Axel Jean-Francois
on
A December reflection
I came across that video again the other night. Somewhere Over the Rainbow / What a Wonderful World. Israel Kamakawiwoʻole. Most people know the song. Fewer people stop to consider what they’re actually watching. It isn’t a music video. It’s a tribute. Ashes being scattered. A community present with intention. No narration. No explanation. Nothing telling you what to feel or how to interpret it. And yet it works. More than a billion views. A billion quiet pauses. People stopping for a few minutes longer than they planned to. There’s no optimization behind that. No framing. No attempt to guide the reaction. Just something human, landing where it lands.
What makes that interesting is the story we often tell ourselves alongside it. That people are moving away from funerals. That ritual is fading. That services are becoming smaller, simpler, easier to bypass. We repeat it often enough that it starts to sound settled. And yet this ritual traveled farther than almost anything else. No pricing. No packaging. No explanation. Just meaning, carried forward.
Once you notice that contradiction, it stays with you. I noticed it again in a very different room. Chicago. NFDA 2025. The Service of Remembrance. Thousands of funeral professionals gathered together. People who live inside coordination and responsibility every day. People who understand, better than most, how much has to go right for a single moment to exist. The music came from Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church. One of those churches whose name carries history even if you can’t recite it. Gospel with depth. Voices that fill a room without asking for attention. If you were there, you remember what happened next. The room didn’t quiet because it was instructed to. It quieted because everyone felt the same thing at once. Different setting. Same response. That reaction matters because this profession is not built on atmosphere alone.
Before I ever worked in funeral service, I spent time in logistics. Ports. Borders. Paperwork. Timing that doesn’t forgive mistakes. Frozen seafood. Produce crossing into the U.S. Explaining delays to people who don’t care about context. It made funeral service immediately legible to me. Transfers. Scheduling. Permits. Clergy. Cemeteries. Families. Weather. Timing that cannot slip. Errors that cannot happen. This work is precise because it has to be. The numbers matter because the work matters. The science of running a business isn’t optional, it’s the scaffolding. That’s why the contrast is so striking. Because none of that explains why a tribute filmed years ago can still stop people mid-scroll. None of it explains why a room full of seasoned professionals goes silent when the music begins.
That’s the space this profession actually lives in. Math and emotion don’t compete here. They coexist. One keeps the doors open. The other gives the work its weight. The spreadsheet records what happened. The ritual determines what’s remembered. We spend a lot of time trying to reconcile the two. Translating feeling into figures. Justifying meaning with metrics. Some things don’t need that translation to endure.
The spreadsheet closes. The memory doesn’t. And for something people say they’re moving away from, funerals have a quiet way of staying.