Kh. Frederica Mathewes-Green: I’m sitting here in Smoots Collision in Reisterstown, Maryland, talking to Joe Canby. Joe, are you the owner of Smoots?

Mr. Joe Canby: Yes, I am.

Kh. Frederica: And for how long?

Mr. Canby: Since 1984.

Kh. Frederica: 1984. We came to St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in 1989. That’s where we met you, and we got to know you very well here at Smoots Collision because, over those intervening years, I had three teenagers, and all of them dinged up cars, and we kept bringing them here. But at this point, you’re kind of semi-retired. You’ve got a lot of free time, you’re working on your other line, which you call a ministry. I always thought it was unusual that you work on car bodies here, and in your ministry you’re a funeral director. Tell me a little bit more of that, because what you do is not exactly what you would get if you just walked into a funeral home and bought their whole services. What is your ministry as a funeral director?

Mr. Canby: Well, my ministry is that it’s my goal to bring the funeral back into church, with a church community participating in the funeral. How many times have you walked up to somebody and said, “Is there anything I can do?” Well, someone walks up to me and says that, I’ll find something for him to do. Our record number of people participating in a funeral was 58, where they were cooking the food, picking up relatives at the airport, handling flowers, answering the phones at church. It’s just everyone gets the sense of doing something and taking care of the family who is obviously not in a condition to take care of themselves at that point.

Kh. Frederica: What’s better about this for people than [when] you go to your commercial, franchise funeral home and buy their whole slate of services? How is what you do different?

Mr. Canby: What I do differently is we do not mark up caskets. In other words, what they are, what they cost from the casket supplier is what the people pay for them. This is because we have no overhead. My overhead is my briefcase, and we will hire services out to funeral homes that perform the embalming if necessary and supply the hearses if necessary, whatever. So we have no fixed expense. We are acting as professionals. Our job is to guide you through this process, not for it to cost you a fortune. We know where to go, what to do, [whom] to talk to. Whereas you will experience once every 13 years in your family, we experience it twice a week. And we know [whom] to talk to, where to get the right services at the right kind of prices.

Kh. Frederica: You’re not a totally freelance funeral director; you’re affiliated with…

Mr. Canby: Yeah, in the state of Maryland, I have to be affiliated with a licensed funeral home. I’m a licensed funeral director, and I work with Mike Barsal, who owns a funeral home. We’ve known each other for 30 years, and he allows me to do our things through his funeral home. We operate off of his price lists, and then we show the people according to the law what we have to do. And then I deal with the people and offer the services at cost and goods at cost.

Kh. Frederica: Some of the things that we’ve been interested in at Holy Cross Church was returning to a more 19th century or earlier way of approaching funerals, where it’s church-based, family-based, a minimum of artificial intervention, avoiding embalming in some cases, using a plain pine casket. We were surprised to learn that there’s not a lot of state laws. You don’t have to have embalming. You don’t have to have a vault.

Mr. Canby: That’s correct. There is no law in the state of Maryland says you have to be involved. We say that there’s a law of common sense, but other than that, that’s it. The only requirements to have a vault or a liner are cemetery requirements, not state law. In fact, the only thing it prevents you from burying somebody in your backyard are zoning regulations.

Kh. Frederica: I remember you told us once that the only law in Maryland is 18 inches of dirt.

Mr. Canby: 18 inches of dirt on top of the casket, yes, and in a correctly zoned area. And people don’t know that. There’s a lot of people out there telling a lot of stories, a lot of people. Our biggest problem nowadays is the commercial, large corporations that are buying up the cemeteries and buying up the funeral homes, and they have commissioned salesmen selling to people.

Kh. Frederica: Oh, it’s like buying a car. And people are so vulnerable. They’re emotionally distressed; they just want it over very quickly.

