is that she didn’t want you all standing in a line for four hours shaking hands with the whole county.”
He gave them a two-hour visitation the evening before, family only for the first half. Everybody at that table signed. The older daughter wrote to my father afterward.
That was 1994. Everett was twenty-six and had been with us a year.
He came to Sedlacek in 1993, out of mortuary school and an apprenticeship two counties over. He has been here thirty-three years and has managed one chapel for one year and has otherwise never had anybody report to him. He is a broad, unhurried, permanently rumpled man who remembers what everybody’s grandchildren are doing and is not performing when he asks. He has run the phone at night for thirty-three years. He will stop in a hallway for a conversation that ought to take a minute and be there for twenty and be late to something, and the person he stopped for will tell you about it two years later.
Sedlacek Funeral Homes and Cemeteries has five locations across three counties, two cemeteries, and a crematory, headquartered in Marston. My grandfather started it in 1951. My father Radim ran it until 2016 and is eighty-four and comes in for the mail. There are forty-one of us.
I came in 1994 out of college. I have been president since 2016.
This family has had a sentence for Everett Kubes for three decades. I have used it more than anybody and I meant it every single time.
You can’t put that on Everett.
The remediation plan goes to the state in six weeks and part of it is a hundred and forty letters to families holding pre-need contracts, and somebody’s signature goes at the bottom of those letters, and whose it should be I have not settled.
My father has one line for ending a staffing discussion and everybody in this company can do it.
“Well, everybody loves Everett.”
The Arrangement Room
A family sits down at that table on the worst day of their lives and makes about forty decisions in ninety minutes.
Casket or urn. Which one. Visitation, and how long, and where. Service in the chapel or the church. Who speaks. Vault. Opening and closing. Obituary and what it says and which paper. Flowers, cards, a book, a video, a lunch afterward and who provides it. Vehicles. Pallbearers. And underneath every one of those, a price, from a printed list we are required by law to hand them at the start.
Almost nobody outside this trade understands what the difficulty in that room actually is. It is not grief. Grief is the condition; you work inside it.
The difficulty is that the people at that table do not agree with each other, and have not agreed with each other for thirty years, and are now being asked to produce a set of joint decisions in an hour and a half, in public, about somebody they have all lost, with money involved. A funeral director’s real skill is bringing a room that has no agreement in it to a set of decisions that everybody at the table can live with afterward.
Everett Kubes is the best at it I have watched, and I have watched maybe nine hundred arrangements, and the distance is not close.
Our on-call rotation is a phone that gets handed over on the fifteenth and the last day of the month, and a first call comes at whatever hour it comes, and a removal takes two people and a van and about ninety minutes. Everett has taken more of those nights than anybody, including the years he was not on the rotation, because directors call him when a house is going to be difficult.
I play cribbage with my father every week. We have kept a running score since 2004 and it is currently a five-figure number and he is ahead.
The Same Dial
What Everett has is not niceness, and calling it niceness is the mistake this family made for thirty years.
He reads the state of a group the way other people read a face. Not each person separately — the room, as a single thing, with a condition and a direction. He knows where a room is and he knows what would move it and he can move it, and none of that is manipulation, because there is nothing in it he wants for himself. He steers a room toward being a room that can function.
The content comes from what has always been owed. He knows what this family got in 1994 and what we said we would do and what the second cousin will expect and what we did for the Nowaks when it was their turn. Obligation as a record.
That instrument has a fault in it, and I did not find it until this year.
Its information is the state of the room. And its signal that things are going well is also the state of the room. Input and readout are the same dial.
Which means that when a room is wrong — comfortable, unanimous, and wrong — he has nothing outside it to check against. Not because he is a coward. Because there is no second instrument. The needle says the room is fine, and the room being fine is what the needle is for.
Adette Nowlin has done the same thing at our Bexley chapel since 2005 and is nearly as good. What gets said about Everett is that everybody loves him. What gets said about Adette is that families adore her and that she takes on too much, and she has been offered nothing in twenty-one years and has never been spared anything either — she did the layoff at Bexley herself in 2020 because I was in the hospital. What the same tending costs a woman doing this work, and why it never occurs to anybody to spare her, is written up separately.
