On Memorial Day, funeral home puts its focus on the living

The thousands of visitors to Richland’s Sunset Memorial Gardens on Memorial Day will get more than a chance to honor late loved ones and fallen soldiers.

They’ll get a preview of how one local funeral home is adapting to modern sensibilities. Ten years after Einan’s Funeral Home at Sunset constructed an airy, light-filled event center, it is replicating the celebratory atmosphere in its funeral chapel.

Einan’s, the for-profit funeral arm of the nonprofit Sunset Gardens, is investing about $1.5 million to remodel its 9,500-square-foot building. The project includes a 5,600-square foot expansion that updates its old chapel and modernizes the downstairs rooms, where it receives remains and prepares them for burial or cremation.

Lower-level upgrades include a new crematory unit, embalming room, cooler facilities, offices for Einan’s team of funeral directors, and a comfortable and accessible area for families to witness cremation, a rising practice.

Upstairs, the public floor is gaining a welcoming lobby with a fireplace, accessible bathrooms and a spacious chapel with expansive windows, a catering kitchen and state-of-the-art technology for multimedia presentations. It will expand to add new office space in a future phase.

“We’re embracing what the community wants,” said Holley Sowards, service and operations manager for Einan’s.

Sowards spoke frankly about the crematory, embalming room and other behind-the-scenes upgrades to shed light on a subject most people prefer to avoid.

“We’re very interested in community awareness and making it more comfortable for people to talk about,” she said. “We know nobody wants to come here. The goal is to make it as comfortable as possible when you do come.”

Memorial Day is, of course, the exception to the rule. It is the busiest day of the year for Sunset Gardens and indeed most cemeteries. Its eight-member grounds team spent weeks preparing for visitors.

The cemetery will fly burial flags of about 1,000 veterans interred at Sunset Gardens, most donated by families. It will serve hot dogs and ice cream at the event center between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Monday.

There will be a formal program at 11 a.m. Monday with bagpipers and speakers.

Workers will be on hand throughout the weekend to guide visitors to burial plots and provide transportation around the cemetery’s 30 developed acres.

Funerals and related services are an about $18 billion industry in America, with nearly 20,000 facilities and 141,000 employees. At Sunset Gardens, there are eight employees at the cemetery and eight at the funeral home.

The National Funeral Directors Association says the median cost of a funeral is nearly $7,200.

The strategic shift at Sunset Gardens began about a decade ago when Einan’s spent $1.5 million to construct the 6,000-square-foot event center at the cemetery’s northern edge.

Instead of traditional dark funereal decor, the event center has modern furnishings, high ceilings and windows overlooking the manicured cemetery grounds. It was meant for funeral families, but quickly became a setting for weddings, baby showers, anniversary celebrations, corporate meetings and other non-funeral gatherings.

The event center was so popular that Einan’s found itself using the chapel in the funeral home for overflow. Demand for event space drove its decision to upgrade not only the business end of the building but the chapel as well. As with the event center, the remodel and expansion project is self-funded.

The event center’s popularity has been a marketing success for the cemetery.

Patrick Hollick, who operates the cemetery, said people who wouldn’t otherwise visit come to the property for happy occasions, raising its visibility. That reinforces one of Sunset’s discrete marketing efforts to offer a final resting spot for the many urns that are taken away after cremation.

Einan’s serves about 650 families a year, with more than half choosing cremation. The cemetery places between 250 and 260 caskets and urns. It would like to place more of the urns that leave and end up being preserved in homes or spread in sentimental spots.

Its pitch: A cemetery is a permanent place for families.

“Cemeteries are for the living,” he said.

This story was originally published May 29, 2016 at 6:15 PM with the headline "On Memorial Day, funeral home puts its focus on the living."