Mr. Canby: They are, and they can spend $5,000 at the cemetery before you even get to a funeral. And a lot of these monies are monies that you don’t have to spend. There are cemeteries that don’t have those kind of requirements. I had a deacon at the church we buried last year, and, as an example, we paid $1350 to dig the hole, we spent $900 for a vault, we spent $125 vault-handling fee, $295 administration fee, and then they’d already bought a $2200 monument. We haven’t had a funeral yet! And that’s just the…

Kh. Frederica: That’s a lot of money!

Mr. Canby: That’s a lot of money, and right next door to it was another, very nice cemetery that had none of those requirements.

Kh. Frederica: Oh, really?

Mr. Canby: And that cemetery was right next door, a very nice cemetery, been there just as long as the commercial cemetery, and the fees would have been less than half.

Kh. Frederica: Really. I know that sometimes we’ve had you handle a number of funerals for us at Holy Cross, and we’ve tried to go without the embalming sometimes. As you say, the law of common sense, but I think you’ve told us that you could maybe go 48 hours as long as the weather’s cool, as long as you keep the air conditioner up high at the church. So they’re brought from the hospital or wherever they died to you to be cleaned up a little bit, and then into the church, and staying in the church until they’re taken to the cemetery.

Mr. Canby: There are a lot of conditions that affect that, temperature, for one, the condition of the remains. Obviously, people die of different things. We also have a duty to the public to not expose the public to any nasty things or diseases and so forth and so on. So we have a responsibility there also, but that’s what we’re trained to do, so we’ll know whether it’s safe or not, whether to keep the lid closed or open it. We could do a lot, a lot of things.

Kh. Frederica: Why did you… It’s unusual for somebody to be interested in going into becoming a funeral director. What was it that attracted you to this line of work?

Mr. Canby: Actually, it was a dare. I went to work for a funeral home when I was 17 years old, and my own father and his friend got inebriated and said I didn’t have what it took to become a funeral director, which ended up being a challenge for me, so actually I have fulfilled all the requirements—the schooling, the apprenticeships—and you can’t become licensed as a funeral director until you’re 21. I had all the requirements except for being old enough. Therefore I had to wait to become 21 years old, and I was the youngest licensed funeral director in Maryland at the time.

Kh. Frederica: Did you have to overcome fear or revulsion? I mean, there’s a lot of things that people think about who haven’t done this work.

Mr. Canby: Actually, starting the job in the funeral home was a summer job, and I had never dealt with a deceased person before in my life. One of the first things they did, they needed someone to go to St. Agnes Hospital with another gentleman and pick someone up. I had never touched a dead body before in my life. So there I was, 17 years old, in a black wagon going to St. Agnes Hospital, and went inside this great big cooler, and here was the Rev. Asher.

I’ll never forget his name. I don’t remember very many names, but I’ll never forget this guy. He died in the emergency room, so he’s fully clothed in his suit and everything. The other funeral director said, “Well, grab a hold of his ankles.” And I said, “Oh, well,” and I did. And he had been in that cooler all night long, and that cold went through my fingers, up my arms, across my shoulders, and down my torso. That was my first experience.

Kh. Frederica: In the Orthodox Church, often we have an open casket as you know, and everybody lines up to kiss the deceased as they leave. And there’s something about that cold, that it is a cold, like marble. It really does go through you.

Mr. Canby: It’s something you’re not used to. When you touch somebody, they’re warm, 98 degrees. And the person who’s deceased is the temperature of the room or, if we just came from the hospital, they’re even colder than that. That is a shock.

Kh. Frederica: I think one of the things that’s impressed me is that, and perhaps for people who don’t have faith, in this line of work, one might think you’d shield yourself by becoming hardened, calloused, or sarcastic about it, but a story you told me years ago was about a widow who had wanted her husband’s grave moved, because it was a downtown cemetery and there was a fence around the corner, but it was a bus-stop corner and people were spitting and throwing trash on the grave, so she wanted it moved further inside the cemetery. I remember you said…

Mr. Canby: I think she wanted it moved to a different cemetery.

Kh. Frederica: That’s probably even smarter.

Mr. Canby: Ayuh. We had to do a disinterment.

