Reflections on 2020: Greg Jenness

Hi friends, welcome back to our series during Lent Reflections on 2020 as we have asked
some folks in the congregation and even in the community to share with us some of their
experiences over the past year,
some of what has been hard and difficult,
some of what has been helpful to them as they reflect back on this last 12 months and their experience
of this pandemic journey that we’ve all been taking together.
And today a good friend,
a well-known member of the community,
Greg Genis of Turner Genis
Funeral Home and of First Presbyterian Church.
And Michael,
Greg occupies a very interesting spot in regard to all of the things that have
been happening over the last year.
He lives in a really busy intersection.
Like you said, he’s a business owner dealing with all of the things that a business owner
needs to deal with and yet because of his industry,
because of the reality that we still
have people who come to the end of life and families who are grieving,
Greg has continued to have to innovate and change where necessary and continue on even in some difficult circumstances.
But yet,
as he balances that,
I remember going to Emma’s graduation party last spring
and they as a family trying to navigate what do you do with a high school senior?
And then also just the general personal navigations of how do I take care of myself in this season
with all of the stresses and a very difficult and demanding job that was made only more
difficult in the last year.
So, Greg does occupy this very,
very busy kind of space and I’m grateful in our conversation
for as he processes sort of those intersections,
he’s able to point out some of the ways that
he’s navigated, both that he I think found helpful,
but also just the straight up confession.
You know, I know that it always hasn’t gone the way that I wish it had gone.
Yeah, and I think the funeral piece has been an interesting one that you and I have had
a glimpse into because those things don’t stop in the life of the church.
They’ve changed drastically, but how is it that that end of life care still provides
for a family and for loved ones
what is I think really important in the beginning of
the grieving process that that chance to celebrate someone’s life and to be surrounded
even even digitally surrounded by a community that upholds them and supports them.
And that has changed drastically and I think those changes have been difficult and I suspect
it has been hard for Greg to see what is lost in some of what has had to shift,
especially for those who I think are most affected,
those who have lost a loved one.
That has been a part of this that I think has been really difficult to navigate and
I’m grateful that Greg would come in and visit with us about it.
As I’ve reflected on this interview and had an opportunity now to engage with it for a little bit,
I’ve been reflecting on some of the themes that come out of it and I guess
I may just sort of offer to you as you come into this interview.
One theme you may want to track because I think it’s interwoven in the entire conversation
is this tension between the timeless and the now and let me explain what I mean by that.
Greg says and reflects on in a number of moments
how death and the reality of that separation
is as old as time is and humans have dealt with grief and we have ways of coming together
in community.
We have reasons for why we do the things that we do.
It helps us to honor,
to remember,
to move on in a kind of respectful honoring love.
And what you find is that timelessness coming up headlong against this very present moment
in which all of these changes and these expectations,
the medical stuff that Greg had to rise to,
the different sort of restrictions that kept things from being the way that they had been.
All of this has a way of counteracting in some places and simply just in some other
cases transforming and changing some of these other timeless practices.
And Greg lived and lives in a very interesting place of trying to help families navigate
that interesting tension and he speaks to how that is as unique as every person,
as unique as every family that he serves.
And so as you listen,
I wonder if you will see that same kind of theme written within
and there’s a question in there for us.
What is the timeless in our own lives that has been met by change,
by unexpected change?
In some cases we might even confess unwelcomed change and I think Greg may help us into that
own sort of self-awareness and that own conversation.
Yeah, we appreciate Greg’s perspective.
Appreciate Greg and what he does not only in the church but in the broader community
and how he helps people.
Grateful for his time and his reflections and hope that you all find something in them that’s
meaningful for you.
Thanks for listening.
Hey, thanks for joining us again as we continue to reflect on and talk to people and their
experiences during 2020.
Today,
Greg Genis, well known in the community and in the church,
a good friend and a business owner,
a person who has really in some ways been in the thick of some of what’s happened
by nature of the funeral home and caring for families.
Greg, appreciate you joining us today.
To start with,
maybe just give us an overview.
Obviously the funeral home,
the process of dealing with families,
initially if you can
think back to when everything kind of shut down,
you know, you’re not in a business that
can do that.
You can’t just put what you do on hold.
So, initially what changed and how did you navigate those first
months or so of everything being different?
Yeah, so kind of going back to the very beginning,
it changed so fast and so immediate.
And so we had some funerals scheduled for after kind of the shutdown kind of started.
We had to change how that looked like.