Forty-one people. Nine directors. Six managers, of whom two are women, and I am one and the other one is Adette.
She called me the evening she did Bexley in 2020 and I was on a hospital phone.
I asked how it went.
“It’s done,” she said. “Two of them cried and one of them thanked me, which was worse.”
I said I was sorry it had fallen to her.
“It falls to me a fair bit,” Adette said, and asked how I was feeling, and I told her, and we did not go back to it.
We Kept It Off Him
I want to write down what I actually did, because for twenty years I experienced it as kindness and it was kindness and that is not the whole of it.
In 2009 we closed the Amity chapel. Four people lost their jobs, two of whom had been there since the seventies. Everett had managed that chapel for a year in 2003 and knew all four. I did it. I drove out and did all four in one morning and I did it because my father said, at the kitchen table, you can’t put that on Everett.
In 2013 we ended a forty-year relationship with a vault supplier whose owner had been at my confirmation. I did that.
In 2015 a director at Nyland was drinking and it had reached the families. I did that.
In 2018 we went to a fixed package structure and told nine directors their commission was changing. I did that.
In 2020 I would have done Bexley and I was in the hospital, so Adette did it.
All of that is on my record. Not as a line — as the thing people know about me. When my father handed this company over in 2016 it was only partly because I am a Sedlacek. It was because I was the one who had done all of that, and a board of my own relatives could look at me and see somebody who had ended things.
Everett’s record for the same period is that everybody loves him.
I did not build that on purpose and I built it. Every time I took a hard thing off him it was a real kindness and it was also a deposit in my own account, and twenty years of that produced one résumé with scar tissue on it and one with nothing on it but affection, and the seat requires the scar tissue. Everybody knows it requires the scar tissue. Nobody ever says that is what it requires.
Nobody Objected
Between 1988 and 2008 this company sold pre-need contracts, which is the arrangement where a person pays for their funeral in advance, at today’s price, guaranteed.
That is a good product and people want it and there is nothing wrong with it. The money goes into a trust, the trust earns, and when the person dies the trust pays the funeral. The whole thing works if the money going in, plus what it earns, keeps up with what the funeral will actually cost thirty years later.
Ours did not keep up. Not through theft and not through anything anybody hid. Through a series of pricing decisions, made in this building, in rooms where everybody got along, over twenty years.
The pattern was always the same. Somebody would raise that the guaranteed price on the older contracts was getting thin against our own list. There would be a discussion. And the discussion would arrive, warmly, at a version of we’ll look at it next year, and it would be genuinely reasonable, and everybody would leave the room feeling that it had been a good meeting.
I have the minutes from one in 2003 and I can reconstruct the rest because they all went the same way.
Alberta Kysar, who ran the office and who has been dead six years, said the guaranteed contracts from the early nineties were running about a third under our own list.
My father asked how many were left.
Alberta said two hundred and some.
And Everett said, “Those are the Wenzels and the Broulettes and Alberta’s own mother. Half of them are in the ground at Nyland already.” He was not arguing against anything. “We’re not a firm that goes back on a price.”
My father said nobody was suggesting that.
“No,” Everett said. “I know.”
And my father said we would look at the funding side next year, and everybody agreed that was sensible, and Alberta wrote it in the minutes as deferred, and the meeting went on to the parking lot at Bexley.
I sat in about fifteen of those meetings. My father chaired most of them. Everett was in maybe nine.
And what Everett did in every one of them was what he does. He would take the sharp thing somebody had said and find the part of it everybody could accept, and he would say something about the families, and about how we were not the kind of firm that goes back on a price, and the room would settle, and we would move to the next item.
He was not lobbying for anything. He had no position on trust funding. He was doing the only thing he does, which is bring a room to a place it can operate from, and a room that has just agreed to look at it next year can operate.