Kh. Frederica: You did the disinterment, and as the coffin was lifted up, some fluids began to run out of it. And I remember you said, “Talk to the widow. Distract her. Get her looking at something else. I don’t want her to see this.” And I was impressed, because I thought you’ve never seen her before or since; she’s just a client; she’s not going to hire to you bury a different husband. But it was just instinctive that you wanted to protect her from something.

Mr. Canby: My job is to make the experience as less-painful as it could possibly be. I’ll take the heat; I’ll do what I have to do to protect her.

Kh. Frederica: You lost your dear wife, Kathie. Was it March a year ago?

Mr. Canby: Year and a half.

Kh. Frederica: Year and half, March of ‘08. This was, I guess, the profoundest loss in your life, maybe the first really immense loss in your life. Now you’re living through what a lot of people, a lot of your clients, have lived through. Has this changed the way you look at your business?

Mr. Canby: Absolutely not. Kathie and I, of course, had been living the funeral experiences for 40 years. We were married for 41 years. And we knew what each other wanted to do, and she had also experienced the death and dying with me through the years. The faith we have… She’s just gone for me; she’s not gone.

Kh. Frederica: Good way to put it.

Mr. Canby: I physically can’t touch her any more, but I can talk to her every day. In fact, I do. The people of my parish have stepped up. I’m going out to dinner twice a week with different families, and they have kept me part of it, to be part of the church community. I noticed that before, that a lot of people, once you are accepted into a community as a married couple, and you’re treated like a married couple for years and years and years, people don’t know how to handle it.

Kh. Frederica: Yeah, that’s true.

Mr. Canby: They don’t know what to do with you. We knew what to do with you as a couple, but what do we do with you by yourself? And a lot of people stepped up to the plate and are taking care of me. I’m loving life.

Kh. Frederica: You’re a lovable guy, I think. You’re funny and you’re extroverted. I remember something that we used to do at St. Peter’s that was a great fund-raising idea. Everybody would donate to the church their junk, what they used to call a white elephant, things you couldn’t possibly use. Then we’d have an auction, and you would play auctioneer. And everything that came to your hand, you would make up something. Everybody was laughing. They’d start bidding against each other, and they had a great evening, and it was because of the buoyancy of your personality that that was so much fun.

Mr. Canby: Well, you know, you have to have fun doing things in life, and if you can help other people at the church by doing it, if it’s a talent you have, use it. Everyone should take the talent they have in life… One of my talents is being a funeral director. I’m taking that and using it to help people. I don’t even make any money at it. I get what I need out of life by making it happen for other people.

Kh. Frederica: And what you just said is pertinent, because, being owner of Smoots, that supports you. You hardly have to come into the office any more. You could give up being a funeral director, but you do it as a ministry because you care about it.

Mr. Canby: Yes. It’s a license I’ve had for, oh, 45 years. I believe that I can make changes in the funeral industry. I would love to see it become a profession, where people don’t sell anything to anybody. You’d just act like a doctor or lawyer or an Indian chief, and just step in and take over what you have to do to get ‘er done.

Kh. Frederica: A vocation rather than an industry.

Mr. Canby: Right.

Kh. Frederica: I remembered you’d said you’d learned a lesson with your mother’s death, that you should not prepare the body of somebody who’s really close to you.

Mr. Canby: Yes, I made the mistake of handling my father’s funeral. I drove down to Florida, picked him up in the casket, drove him back up, and so forth, and handled just about every detail. And because I was in charge, I blocked out the grief part of it. I was busy. I was actively the funeral director. And at the cemetery, when everybody had left, and I was there with the people to put the vault lid on him, I just stood there and said, “What have I just done?”

Kh. Frederica: Yeah, like you missed it all.

Mr. Canby: I missed the whole thing. I didn’t have a chance to cry. I was too busy taking care of other people who were crying. So when my mother died, I made sure that the funeral director I worked with handled the service so I could experience my mother’s funeral. That was a neat thing, too, because I’m an Episcopalian and I picked up the thoughts or the experiences of a mercy meal, what they have after a funeral.