I just remember just the unknown of everything.
I probably like a lot of people were going around with my disinfectant spraying everything
down and this boogeyman of a virus was just around the corner ready to get you.
So on the personal side of the business,
I was spraying everything down,
just really not sure,
I don’t think anyone really understood what
coronavirus was at the time,
as much as they do now.
But yeah, so we had to change the immediate services that we had.
We had to just limit them to immediate family.
At one point, there was a limitation of 15 people in the building or during the service
or 10 or something of that nature and I kind of had a hard time with that because I just
came from the house and there was 25 people there,
all the grandkids and they were all
hanging out with grandpa.
And so I really didn’t follow that very well.
I just did,
I made sure that they were immediate family,
I limited them to immediate family.
But we had to do some things different and Michael was involved and helped me get set
up with live streaming and some different technology things that we implemented.
Yeah, initially lots of those gaps get filled in with technology.
Were those things,
were any of those things you were already doing,
was that just completely
starting from ground zero on that stuff or what did that look like?
Yeah, well I had a video camera and that was about it.
And so yeah, it was brand new, brand new.
Heard of live streaming,
heard of live streaming funerals,
just had no interest,
had no need for it.
Probably that’s more need,
I didn’t have any need for that at the point.
Yeah, we tended I think at that moment really to think of all those things as
basically
physical.
You know I think of funerals here where we may have run a copy of it on DVD for an aunt
or an uncle or somebody who couldn’t be there.
But generally you always thought of those as kind of in-person events.
So what would you say changed,
was there anything that changed in the content or the style as
those services got smaller?
Did you see more cremations where they said we’ll do a service later or did you see people
maybe the idea of putting off the service till some point in the future where they could
get back together again?
Yeah, we’ve seen the whole gamut.
We’ve seen the whole gamut,
people not doing services and waiting till this past summer
and then when the time comes,
there’s been enough time that’s kind of taken the immediacy
of the need to have a service.
The immediate emotional need to have a service to kind of get through the immediate grief
to be able to have your grief shared and with the community.
Those started with good intentions but it got to the point at some instances in the
summer where it’s been four months and it didn’t necessarily occur.
But we’ve seen the whole gamut,
I’m not sure if the cremation has increased.
I think the value of the funeral itself,
the need to have something,
I think that kind
of may have reignited with some people.
If that makes sense.
There’s such a sense of closure in that and in some ways that’s kind of the doorway to
the finality of saying goodbye and then the entrance to the process of getting into that
new normal or living into that new reality and I can imagine without that funnel it changes that for people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I imagine that a family that did decide we’re going to do it later and then maybe circumstances
changed or whatever, that there would be a new kind of grief maybe even in that,
a kind of regret that we didn’t do the thing that we said we were going to do four months ago.
I wonder, you worked so closely with families,
especially in that sort of crisis moment.
Have you seen our family struggles the same as before COVID or have they changed in some
substantial way?
Have you had to sort of address families differently in this time?
Yeah.
Michael, what initially comes to mind is some regret from families that I’m thinking of
a couple of specific instances where the wife could not take care of the husband anymore.
He was a larger man.
He kept falling down.
She couldn’t care for him and this was out of state and she had to get some kind of reprieve.
She had to get some kind of help and so for a short time she wanted to bring him to a
rehab facility and it was there where he contracted COVID.
He was not very healthy and ultimately died from complications of COVID and she took that
all on herself because she promised him that it was just going to be for a short time and
she’d bring him home and yeah,
she really took that upon herself,
the pain of making
that decision for him and that’s where he met his demise without bringing him back home.
So she felt responsible directly for his death.
So there’s been several of those instances that are new,
I guess.
Grief is as old as the ages but a little bit newer.
I can’t think of the right word but it’s been another dimension that we’ve seen.
Along those lines, Greg,
and I know this isn’t exactly in your field but second-handedly
you’ve dealt with it probably dozens of times.
The reality of people in care centers whose families aren’t getting to interact with them
and who for months maybe on end didn’t get a chance to be with them and see them and
then their loved one ends up dying and they get together with this sense of we haven’t
been able to connect and for people to have to face those last months of their life without
so many of the things that we hope are present in that.
I think as we consider how we hope to exit the world,
most of us would say surrounded
by my loved ones and as people have lived without that,
do you have some sense from
your perspective of what’s that done to people,
what’s that been like for people?
That’s unimaginably difficult.
Yeah, I would agree.
