long life time of frustration. at eighty five years old in thomas' old what trains as hard as anyone and. i feel so good i feel fresh i punch this side and this side like this and like that i really love this i don't like things like soccer because i will bring these ladies are tough and i take their training very seriously. don't you feel a. little more energetic you feel more alive. with al-jazeera has eyes and ears on the ground in southern africa identifying the crucially important stories for the audience that's incredibly diverse. you're watching of his arrives the whole raw but these are all top stories the u.s. but syrian forces of finally retake of the city of raka from eisel fighters

a kurdish y p g flag has been raised inside rocker stadium but after the last debate the eisel fighters were forced out rocker was one of the last holdouts for i saw its full back up little shell has a ball for beirut. the capture of rockabye i saw in two thousand and fourteen was held by the arm as a major achievement back then i said it demonstrated its strength as it continues to expand across syria and iraq. it declared its capital in syria setting up courts prisons and other institutions but all of this was against the will of the people. i saw emergence in the cartels a huge blow to the syrian opposition and the free syrian army who had previously controlled the area their fighters were forced to retreat and president bashar assad was able to validate his claim that his troops were fighting what he called terrorists and not legitimate opposition in turn an international coalition was formed to fight the group led by the united states and in coordination with russia

whose forces had been sent into syria to help prop up the flailing regime the coalition and russia launched hundreds of air strikes in a bid to defeat eisel but many civilians were killed in the process on the ground the offensive to expel eisel from iraq i was being led by the y.p. g a kurdish faction supported and armed by washington while they managed to make large advances that true was at the expense of the syrian opposition who accuse the group of expelling the indigenous arab residents in order to pave the way for future kurdish states. why p.g. has links with the kurdistan workers party or p k k an armed group in turkey which i care considers to be a terrorist organization some editor analysts believe that despite the y.p. g.'s success in expelling eisel from iraq the group will not be able to achieve its goal of autonomy see that the kurds and the y p g definitely are overstretched

they could buy an area that they constitute a minority of twenty five to thirty percent compared to seventy percent now that i saw has been pushed out from the many will declare the end of the armed groups but others disagree we are witnessing. the. but that doesn't mean i will be destroying. remain. cells in syria and lebanon i saw is not an ordinary group its methods are both horrifying and unconventional it doesn't have a membership process for example anybody who wants to kill or maim can do so and then attribute those attacks to the group and that's what makes defeating i saw seem so impossible now whilst expanding its members from iraq is significant the reason need to deal with the root causes that push young men to join such a group. well kurdish forces are suffering huge totoro losses in

iraq a day after government troops seized the northern city of kirkuk they were withdrawn from the tells of sin jarba more. as well as giving up control or several on oil fields. the philippine president says his military has liberated the southern city of morale we have to five the battle against us a link to fighters present rodriguez eternity's says the city has been freed from what he called terrorists but his military says fighting is still could. the taliban says it's responsible for a suicide bomb attack that killed at least thirty two people at a police training center in afghanistan's paktika province a car with explosives was detonated outside the compound the u.n. says the number of refugees refugees who fled violence it would be about has risen to five hundred eighty two thousand the global body released a drone video to highlight the scale of the bax exodus of refugees to bug laddish

their escape military crackdown on iraqi state of the funerals of also be held for twelve or hegira few g.'s half of the children they drugged where that overcrowded boat capsized at the bay of big gold they are badly desha fishing village those were the headlines of the back with more if thirty minutes we continue on al jazeera with al-jazeera correspondent. once you've taken over these businesses in these small towns you are locked in for your career however many decades i last. i want to know his motivations in getting

into the business i would like to know the conversations he had with my grandpa how he felt he realized this trend in our family i want to know what it was like for him when he first began working earnestly in the business if it was hard for him to get over these more difficult parts of it that i feared growing up if there was times where he doubted what he was doing if you could do it all over again would he do it said thank god it's possible say yes but these are real questions for him of course because he had the same experience i had he grew up in the same dynamics like. who else would be able to relate more to our feeling than him.