Kh. Frederica: Oh, yeah, what they have after an Orthodox funeral.

Mr. Canby: I included that in the Episcopal church! In fact, I’ve done it a few times. Actually, it worked out very well. The experience I had with the Orthodox church was that some people knew the deceased from work; some people knew them from home; some people knew them from their early childhood. When everybody gets up and says something about their experience, then everyone in that crowd leaves with a better picture of the whole person.

Kh. Frederica: That’s so true: more rounded.

Mr. Canby: More rounded: this is who this person really was. Now I know something about him outside of work. Great. And my mother died sitting a chair down in Florida. She just was watching her Christmas tree, and her head went to the side, and she died. The people she was going out to dinner [with] actually found her in her chair. So when we brought her back up here, I brought her Christmas tree, with all the Christmas balls on it. At the mercy meal, we set the Christmas tree up, and we invited everybody afterwards, “Take a Christmas ball and think of Mom.”

Kh. Frederica: That’s so sweet.

Mr. Canby: And for my wife Kathie, she had a collection of bears. Hundreds of bears. I gave my children the first choice of whatever bears they wanted to go, and we put the rest out and said, “Anybody here wants a bear? Take one, and think of Kathie.” So that worked out very well, and everybody got something to take home to remember.

Kh. Frederica: I think one of the most extraordinary things that you’ve done is that you’ve volunteered to go to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in your capacity as a funeral director because there were so many corpses. In fact, you picked up a lung infection that was very serious.

Mr. Canby: Yeah, I got pericarditis, which was an infection around my heart, and ended up in the hospital with 1400 cc of fluid around my heart instead of 60.

Kh. Frederica: Oh, wow.

Mr. Canby: It was not a good thing, but there was a job that had to be done down there, and we were called and were part of a disaster-response team in Maryland. So we were lent to the state of Mississippi, because there just weren’t enough people down there to do what had to be done, so you bring in people from other states to do it.

Kh. Frederica: I think for us laypeople, the idea of all the bodies in the wake of that hurricane are about the worst thing we can imagine, and that you would volunteer to go down and deal with this.

Mr. Canby: It was truly an experience, because not only did you have the thousand-or-so people that were killed with the hurricane, but you had the people who were dying of natural causes, the normal amount of people, which added to it, plus the cemeteries down there were blown apart, so we had all these caskets and things all over the place that had to be dealt with, too.

Kh. Frederica: Oh, and flooding, of course.

Mr. Canby: It was a serious mess.

Kh. Frederica: I didn’t even think about that, because in New Orleans all the burials [are] above ground, and you hit that with a tidal wave of water…

Mr. Canby: We were in Gulfport, Mississippi, and Biloxi, Mississippi, and I actually went to New Orleans. I didn’t go down to the Ninth Ward. I got close enough to smell it and didn’t go any further. But I wasn’t assigned there; I just went through curiosity.

Kh. Frederica: I was thinking if people would like to know more or learn more about this, is there a movement called “natural burial” or something? Is there a way they might Google the topic to learn more about it?

Mr. Canby: There are a lot of things going on, some of which—unfortunately, I’m not much of an internet person—but there is the “green funeral,” that’s coming around, with all-natural, with no metal caskets and green fields and GPS markers instead of stone markers, no embalming. I guess you could probably go Google “green funeral.”

Kh. Frederica: “Green funeral.” It sounds like it.

Mr. Canby: See what happens. There is a lot to that. We’re really using up a lot of ground that can’t be used for anything else after you do this cemetery thing. And it’s so expensive. It’s so expensive from the cemetery end of it. It’s unreal.

Kh. Frederica: I think it was you that said this to me, the idea that a lot of people have, and it’s a false idea, that you can literally preserve the body, and that the casket and the vault protect the body. I think it was you that said to me eventually the body destroys the casket.

Mr. Canby: Earth to earth, dust to dust. That’s really for true.

Kh. Frederica: Something that gets in the way.