The state examination in 2025 found the trust short against the guaranteed obligations by an amount I will not put in a magazine, and the finding is public and the remediation is agreed and no family will lose a funeral. This company will be paying for that for a decade.
Nobody objected in those rooms. That is the finding underneath the finding. And the reason nobody objected has nothing to do with fear. The room never got to the point where objecting was the natural next thing, and it never got there because the best man in this building was in it.
The Examination
Franka Deis is the examiner and she spent nine days here and she was fair.
What she needed, in the end, was to reconstruct what families had actually been told at the table in 1997 and 2001 and 2004 — what was guaranteed, what was not, what was said about cash advances and about the vault and about what happens if the family later wants something different.
Our arrangement records are the records. Everybody keeps them and everybody’s are thin: what was selected, what it cost, who signed.
Franka went through about six hundred files.
She came to my office on the seventh day.
“Whoever K.E. is,” she said, “his notes are different.”
I said that would be Everett Kubes, and that he initials the other way round because there was another E.K. here in the nineties.
“His records have the disagreements in them,” she said. “Everybody else writes down what was decided. His write down who wanted what and how it got settled and what he told them.”
I asked whether that was a problem.
“It’s the only reason I can tell you what a hundred and some families were promised,” she said. “You’d be in a very different conversation without it.”
The Kilbrides
Six weeks ago I did the first of the disclosure conversations myself.
I did it myself because I decided it was mine to do, which was correct, and because a version of me that I do not entirely like wanted it on the record that I had done it.
The Kilbride sisters have a contract their mother signed in 1999. Their mother is ninety-one and in a facility in Marston and does not know any of this and will not.
I had it prepared. I had the numbers, the state’s remediation order, the schedule, and a letter from our counsel. I sat down and I explained the shortfall accurately and completely in about six minutes.
The older sister asked whether their mother’s funeral was still paid for.
I said the remediation agreement guarantees that every pre-need contract will be honoured in full.
She said, “But it isn’t paid for.”
I started to explain the trust structure again.
And Everett, who had come along and was sitting where I sat in 1994, said, “It’s paid for. She paid for it in 1999 and it’s ours to provide and we’re providing it. What Lise is telling you is that we didn’t manage the money well and we’re fixing it out of our own pocket, and the reason she’s telling you at all is that the state made us and we agreed with them that you should know.”
The younger sister said, “So why are you telling us?”
“Because you’d have found out from somebody else,” Everett said, “and because your mother trusted us with something and we should be the ones to say we didn’t handle it right.”
They signed the acknowledgement. The older sister hugged him at the door and shook my hand, and I have been in this business since I was twenty-four and I know exactly what those two gestures are.
In the car I asked him how he had known to say that.
“They didn’t need the structure,” he said. “They needed to know if anybody was ashamed.”
I have thought about that sentence every day since, and what it keeps doing is taking apart something I have believed since I was twenty-four. I thought he could not deliver hard news. He delivers hard news better than I do. What he cannot do is be the one person in a comfortable room who says the room is wrong.
Those are two entirely different incapacities and this family merged them into one reputation in about 1998 and it cost him thirty years.
Six Certificates
Funeral directors carry a state licence and the licence needs continuing education, and the state association puts on the courses at its meeting every year.
Everett has taken the same one six times.
It is called something like Communication Styles in the Arrangement Room, it is worth two credits, and it comes with an instrument: the sixteen boxes, a set of letters, one page. He has six certificates in his file, from 2001 through 2019, and the letters are the same on all six.
They say ESFJ.
He takes it because it is offered, because it is easy credits, and because he goes to that meeting for the people and would attend a course on anything. He also takes it seriously, which is the part I find hardest. He has told me things he got out of it. He has used them at that table.
I pulled his whole development file this spring. Thirty-three years. Every course this company has ever paid for him to take is about handling other people. Grief work, difficult families, aftercare, communication styles, six times. There is nothing about a balance sheet in it. There is nothing about a trust in it. There is nothing about running anything in it, ever.