i was so surprised he's teachers see parents going to sears. he read it probably would have wanted to be a hockey player. that's funny because that's what dad says he would have wanted to do if he wasn't your record but lack of skills. my family's own a funeral home in our small canadian town of st thomas for over ninety years it may seem strange to grow up around death but for us it was a part of everyday life. i'm the first son in four generations not to become

a funeral director my decision has weighed heavily on i worry about what it means for the future of my family's funeral. do you think for the service today i don't know if we had to register but just down to the right there at the right you go and you know you get here you can see it if you like to sign the register book and i'm like to going to visit with the family this is our son this is blake and so next generation going in the same no he's a producer with a new story so that's what we are conservative yeah so different business yes yes he's mr smart fresher than a here. my grandfather was brother paul petersen oh ok oh ok sure yeah we had to register but just on the right she mentioned it was a waltz far yeah that was one of the it was the sentence to life serve your family have also made it all go. by and asked if anyone could sing and no one was able to know someone's going to and why not someone in the family and. she

really meant to me the window that she was loving. caring and she sings sung to grandma. great grandma as the artist down heard her you. know your hair nothing there. ever you. think you. are a wound to the. oh. well not. for highly we got lucky because like i did maybe i have.

already heard that that you know that you know i mean if you're really going to say . that you know. it was very nice you know it was very nice and they're really really well all right i'm going to change ok because it's ludicrous that i'm in the city. and i was in high school i would help with visitation so holding the door helping to show people where to go and then other than that around the business like helping with the lawns and washing the cars and putting on the suit being in the funeral it was kind of maybe a little glimpse of what it might have been like avoided if if i had done that job i wouldn't say i'd five years old and look at the businesses that are doing that so it was i felt rather different things i was always very interested in history it was the idea of the power of witnessing moments well history is made of. this was my childhood bedroom this is where i would be asleep in the middle of the night when my dad would get a phone call to hear footsteps and see the light underneath the door he would walk

. from his bedroom over here through this hallway to the bathroom to get ready get dressed and we were very aware that he was going to put a student that he was going to go outside in the cold and that he was going to go pick up a dead body i have very striking memories of our funeral of my aunt jennifer grew up around the funeral and also moved away from st thomas they called it the bassem one of the battling it was gallant we called it the funeral home but i think that's right you're right that it is the act and it has all these like intercom buttons and we call them the bow and you have to do and and whatever called whatever hour the day whatever you're doing it when you have to and that's perfect actually we were maybe we were back to. that phone ringing it still sparks a little moment of things i wish everybody stopped everybody be quiet when i'm home briefly however briefly the phone rings i got up as vacillated it's a strange thing. i'd be interested to know how he prepared himself to do this work

because i don't think he was actually built for it just like i don't feel like i was actually built for. i'm going to talk to call and haskett a young funeral director in a neighboring community he's around my age and in a way i feel like he provides a glimpse of what my life might have been like if i decided to become a funeral director this is my great great grandfather charles haskett and then his son which is william haskett and then well you had two boys clarence and then my father bill so there are six funeral directors in five generations thankfully we're all passionate about it and i think that's for family businesses get into trouble is when people feel obligated if you love what you do and it's easy to keep a clear direction and we're all on the same path so this is my very grandfather's our family used to transport the deceased by horse and buggy i'm kind of allowed to say that i don't wear hats like that and i don't transport people by horse and buggy anymore when i was four years old i made the decision that i was going to be

a funeral director and at that time it was because my dad had two separate riding lawn mower city used to cut the cut the grass at the funeral home and i thought what a cool thing to be able to drive two different lawn mowers it was for as well when i kind of realised for the first time there was this trend in our future home it was my great grandfather started the funeral home in one hundred twenty six and then my grandfather and my father and every generation there was one boy born in every generation they did it and i was four years old when i'm like wait a second great grandpa grampa dad do i have to do this and from the moment i first asked that question my dad always said you don't have to do this you can whatever makes you happy you can do if you want to be if you're a director that's fantastic but if you want to take a different path that's that's fine too so i don't know maybe if you've had riding lawnmowers i would have i would have been i would have been a better selling point what do you think the stereotype of a funeral director is black suit dark tie and white shirt and you know maybe not very. personable and certainly not very comforting and you know just sort of this