Early on there was a gentleman who passed away in a care facility,
they were on lockdown
and he had some dementia and his wife came every day up to that point and after some
time of his wife not being there,
he was talking around the phone and after 66 years of marriage
was asking his wife if they were getting a divorce because he hasn’t seen her for so
long and for a person that’s suffering from dementia,
that’s their reality and that’s
heartbreaking and on another hand,
we have people come in,
we make funeral arrangements
for their parents or loved ones that have been in a care facility.
Sometimes I forget they have not seen them since March and maybe through a glass,
maybe, but the physical presence it’s been since March and they want to spend time with them
as really as soon as they can because they maybe feel cheated from not being able to spend time.
And unfortunately you’re dealing with a population age-wise that either because of some limitations
of their condition or just because it’s not what they normally do, the technology piece
doesn’t always solve that,
I mean the Zoom calls and the FaceTime.
Some of those folks,
they either don’t know how to do it or don’t want to do it and so
yeah,
that’s fascinating that you say that Greg because this whole kind of movement has been
largely under the heading of trying to keep people safe and prevent sickness but ultimately
prevent death and yet in the midst of that,
there is the reality of death and the changes
that have happened as to how people travel that part of the journey and manage those realities
and I don’t think probably most of us have thought that through unless it’s overlapped
our experience and we’ve had to try and do a funeral or manage some of those challenges
during the time, that’s really interesting.
Yeah, from an organizational standpoint,
in terms of the big picture of your industry,
obviously most funeral homes in the same boat around the same time,
I’m sure like anything else,
some have navigated it better than others.
Is there anything that you see looking back now that
this has forced you to do that you’re in some ways appreciative of or that you think,
hey, we’ve developed some new skills,
we’ve learned some new things and even when this
gets over, whatever over looks like,
we may continue to do these new things.
Anything change for you that you think might be permanent?
Yeah, I think I mentioned some of the technology
pieces and there are certainly some other pieces that we need to get better at and improve on but
I think that’s something that will increase our services to people that are not able to make it.
And has that made it easier?
Things like that initial meeting with the family,
if for instance they’re not able to get in town right away,
I would think something like Zoom or a FaceTime
conference call allows you to maybe do less waiting on the planning,
some of that?
Yeah, it’s funny you mentioned it,
every month I get a notification of Zoom and my monthly payment
because that’s one thing I did do early and in offering that possibility to families,
for the most part,
been very resistant and wanted to come in and meet face to face and
so I’ve not had one Zoom arrangement since the beginning.
I’ve had a couple where they
wouldn’t be on the line where they FaceTimed,
we FaceTimed and did it that way.
So thanks for reminding me I need to cancel that Zoom subscription because I thought that was going
to be a huge thing and so we certainly have the capability of doing it on the free side.
Do you have any sense of what would be behind something like that, Greg?
Is that essentially
a generational thing?
Would that be the case that you tend to be maybe meeting with people who
just aren’t that interested in those things or is that at this point people are just tired of the
need to do those things in person?
Do you have any sense of what drives?
I think it has to do with
wanting to do it in person.
Yeah. That’s been my because the people that have wholly objected
to it are people that certainly could hop on a Zoom call very easily.
Yeah.
Maybe it’s Zoom fatigue,
maybe it’s…
Maybe just the idea and I don’t know if this is particularly Midwestern but just that
some things are important enough that they should be done face-to-face.
I can see that being true.
But you live in an interesting space in that it would be virtually impossible for you to say,
“I deal with this segment of the population or this…” So you’ve had to have people all the way
from terrified of COVID to don’t care about COVID at all and that whole range…
I mean, you can’t draw a circle around your group.
You deal with everybody and everything.
And so, yeah, that’s fascinating that that hasn’t been utilized.
Yeah. Interesting.
Yeah. Along those lines, Greg, you also…
Obviously, your job takes you into the middle of those situations, care centers, hospitals,
hospice care at home.
I mean,
maybe not initially as much,
but certainly over some time in the past year,
you’ve been entering places where you know that that risk is higher personally.
What does that look like for you and your staff?
The masking and has it
changed anything in regard to that part of the process?
Yeah, it probably made us more aware.
I mean, we have a certain protocol we’re supposed to do at every situation of death.
We’re supposed to,
universal precautions,
just assume that everyone that you come in contact with is a potential
spreader or a potential virus or something of that nature.
Yeah. And so, you just make your
proper safety protocols that you do,
that you have in place already,
that sometimes you might
get lax on, but it just reinforces what we already know,
to be honest.