The material worth reading is in the back of the course packet, in a page nobody covers, where it says the letters are an order of precedence: one habit in the lead, one behind it doing the supplying, and a last two that arrive only if a man decides to send for them and then waits. The precedence for this one is laid out wherever the type is handled by itself, out of the sixteen the association was printing from.
Out front is the condition of the group, taken directly, as a single fact. Not each person; the room. He knows where it is and where it can go and how to get it there, In a funeral home there is nothing worth more, and it is worth more than everything I know put together.
Supplying it is the stored obligation: what was promised, what was done for the Nowaks, what this family got the last time. Precedent as a debt.
The last two are what would have made him the one who spoke up in 2003.
One of them tests whether a thing holds together irrespective of who agrees with it — the arithmetic that does not care that the meeting is going well. The other is the faculty that sees that the whole arrangement could be otherwise, that we’ll look at it next year has been the answer for eleven years running and that a pattern is not a series of reasonable decisions.
He has neither. So the needle read fine for two decades in a room that was quietly going wrong, and the needle was not lying. The room was fine. The room was fine the entire time.
This part is mine, since his file is my doing. If every piece of professional development your employer has ever paid for is about handling other people, that is not a coincidence and it is not about your aptitude; it is a decision somebody made about what you are for, and asking in writing for a development plan that includes the financial or operational side is an ordinary request whose answer tells you a great deal. And a second thing, because families read these pages too: money paid in advance for a funeral is regulated at the state level, a contract should say plainly what is guaranteed and what is not, and the state agency that licenses funeral establishments takes questions from the public and answers them. None of that is a question about anybody’s temperament. The people for it are that agency, an attorney of your own, and — if you are the employee — whichever channel your company keeps for complaints.
The association’s course description says the instrument is offered to improve interactions with families and is not intended for staffing or assignment decisions, and that a person taking it again a month later changes box roughly one time in three.
His six certificates are identical, and they are filed in this company as his professional development record, and my initials are on the file.
A Hundred and Forty Letters
The letters go out in six weeks. They will say what happened, what the state has ordered, and what this family is going to pay to make it right, and each one goes to somebody who sat at a table with one of us and trusted what was said there.
The Kilbrides took two things apart.
The Prosek arrangement in 1994, first. That one I have used at two state meetings and once at my father’s retirement, as the day I learned what a great funeral director does, and the laugh — the small one, the right one — is always so she told you where and she told you how. What was going on in that room was a twenty-six-year-old finding the sentence that let six people who had been fighting for thirty years act together for one week. There is no charm in it. It is the hardest thing anybody at this company does and we never once called it a skill. We called it Everett.
Then the kitchen table in 2009, and you can’t put that on Everett. I have carried that as my father protecting a good man. It was that. It was also the first entry in a ledger, and I made every entry after it, and twenty years on the ledger said that one of us had done hard things and the other one was beloved, and I read that ledger out loud in 2016 without ever noticing I had written it.
What the certificates left out. Money has been a problem for him for thirty years, his wife has managed it, and everybody here knows; he has a brother he has not spoken to since their father’s funeral, which he arranged; and there is one former employee about whom he is capable of a coldness so complete that I have twice watched him leave a building rather than be in it.
Osgood Rees came in from outside in 2023 as vice president of operations and will be the chief operating officer by the autumn, and he is thirty-nine, and he is good, and the reason we hired him is that we needed somebody who would say the room was wrong.
Osgood asked me in his second month who the strongest person in the company was.
I said Everett.
“Everett in family services?” He was not being unkind; he had read the file. “What does he run?”
I said he did not run anything.
Osgood said, “Huh,” and wrote nothing down, and there the matter rested, and I have replayed my own two words about nine hundred times.
Bijan Nassiri, who is twenty-eight and has been a director for two years, asked me last week who he should ask to sit in on his difficult arrangements.
I said Everett.
He said everybody tells him that, and asked whether there was somebody else, because he did not want to keep taking up Everett’s time.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.