this creepy this creepy image of someone that deals with the dead every day and that's certainly not how i would describe myself at all i'm far more suited to dealing with the living than i am the dead and it's just the ability to do both which makes me go to a job i'm just the guy that lives down the street that doesn't know how to build decks but i do know what to do when your mom dies ok that would be great and if there's anything that comes down i will let you know and you have my telephone thank you very much but did you have a direct line from the funeral home to your home growing up you are standing in my better this is where i grew up really yeah we were very much have a direct life i believe very strongly that my number one goal and my number one job is to stay in business we're increasing our reception facilities and we're having different types of receptions and we're selling alcohol and that's not necessarily

because that's exactly what i want to do i just want to make sure that we remain profitable so that we can continue to do what it is that we love to see if i can pull something out here we've got all kinds of different options and now you can get rings you can get type pens you can do cough links this is actually d.n.a. keepsake so lots of different options. i have done some neat things with the cremated remains we have put people in their taco boxes in their recipe boxes actually we have someone here that was just placed in their cowboy boot as an urn i had a gentleman the strangest one yet every night before you went to bed he had a bowl of ice cream with his granddaughter so he is in a nice cream tub people are tired of what we would refer to a cookie cutter funeral a lot of us in southwestern ontario are smaller operations family businesses we have some larger corporations coming after the independent funeral homes on our own

us would survive in this business for certain. what we decided is if we could do it collectively then we can all do a good job and that's exactly what we've done with. cremation is becoming increasingly popular but loved ones are rarely present i have never witnessed a commission myself. i grew up around the funeral home i've been to the funeral home. constantly my

whole life i've saved. more bodies that i could remember in the setting up in the in the made room of the funeral home with made up it suits with with flowers and framed photographs but maybe it's the volume maybe it's being here and within the last few minutes just seeing so many bodies coming in from from from the region. i think that i could have done it. the men who tend to this long process tell me the last muscle is that.

occasionally i would bring stress home from work. it didn't happen very often did it but it did happen and i'm the first to admit that it did happen and i can't believe there's not a few a director out there that it hasn't they haven't brought it home and so but there was a quote in and and blake said in the article my sister used to yell back at him if he would explode because maybe we were too loud when he just got off the phone or and and i would just take it and but his quote was. we knew we were not the. source of his anger and anger that much and it didn't take much to know what was he knew i had brought home from the funeral home right. growing up i saw firsthand the

toll funeral service took on my father many of his days were spent helping other people through the worst days of their lives we saw the side of it that wasn't always great and he dealt with it very well but there were times that it was stressful if you asked me at those moments you know you want to be found out or i'd say hell no there are circumstances that happened here that i feel like walking out the back door when the family are walking in the front door the thing that's going to make me retire is families not agreeing and i mean absolutely not talking to each other and probably after the service is over i never talking to each other again. so you're on the way to the hospital. oh ok. yeah. we'll do is all.

i think since you're on the way there and. you won't be released tonight i don't think from the hospital so all the phone can ring anytime you can ring at nine fifteen i can with three o'clock one it's a release for your dad his you expressed what he. had wanted to so you know well again my condolences to you and all i'll call them in the morning. you know people call because they're ready so. when i think about the connection of brennan the funeral home i think about the fact that he had this cool parking lot where everyone just play i could play hockey and they they stored the nets in the garage. all right. but you can do old wooden sticks they don't make them like this anymore those gloves the whole big thing. for you if you do it are two of them. were.