Mr. Canby: What people don’t realize is the definition of embalming is the sanitation, preservation, and beautification of a dead human body for funeral purposes. It doesn’t say any more than that.

Kh. Frederica: Just to get you through the funeral.

Mr. Canby: It will last a lot longer, but nothing is forever. When you are buried in a casket inside of a vault, okay, eventually the vault will fail.

Kh. Frederica: There’ll be a crack, roots will go through it.

Mr. Canby: You never know. It’s done that. And what’s the guarantee on a burial? That if it goes bad, they’ll give you another one. Oh, well!

Kh. Frederica: If somebody notices this 25, 50 years later.

Mr. Canby: Right. You know, as far as cemeteries being forever—are they? When I was an apprentice, they moved a Roman Catholic cemetery with 25,000 bodies.

Kh. Frederica: Wow.

Mr. Canby: They moved it, because they wanted to build a school.

Kh. Frederica: Oh my!

Mr. Canby: And the bishop came in and unconsecrated the cemetery, and they moved 25,000 bodies.

Kh. Frederica: That’s astounding. That’s incredible.

Mr. Canby: It was totally unreal. There goes your “forever.”

Kh. Frederica: Right!

Mr. Canby: The bishop says it’s unconsecrated, it’s gone. School coming here.

Kh. Frederica: I know that in Jerusalem in the time of Jesus, there was not enough room to bury people; it was too crowded. So they’d gone to this process that’s still used in Greece, I understand, where they put the body on a stone ledge in a cave or in some kind of stone surrounding, marble, and come back a few years later and clean up the bones and then put the bones in a bone box or put the bones to the side. You could keep using that same ledge, putting bodies on top of it.

Mr. Canby: You don’t have to go to Greece. Go to New Orleans!

Kh. Frederica: Do they remove the bones?

Mr. Canby: New Orleans has a very high water table, so you have above-ground burials in mausoleum settings, and one body is put in there, where it is left to decompose, and when another body is ready, years later, they push the first one through to a common pit and put another one in.

Kh. Frederica: “A common pit.” I had no idea.

Mr. Canby: Yeah, in the back of the mausoleum. Right. That’s what’s available.

Kh. Frederica: Golly. That’s like really not permanent. You’re mixed up with everybody else.

Mr. Canby: There are different practices around the world. There are books that you can read that your jaw would drop. In Tibet or Mongolia, there’s some place where they actually have monks that feed the deceased people to birds, to vultures. That’s their job.

Kh. Frederica: Oh my goodness. Ooh.

Mr. Canby: There’s a Mongolian tribe that, a person dies in the village, they leave the body, move the village.

Kh. Frederica: Wow! Travel light, I guess. You’d get in the habit of not keeping very much. You just leave the body and keep going. And I think it was the Zoroastrians that were kind of similar to the vulture thing. They would put the body up on a high ledge or a tower and let the birds of prey eat it, and that was seen as honoring it: you put it close to the sun, and you’re delivering it back up into the air again.

Mr. Canby: The American Indians did that. A body will decompose fastest in air and above ground. Then water, then below ground.

Kh. Frederica: And below ground slows it the most, but eventually…

Mr. Canby: Eventually, it is what it is.

Kh. Frederica: Eventually, it becomes dust again. I read a book where he said, “We’re vigorously recycled.” Good image. We eat at the top of the food chain, and then we’re eaten by worms; go right back to the bottom.

Mr. Canby: As Christians, this is only a shell that’s carrying me around. I don’t need it after I’m gone out of it. You can have it. When the Holy Spirit… and I’m not using it, you can have it, you know.

Kh. Frederica: We’ll donate ourselves back to the good of the earth, and hopefully in a green condition rather than a chemically preserved, partially preserved condition.

Mr. Canby: You could grow a lot of vegetables with this massive body that I have here. Use it for fertilizer.

Kh. Frederica: Oh, Joe, thanks so much. Was there anything you wanted to talk about or that I forgot to ask.