Yeah.
And yeah, we’ve used our
PPEs a lot more than we have probably in the past,
but probably the first month, again,
I bought several gallons of disinfectant just because I knew we would need to be doing that.
And I’m also curious,
Greg, so I’m sure there’s got to be some sort of associations or organizations.
I don’t know how your business is structured sort of nationally,
but have you found some of those,
whether they be national think tanks or have you found some of those national conversations
helpful for the work that you do on the ground or have those organizations struggled to be
supportive to you as an industry, do you think?
Yeah.
No, I think early on,
we knew we needed
to have some PPE.
We need to have larger quality quantities of personal protective equipment,
and our normal sources were not there.
They were run out.
They didn’t have any supplies.
And so, some of our national organizations,
we have been able to get some N95 masks and some
other PPE from them,
knowing that we would need it and couldn’t find it anywhere else.
And so, I feel we’ve gotten pretty good support from our national organizations and state organizations.
Early on,
the World Health Organization put out some things that,
while may be true in a third world country or something like that,
as far as virus containment and preparation,
it was not applicable to modern
funeral services in the US and most industrialized countries.
But yeah, on a national and state level and county level,
we’ve been well taken care of.
Greg, from a professional standpoint,
both
from your perspective and maybe looking through the relationship you have with families who
come in and need your services and your ministry mission to them,
what has been
the most frustrating piece of this for you,
either, again, either professionally or relationally.
You’ve done this long enough to have a system in place.
You have a business and you’ve run that
long enough that in large measure,
you probably were doing things the way you thought they need.
I mean, obviously, we could improve this or change that,
but you largely have had enough
input to think, okay, this is how we’re doing things and kind of be comfortable with that.
And then flip the switch, everything changes.
And now, nearly a year later,
what’s been the part of that that has just been the most challenging, the most,
maybe frustrating, if it’s been that.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, everything.
I’m a guy that
I do not deal with change very well.
And you can only ignore it for so long.
I’ve tried.
I’ve stuffed it in.
I tried to ignore it.
I tried to.
But it feels like I’m grasping at straws
because every service is different the way families do things where we had,
maybe not regimented, we did things a certain way.
And I don’t know.
I feel like I’m very ineffective in dealing with
changes like that.
I feel lost.
I mean, sometimes I feel lost.
Yeah, just trying to navigate.
Just trying to navigate,
trying to figure out what’s the best way to do this.
Where is each family in the whole thing?
Yeah, that’s the other thing.
You have to figure out
where each family is.
Some are,
like you said, the whole spectrum.
We had a service recently,
and one comment that the son made was,
“I’m so sick of COVID.
I’m tired of kissing COVID’s butt,
and I don’t want to do anything different.” And all the way from that extreme all the way to
yeah, we can’t do anything.
And it’s been tough.
I mean, professionally and personally,
yeah, it’s been difficult navigating those waters.
Yeah, that’s really interesting.
One of the reflections that we’ve had here is
that in a place like Iowa and rural Iowa,
where we’ve had some freedom to navigate,
the upside of that is exactly that,
that we’re not locked in.
But what that means is that every single moment is a decision.
The decision’s never made for you in
a place where they say,
“Look, here’s what we’re doing.
You don’t have to sort through that
10 times a day,
50 times a week.” Whereas our ability to kind of have some leeway
creates this constant tension.
And I would say almost exhaustion of just,
“Do I,
okay,
the mask on or off?
Are we distancing?
Are we not?
Are we meeting on Zoom?” And it just creates
this sort of constant uncertainty.
And yeah, I can imagine where that would get really, really tiring.
Yeah. Fatigue would set in.
Have you found yourself, Greg,
turning to a particular place
to find solace and to find some respite from that?
Maybe even a new place in this season?
Yeah, not really a new place,
but I’m a nine for the Instagram.
And it’s not necessarily healthy.
I mean,
it’s not healthy.
I mean,
just to try to block everything out.
I think I go to YouTube,
binge watch YouTube things.
And the most frustrating thing is,
I think,
for me,
is I know the path.
I know
where I need to be to be healthy.
And I find myself kind of,
yeah.
That’s so much of our cultural experience in this moment,
right?
It’s to say that if we’re
reflective, we realize all of the goals we might have set January 1,
2020 got blown into smithereens.
The idea that we know where we would like to be,
what you call healthy,
and then the awareness of
how far those gaps have come,
and the recognition that at some level,
we only have so much energy.
We only have so much stamina that we can apply to a situation.