you walked in the house all right we pushed hockey ok over it when. i've been playing hockey sense i was probably seven eight years old i played travel hockey for many many years my dad missed yours were a few games of mine he taught me how to play goal right between their house and the funeral home. after i wear is a tribute to my dad but i was also born in one nine hundred fifty eight this was my playground this is this was where you know i grew up you know i learned to play tennis i assume that my parents always knew that i want to be a film director but we really never sat down i mean i heard about from my high school counselor that oh i guess parents going off to humber to take funeral service i never i guess assume that they knew but quite frankly i thought i was going to be a professional hockey player or

a professional tennis player but i think lack of talent sort of got in the way we're going to go in the funeral right. and who goes in there you know and. so here you go. you know what my grandfather's name was. leonard. and you know what leo leo was short for leonard. good job. i was all here you're like kasey here. you. know life here you know there's to understand when there's no ghosts here no ghosts here there's no ghosts

here i remembered as a kid being so so afraid by that idea of like are you fraid of the being around the dead people i forgive the bodies i guess i'd seen like you know zombie movies or monster movies or something and a member and just being again it was just like a lightbulb is just like well no because they're dead like to be more free of the mailman for example then you should be of the dead body in the in another room because the living people going to are you dead people cannot hear you this is not a monster movie this is real life. oh oh oh oh you're on phone or that i can't help but wonder if perhaps one day when will develop a passion for this profession where i didn't. do you. i did. my dad since i was you know is eleven or twelve years old he would send me on errands that would include sometimes going to doctors' offices to sit and wait in their office until a. certificate was signed and i see this was there that was

a doctor's office at one time there were. doctors and corners there i think companies came through here movie stars came through here when they were on the trains and there's a platform as side. there's another film director this is mr this is this is mr allen is it. alan's dad actually the premise for my grandmother that there's ago your father was best man at my father's wedding i think i did know that yes i read yeah winter. i mean it's funny you say but i think there was more of an expectation that the son would take it over and i never felt pressured but did i feel a sense of obligation i would i would say yeah having the family business and this is a provide such an impactful service to the community was kind of a badge of honor that people knew our business really you could own a printing shop people might not know your business but sifton second funeral home you know took care of my grandmother's funeral that's

a bond to people for the for life kind of thing i was proud to be a sifton i know grandpa he really felt that it was a calling and that's that's the way i've always liked upon it with me i i know this was something i was meant to do i mean i can't say right now for you diving how much it just was a relief to come in and know that we were amassed and he was so gentle and it was just like talking to a friend don't worry about that i got that look dr don't feel you've got to look doctor i don't know how many times i had people say to me your dad helped me through a really tough time behind the doctors. they could see your dad and grandpa walk in my dad that sense of humor joke or that he was said oh yes here comes the two undertakers to take me home she was really my first hero and i guess i wanted to be like him and i tried that. here we are nine hundred twenty six the year

we were founded my great grandfather founded our funeral home after serving in the first world war he served with this cousin who was killed in action and awarded the victoria cross for valor my family believes that my great grandfather's experience of witnessing mass death and seeing his cousin buried in mass graves instilled in him a desire to provide dignity for others when the time comes i definitely want this funeral home to. family and i want to continue with the same values that. my father carried on and i carried on how important is the name the idea that that's have to remain a name in this community is well. it's very. also care about what our name stands for and that's one of the reasons i still struggle with my decision. i thought you

know. i'm ready for a real force and that's your favorite. thanks for having. your. record heard. you're. not. mine therefore i was wrong there is no reason. you know what grampa thought about me not becoming a funeral director deciding to be a hero they don't think about who i think you realize that. everybody should make their own decisions and i think that i don't think it bothered lola never heard him say he was always so well he's got two books on you is very proud of you of all his grandchildren i think of my burgeoning drano with career you enjoy being

a journalist i don't doubt my decisions i still felt like there was some kind of family responsibility that maybe i'm a grandfather an in your dad would say no you must you must do the what you'd like to do yourself and that your be happy and i come from a farm background i think those farms are all begun in i'd say they won't be long i don't feel badly i think that that's progress in other words we all we all make their own decisions i love you. you shouldn't feel guilty and that makes me feel sad to think that you there's even an ounce of guilt what do you do when you're at a funeral you tell stories that's the thing you're continuing i don't know if you can think about it that way and frankly i think who knows what's going to happen right i mean everything's changed so fast maybe it'll be one of those industries that stays very much the same because we all want that close emotional connection or maybe you know the future will be very different.