Mr. Canby: Not really. It’s just you try not to toot your own horn. I would love to do my thing silently, but if I’m silent all the time about what I do, nobody would hear about it, and we couldn’t do it that often. So I would rather say, “This is out there.”

Kh. Frederica: I’m hoping this’ll be…

Mr. Canby: You can get in touch with me by contacting the clergy who know about me, and they’ll get in touch with me.

Kh. Frederica: All right.

Mr. Canby: In fact, that’s what happened. You started at the Episcopal church, and Fr. Gregory went to the Orthodox church. I think I’ve done all of the funerals from that church.

Kh. Frederica: I think you have.

Mr. Canby: Then the Russian church found out from the Antioch church. Next thing you know, I’m burying a lot of Russian people. Now they’re going to… One clergy hears about it, another clergy hears about it: “Hey, this is the best thing since baked bread.”

Kh. Frederica: Well, this is the thing I’m thinking about: You’re doing presentations at churches, and several Orthodox churches now.

Mr. Canby: Educating the populace is what we have to do. Remember, you’re going to experience death once every 13 years, and for 12 years, 364 days, you’re not going to think about it. So therefore, it comes, smacks you right in the face—“What do I do now?”

My idea at a church group is to get people talking. All I could [do is] get a table of people talking about [it]. I said, “This is the time we can laugh about it, talk about it, discuss it. Your kids’ll know what you want to do.” When somebody dies, you think, “I’m going to get [her] the best. I’m going to do everything I can for Mother.” Well, there’s nothing you do for Mother; Mother’s with God. What we’re doing in a funeral we’re doing for ourselves. So there it is.

Talk about it ahead of time, and you’ll find out. Mother: “Oh, I don’t want all that. I just want this, I want that.” And everybody has a picture in their mind then that differs from all this copper caskets and vaults and whatever of stuff. I’ve had some real interesting comments from people, what they’d like me to do. And I say, “Well, if that were legal, we could probably do it, but I don’t think it’s legal.”

Kh. Frederica: When people choose for themselves, they pretty much want the minimum. They don’t want to be chemically preserved.

Mr. Canby: I have never actually spoken to anybody who’s said, “I want the biggest and the best.” Anybody who’s ever brought it up: “Oh, no. When I’m gone, use the money to send the kids to college. Don’t put it all in the ground for me.” And, hey, that’s basically what everybody really feels. We get a guilt complex, saying, “I want to do everything,” and basically, it’s not what people want to do anyway.

Kh. Frederica: Do it beforehand. I think that’s the lesson. Say what you need to say.

Mr. Canby: You know, there’s two ways you can do it. Discussing it and writing it down, so everybody knows, and you keep a record of it. You can keep a record of it at church, with another relative. No money has to change hands, but: “I want this, I want that: very simple casket. I want to be buried in that cemetery.”

Or you could do what’s called a “pre-need funeral,” where you actually go and have it all selected, picked out, and paid for with either funds or insurance, and it protects the pricing of it. In other words, you’re not going to die for 20 years, but here’s basically what I want and it costs this much now, and that policy or whatever it’s in advances in value, so by the time you die, the funds, it’s already paid for and it’s caught up. It’s just a different thing.

Kh. Frederica: You have so much wisdom and experience about all of this. I know listeners are trying to write everything down. Since you do give talks at churches, would you be open to pastors around the country phoning you and asking you to come out and give a presentation?

Mr. Canby: Yes. In fact, in Maryland I can’t solicit churches. It’s against the state law for me to do that, but I can go anywhere I’m invited.

Kh. Frederica: Oh, that’s great. Well, what’s the best way for them to reach you?

Mr. Canby: Actually, since I said I’m not much of an internet person, I do have an email, but my people at the collision shop read it for me because I don’t go there. They can give me a call at my home and leave a message, and I’d be glad to call them back. Just leave a message and I’ll get back. If I don’t answer, I will get the message and call you back.

Kh. Frederica: That’s very kind of you, Joe. Well, that was great. I enjoyed talking to you today.

Mr. Canby: It’s always a pleasure.