And even just the awareness of, man,
another YouTube video is itself tiring.
And I wonder if that’s not a reflection that a lot of us share.
I think part of the other reality of that is that at a time that has created
for most of us a lot of stress,
it’s also taken some of our coping mechanisms.
The, hey, should we go out to eat tonight and not think about dinner?
Hey, let’s hit a movie and
put the brain on standby for a couple hours.
Or let’s plan a trip.
Let’s go to Sioux Falls this weekend.
Let’s go golf.
And whatever it is that we have used to manage some of those things
personally,
some of those things have not been accessible to us as well.
So it seems like a
one-two punch in that for a lot of people.
And there’s just nothing easy about that.
That’s really interesting, Greg.
I think a lot of people would resonate with that experience.
Curious Greg, you’re sort of positioned in this interesting place because you deal
professionally with people who are at the end of life.
A lot of those,
I would think, statistically
are older if you were going to put that on a graph.
And yet your family is full of young adults.
And the science,
the medical conversation is the older population is at risk and the younger
population less at risk.
And I’m wondering when you live at that intersection,
what has that been
like for you to see your kids lose some things that you would have hoped for them to see
real pain and need on the other side?
What has that experience been like?
Yeah, yeah.
So like Clint had a senior last year,
and you kind of think of the senior year,
and they’re different milestones.
And the things that they kind of missed out on a little bit.
And I think they are able to cope with that a lot better.
I think kids are more resilient.
I think then some of us older folks projecting on them.
Yeah, when you see,
if I want to understand your
question a little bit better,
I’m sorry, you like talking about,
you see the younger groups,
maybe not taking the threat of COVID as serious as the older generation.
I think Greg,
you
are positioned sort of in the middle of that spectrum of something that
for a group of people is perhaps not as concerning and as serious and
uniquely situated as a parent
to see what that has cost some of them,
what this period has done to them.
On the other hand,
you’re going and collecting bodies of people who have died of COVID and you’re meeting with families.
And most of us have the sort of leeway to live on one side of that imaginary line.
And you have a foot on both sides of that fence.
And I think that is an interesting place to occupy.
Yeah, I maybe look at it a little bit differently.
And I think I have my
professional life in a bubble over here,
my personal life in a bubble over here.
That may not be a very good answer.
So you
can jump back and forth pretty easy.
You can go do the COVID funeral,
everybody wear masks, and then go home and kids friends are over.
And that hasn’t created for you a kind of,
there’s no whiplash in that for you.
There hasn’t been.
Yeah, no,
that’s probably
it’s probably good.
That’s probably some level of anxiety that you wouldn’t need to add to the mix.
So then just you’ve touched on some of this,
Greg, but just as from a personal experience,
and we’ve done a little bit of review,
but coming out of this, is there anything?
I think one of the
things COVID has done for us as we’ve kind of sat home and as we’ve been a little distant from each
other and done some of those things is maybe we
realized that there were things we took for
granted.
Obviously, there are things we missed that we maybe didn’t appreciate as much at the time.
Are there things going forward for you in the hope that as we come into the next couple of months,
things begin to move back in the other direction,
the pendulum begins to swing back.
What does it look like for you?
Is there anything that you personally take out of this and sort of commit to
be more aware of or intentional about?
Is there just anything that you’re bringing out of this saying,
“You know what?
I hope to make this positive in this regard.” Does that make sense?
Yeah,
yeah.
So,
no.
So, I think the first thing that came to mind was just how important community
is and how important touch is,
how important shaking hands or having a shoulder hug or
something.
That’s really important.
I’m not probably the huggiest type,
but I do like shaking
hands and I like having that connection with people.
There’s this ad campaign that Iowa had
several years ago and it was,
“Don’t almost do it.
Do it.” And so,
several times throughout the day,
I’m thinking of different people I should be calling and just saying,
“Hey, how are you?
I know you’ve been kind of isolated and
that’s something that we can do now.” But as far as just the idea
of strengthening the community through touch and through physical presence,
I think that’s important
and I hope to do a better job of that,
I guess, coming out of this.
Yeah, that’s well said.
That’s well said.
Greg, I want to appreciate you and your time.
Thank you for letting us kind of
look through your perspective a little bit.
Again, I think that you are both personally
and professionally in an interesting place to think through some of this experience.
Because on one hand, we’ve all lived with some similar things and then on the other hand,
everybody has a unique vantage point.
And so, thanks for looking from your perspective with us.
We appreciate it.