i was pretty good. in the final part of a six part series filmed over five years. the people of new can still fight for their land. the village chief is imprisonment. and forced underground the filmmakers become part of the soccer. crackdown concluding. china's democracy experiment at this time does interact

i really felt liberated as a journalist when i was getting to the truth as i was that's what this job. as we embrace new technology is rarely do we start to ask what is the price of this progress what happened was he was started getting sick but there was a small group of people that began to think that maybe this was related to the kind of frustration the job and investigation reveals how even the smallest devices deadly environmental and health we think ok we'll send our you waste to china but we have to remember that air pollution travels around the globe death by design at this time on al-jazeera. the whole robert these are all top stories the u.s. backed syrian forces of the retake of the city of raka for myself fighters

a kurdish flag has been raised. to the last remaining myself fighters were forced out rocket was one of the last. days for the capital kurdish forces all suffering huge territorial losses in iraq a day after government troops seized the north of the city of kirkuk with the tiles of said job a while ago as well as giving control of several oil fields. bill. it is a big huge consternation here the government shops that this is going on and some very big questions being made by the kurdish regional government as to this is happened and interestingly enough the conspiracy theories are running rife was somebody or was there a particular party that was responsible for making this happen with in the k r g the philippine president says his military has liberated the southern city of berar

we have two five but battle against i select fighters present rodriguez says the city has been freed for what he called terrorists but his military says fighting is still could to doing the taliban has is says it's responsible for a suicide bomb attack that's killed at least thirty two people at a police training said to afghanistan's paktika province a car packed with explosives was detonated outside the compound. the u.n. says that a brigade germ refugees who fled violence to be a bar has risen to five hundred eighty two thousand the global body released drove video footage to highlight the scale of the bank's essence of rage or to buy globish there is a billet she cracked on iraqi state israel expected to it plans to build almost two and a half thousand new settlement units forty percent are about to be built east of the separation wall in the occupied west bank. and qatar sabir is visiting sigel

poorest part of a three country tour of east asia shake to be a bit heavy dull tired he is meeting with singapore's president and prime minister to discuss trade a bilateral relations those were the headlines of the dark with the elders they refused it thirty but it's next on al-jazeera we continue with correspondent. the smallest sprout shows there is really no death all goes outward nothing collapses we're committing poetry it's a reading of walt whitman's song of myself thomas lynch is both a writer and a funeral director he is considered the poet laureate of the funeral business i say read write resist and this is what we do i bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass i love if you want me again look for me under your boot soles oh.

thank you my dad always said thomas lynch's bestselling book about funeral service the undertaking is the book he wished he could write like my father thomas lynch took over his father's funeral home in a small town in michigan he recently passed it on to his son morning how are you oh man how you doing a good thing here. right coffee oh he left yeah yeah. but he bought me a bill oh i feel very good right below his grave has been dug so slow you're going over he just refuses to go into it i declared hospice care for the last couple years so i feed him till as you know him very easy cheeses and now i think he thinks i'll go in the grave and he'll state that what happened your attempted coup will work yeah. but it's graves out there filled with snow right now and

someday i hope yacub eyes bill this letter will be ok funeral service has nothing except intimate access to a lot of stories. so i've always been interested in characters and the stories that surround them the narratives being a funeral director in a small town gives you access that is not often shared by other people characters and does exist now in north america kind of take for granted that this is the way things are done but it wasn't going to discuss maybe before the spread of funeral homes how death used to be treated up until that maybe the last fifty years probably even near term the only problem created by a death in the family apart from the ones you could catalogue as you know you know grief and mourning in religious fixations the real problem is the corpse on the floor what are we going to do about this you can't live with that guy something has

to be done somebody has to get a shovel or build a fire or drag the corpse up where the birds will come and get pick the bones clean and it's around those activities whatever it was became by virtue of our you know curiosities holy it was looking into the open ground or the. fire where we would form the essential human questions which are is that all there is can this happen to me why is he cold are we all alone what comes next we process death by processing the dead we move the dead from this station to that station in this. you know this little. community theater that goes on but the movement is important you know you can't stay here because we can't live with a corpse acting as

a pall bearer and carrying the body of a loved one in most cases it is the only actor that remains it seems like in north america we've become quite a distance from death well even that we are entirely a strange from corpses. which to me has always seemed like the essential brief of a funeral is tend to the course people will say well it's really for the living yes but it's by tending to the dead to the living get better good fields one that by getting the dead where they need to go the living get where they need to be in the way that we sort of replicate the movement of someone from the edge of this front here to the edge of the one we can't know that's what if your home doesn't makes that we go with them as far as we can go and then we say. with the brutality of the living you stay i go thanks be to god or whoever's in charge or.

thank you so i thank you very much we haven't had a sunday like this bill in the longest day. caring for one's own dad is common in much of the world but rare in the west in british columbia there is a small but growing home funeral movement that is reconnecting people to the process of tending to the dead like yes ok this is robert smith jones he has been our day person multiple times including for our youtube videos one of those videos and i actually now had over seven hundred thousand hits. so she knew me before i was famous. ok. so the first thing we're going to be doing is carry. ok everyone least three people on each side of my name especially mary one i'm a death major are. the executive director scindia which is an acronym for the

canadian integrated network for death education alternatives which strongly supports families having meaningful choices whenever those are around that i'm also aware can priestess and and actually are dangerous one clothes off yes and wicca has a much stronger focus on the balance between light and dark at home and there is that respect for the cycle of the year in the death house to happen in order for there to be new growth what we're going to work on right now is washing the top part of him there's something that happens between the mind and the body when you're hands on with the body that is what we used to call it in the seventy's at the stall. it's like a whole bunch of things come together much deeper than just sitting by the body or praying or singing or writing

a memorial or something like that but it's also easier to process through to this is now a corpse and our beloved is still with us in our hearts and maybe in spirit but this is just carbs now ok so let's then proceed to washing the body itself most people feel that doing this is their last act of love and it allows the person who's been doing the major caretaking to have that one last time and that it also allows people who haven't been involved in the caregiving to actually participate in that sort of feel like they gave a little bit if i could have someone's help like you help me if you can lead them down. every time i do it. this is my favorite color and this one is being kept for when it's time for me to

sleep in the forever. whatever happens to you after death i know one mother eighteen year old son died and accident right in front of their house and doing the body care was allowing her to step one step over the threshold with her son and that was extatic. i mean yes she would mourn him not being there but that actual process of caring for him was one that was black eyed it isn't just an hour ceremony you. can go in the middle of the night and cry your eyes. that we. are all the things that never got resolved to now. all of those moments become incredibly sacred.

i think that we've become increasingly detached from death i think people don't grieve properly when they try to avoid seeing death. and so i think anything that brings us closer to are dead and to confront our own mortality is positive and helping. this is stunning it's. it's completely quiet and still. for steen and beautiful. yeah i mean it might not be a traditional cemetery with headstones and. rows and flowers and everything but i don't think anybody would object to spending for the rest of eternity here i think i have a very traditional view of funerals and the cemetery is just because the way things are done where i grew up but yeah i don't understand why this is such a rare phenomenon that is a controversial this is an alternative or friend it's just. just beautiful and

peaceful and that's what most people want when they're choosing a cemetery. i think my father would be really moved by the scene and most directors to be honest. hi my name server make day my family and i did a home funeral for our mother though this was her bedroom the night that she passed we were all around her and this is where she stayed for five days so she has an ice pack on her abdomen and she's an ice pack on her head and ice pack under her like the core organs are just like a painting was so many beautiful colors and everything verses just your regular funeral is like dead body general home service ground.

we had so much fun and play with it. and we carried her out the door and we carried her like this and as we're carrying her the ladies are singing in the kitchen. and we just carry her down the stairs and around the corner and then there's a driveway underneath and that's her and i o's ford flex was waiting for her and it was raining and i said she's having her p.c. baptism it's beautiful. she put her in and off we went. from what i've read and what i thought for but with people is that your body sister vehicle right is just what you're here with it was her shell that we were disposing of which we had to write and then her spirit was around with us.

davis is a funeral director who helped deborah with her mother's home funeral her experience working out a corporate on the funeral home led her to embrace alternative practices alongside traditional ones when you first get into funeral service you come in with all these . ideals and thoughts about what you're going to do and how it's going to go and the more experience i had within that corporate environment it just seemed like those ideals weren't able to be realized we were told that we needed to have unlicensed sales people with us when we were meeting with people who were just telling us that you know someone close to them has just died what was their background would come from sales of other. industries there were people who came from car sales for sure photocopiers just whatever their background was if we were

in the selection room looking at ernst and caskets. i felt that their their suggestions were biased you know based on what kind of commission they would get out of that once people have suffered a loss how fair is it to put an employee in a situation where if they don't they can't eat there should be no commission sales at end of life welcome to our snow capital today tom crean is a funeral director and a leading opponent of corporate ownership of funeral homes when you serve people who are bereaved you're serving people who are to me uniquely vulnerable so when a organization the size of wall street comes into that very delicate situation there is an opportunity for people who are more ethically. challenged. to make enormous amounts of money in the city of vancouver and burnaby there are

nine real funeral homes left and the largest chain owns eight of them you think there's an awareness in the public that somebody that you know it was our corporate owner what the difference is between know we've had a law passed where it was required for all with a publicly own funeral companies to put their real name in all their contracts all their signage and all their advertise. the two thousand and nine yellow paint just had their name in about a font of i think point five. the next year but it was there so this is a process called stealth ownership right where you are that's where a corporation is a health ownership or a corporation will buy a family funeral home and then keep that family name so the public thinks that they're still working with an independent family if you know what a reality it's just a part of a of a much larger corporation exactly right yeah the mass takeover of independent funeral homes by corporations is what worries me the most when i think about the future of my family's business you know it's such a critical time it's so important that environment is

a caring and supportive environment. a funeral homes a scary place that's were. dad said. i got the. funeral service you have a choice you can develop a keen sense of humor or become an alcoholic it can be. so he called back a few minutes later and he says jackie your mother's body is in that the morgue my sister's of what do you mean it's not at the morgue and he says well it's not here it's sounds like possibly sci has the body john dental oh-h. and jim halliburton stories share a common thread they say their mothers bodies were both mishandled by funeral homes owned by service corporation international a funeral conglomerate based in texas that has come to dominate the funeral

industry in north america we had planned to have an intimate family service we had planned to do celebration of life later but we never had anything we never had anything she said i literally don't know how to tell you this but mom has been cremated. she was on her way to the funeral home. henri with her mother some clothing. our mum had always taken very good care of herself she always wanted to look great she was a little bit of a fashionista and you know even even in a walker she would want to make sure she had high heels on so the fact that our mother was taken and cremated in the pajamas that she died in and without her teeth . is the part that gets me every time we never knew anything about

a cia or any other of their of their brands we thought it was pleasant valley community local vernon funeral home that's been there for i don't know how many years but i remember seeing it as a kid there's basically three entities in the town and the public doesn't know that they own all three of us so so that so families are going from one to another to another getting prices and wondering why the prices are so difficult he started to push an envelope towards towards me on the table and i started to stand up and i said are you offering us money and he said well you know all this and maybe you could pick pick an urn on the wall and blah blah and i turned to my sister and i said carrie we're leaving now my sister opened the envelope and it was three hundred dollars. can you imagine how insulted you would feel if a check was pushed across the room for you basically telling you that your mother's

death and your mother was worth three hundred dollars i have not after three and a half years been able to grieve over my mother i've been trapped trying to get the word out about what is going on here these are not numbers or statistics these are people sci declined to be interviewed and said they don't comment on pending litigation we had done found out a song that my mom used to sing to the troops that's called i'll be seeing you. oh do you do you know play with her for your plate your mom. or you really really yeah wow. and you know i think the thing. is that a lot of this gets lost in the narrative of death because the fact is is that it is a sacred right for all of us that if there were more private providers that would

be concerned about how they were providing that service they would be more tuned to the needs of of the community. you know that boy that william carlos williams wrote about the red wheelbarrow it's only forty words so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glaze with rainwater beside the white chickens. what are you talking about says i i mean i really tried to get that one it was a december because we had two kids in our town that they live by the river in the they had ice over and they got out and they fell through the ice and drowned one of the six one of the four i think we put them both in one casket. and i remember the minute walking those parents into see these two little boys they were in there we got blue jeans one had his arm on the other one they looked like two boils i

remember looking out the window at my garage across the street without them well they're all there something to take your your gaze away on which you could concentrate all your attention so as to avert your eyes from this horrible notion that this could happen to be a good funeral director you have to notice right away that there are things that won't be fixed but you can be present for them. obviously the tragic situations that you deal with the current since the suicides i've had to deal with homicides i've had you know many deaths of children those are probably the hardest like my father doug gilchrist ran his own funeral home for many years he and my father studied together to become funeral directors death is always there it's always in your face it's always part of your every day.

your i suffered a very bad mental breakdown and tie was hospitalized for a couple days and of course as most people doctors a couple days later i'm back at the you know over the period of the next four years i had another three nervous breakdowns i one point of which i was told that i had p.t.s.d. we grieve for those not only in our own family. we grieve for those families that we serve every day because we probably knew them we probably buried their answer their own call years before we know that there are funeral director than ontario who have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder directly linked to their work there appears to be a higher than average rate of alcoholism and certainly a higher than average rate of divorce michelle clark works in funeral education she and her husband paul are both former funeral directors we have lived in constant

fear that these things were going to happen to our children or to us most funeral directors just suppress everything we've we've we're taught how to do it the most recent one was the lady that stopped her son sudden death from postpartum and mike ross was the exact same age as her son i just think it was so real. i was so how would that metaphors that self you would you know you'd be withdrawn and just withdraw it all yeah like i would just come home and just sort of just quiet not saying really the little boy at the memorial gardens at the tree fell on i thought it was horrible you don't even remember it oh mike this is the thing there's been so many people stories for him there on a school field trip the wind picked up and blew the tree branch on the kid member he was eight you know it all. for us we're lucky because we're both funeral

directors so we get it. people to say that. you're born to be a film director. and most people in our industry would say the same thing why i went to this profession. and we know field directors that have born into that world and have continued a legacy on and it's not what they wanted to do and in part because of the guilt but you feel you don't want to let the community down and so they've given up their lives to do something they don't do. ok. it's been great for us we would never have met their fallen in love if we weren't both funeral directors but as parents i i wouldn't want to children. that's pretty good a. member. i

said you know i'm just going to stay. down. there was just something i want to do. i need to come. you know you never get over it it's but you you are to cope and you know. i don't know what will eventually happen with my family. and i don't think i will ever fully get over the guilt that i feel for not continuing their legacy i understand now that i made the only choice i could it's a sacred and solemn duty but you'll never last.

from a fresh coastal breeze. to watching the sunset on the australian outback. hello the change of weather to change of seasons visible not very clearly of a south america it's fairly normal to get a line of clouds from summer like southern brazil that up into bolivia and beyond when it gets quite active it passes and goes away and that was the case just after midnight local time looking out for munich why over the river plate beautiful skies active thunderstorms and they're going to be repeated this is the area develop and so for you to grow the fast out of brazil and maybe the far north east of argentina rain seems like he then there's a broken line to get to bolivia that we've seen suspect in the storms in bolivia

over the last week it looks like they will possibly be that is generally a fading in that likelihood and a good part of brazil part of our sas is looking draw at the moment that's true actually through the north of the coms and so a good part of the caribbean as well there is cloud developing but it's really the western atlantic than the gulf of mexico sees a string of tide down through mexico itself that looks quite active as as this massive cloud these white tops near panama city still the potential for some big downpours in panama costa rica nicaragua and back towards mexico as you can see but if you're in smaller caribbean it's more passing showers no significant threatened development of a priest here but it's not yet dry. the weather sponsored by cattle and face. from the showings of the red sea storage a clean water act the globe and home managed to mate but enjoyed this team of

change to the peaks of the himalayas where water conservation looks like. solutions to save the world's most precious resource and the next episode of that right we look at what is being done to stem what crisis. at this time of al-jazeera . china is holding what appears to be its most significant communist party congress in decades with president xi jinping keen to consolidate his power but what does that mean for this country and indeed the rest of the world join me adrian brown for live coverage and analysis here on out. this is al-jazeera.