Welcome to CENA: a funeral conference story

True story: when I was 25 years old, I raised $2m in venture capital and became the CEO of a funeral startup. Here's a story about a cremation conference.

Jan 16, 2025

Hi everyone.

True story: when I was 25 years old, I raised $2m in venture capital and became the CEO of a funeral startup.

I spent around 5 years of my life working on that business and always thought about turning that part of my life into a book.

In an attempt to do so, I wrote a few parts, below, about attending a cremation conference.

As a heads up, the included writing is book-like and quite long, as opposed to my usual style of essay — so if you don’t like the prose/pace, no worries, the next piece will be more essay-like.

Also, the included stories are mostly true, but I changed people’s names so I don’t get yelled at.

Enjoy.

Alex

Funeral Director ID: 3960

Welcome to CENA: Part 1

“Hi, welcome to CENA,” says the stout blonde woman in the plastic gray chair.

A large banner overhead reads ‘Cremation Expo North America 2016’.

“What’s your name, dear?” she asks me, and as she does so, I notice myself wondering what this woman must have done to end up here — how one becomes a conference coordinator in the funeral industry, if this was always her passion, or if her parents perhaps had her play with the wrong dolls.

“I’m Alex Kruger,” I say before pointing to my co-founder. “And this is Sophie Werner.”

“Hi!” Sophie squeaks in the small voice she reserves for first impressions.

The woman sitting in the chair riffles through plastic name tags tied to orange lanyards embroidered with the words ‘Sponsored by Tukios.’ “Here you both are,” the woman says before noticing the sticker on the corner of our badges. “Oh! First-timers! Welcome!” She beams. “My best advice,” she says, leaning in as if to tell a secret, “is to check out the after-conference events. Tonight, there’s a Funeral Director Evening Stroll down by the riverwalk.” Her hands jazz. “Should be a hoot!”

“Oh!” Sophie says, her voice widening like a lion finding out she’ll soon be dropped into a valley of baby gazelles, “we’ll be there.”

–

People always talk about firsts.

Virginity, skydiving, seeing your child born. To Sophie and me, as young founders of a death startup attending our first industry conference, this is that.

We’re here, at this tired Hilton in Cincinnati, on a mission that’ll make or break our business.

“Excuse me, sir?” chirps a voice on my right. I startle and turn to see a man wearing a black suit and holding what I believe to be a bottle of red liqueur.

“Yeah. What’s up?” I say, noticing his name tag: ‘Richard.’ He must be 30-something and seems like he was hot in high school, but now, perhaps due to time or hardship or meth, he’s that rare combination of greasy and gaunt that you used to find working at Blockbuster.

“Mind if I tell you about our new, scented embalming fluid?” he asks.

“Oooh!,” Sophie feigns. “What scent?”

“Cinnamon,” Richard responds, proud. “Are you two directors?” He asks, meaning funeral directors.

“Afraid not,” I say, and then I pause to reflect on my outfit, wondering if my gray button-down somehow makes me look funerary or if Richard just asks the same qualifying question to every passerby.

We talk for another minute or two before he asks us what we’re doing at CENA (Cremation Expo of North America) as non-directors who don’t work for a cemetery, funeral home, or cremation company. We tell him that we’re searching for someone to help us get our California-State funeral director’s licenses, and he tells us that he has no idea how that works but that we might want to talk to one of the higher-up conference organizers since those people know everything, and Richard, having spent his time in chemical sales, exclusively focused on the Northeastern U.S., doesn’t know anyone west of Mississippi.

We thank him for his time and begin moving from booth to booth, taking it all in.

I never thought I’d end up here.

Twelve months ago, if you had asked me if I was going to leave behind the guy I was in love with in NYC and move to LA to help the world figure out a better way to burn bodies, I would’ve told you that you were out of your mind and that I had no interest in corpses or the people who touched them.

Sophie would’ve said the same thing.

She had been living in Hell’s Kitchen, working at a wedding startup, and loving life as a hot 22-year-old with the world at her fingertips. She could’ve done whatever she wanted. If she’d stayed in NYC, she’d probably now be engaged to some perfect-looking investment banker whose family held the keys to Gramercy Park.

But that didn’t happen.

What did happen is that one day, a very rich man’s mother-in-law died and this was terribly inconvenient for him, as there were so many things that needed to get done to close out her life, and all of these things were things he and his wife didn’t want to do.

There has to be a better way, he thought to himself. And so, this very rich man called a less rich man who called a very unrich man, me.

“Would you like to be the CEO of a company?” the less rich man asked my 25-year-old self.

And now, here we are.

Sophie and I look around the exhibit hall of the great big funeral world: stand after stand of death-related goods, each one stranger than the last.

Makeup kits illuminated under fluorescent lights next to an ash-holding diamond necklace that sparkles in a glass case. A white casket-lowering pully-like rope weaves itself through lilac flowers next to a velvet-lined wooden box of metal bone cutters that seem to pull the cold from the air in the room. A woman stands next to the box in a bob and a pantsuit, and in her right hand, she holds shiny forceps, which are essentially medical tongs, but these ones have a strange angular end, assumedly meant for maneuvering through a turned narrow space — perhaps the nasal cavity. The woman smiles at Sophie and me. We do our best to return the gesture, as my mind, once again, drifts back to her childhood and then the little steps this forceps woman took or didn’t take to now be here.

“Let’s go this way,” Sophie says, pointing down the middle aisle, where, according to the map, there seems to be some sort of large booth.

We round the corner.

A 40-foot photo of a border collie spans across what must be seven booths worth of real estate. The photo is huge — as if Lassie has become Godzilla.

“What are they selling?” I ask Sophie.

“I don’t know.”

Our eyes drift to the chaos beneath the monster dog. A southern-looking man in a cowboy hat gives off the confidence of someone who used to be this dog’s owner. On his left stands his sister or maybe his wife. The space around them is packed with funeral directors examining items strewn across tables: pawprints molded into clay or pressed into wood. Furry faces etched into pillows, tiny clocks, and paperweights. Stones and boxes and mugs. Even a martini shaker with a picture of a Jack Russell on it — display after display of crap, all here to show directors potential ways to hock tchotchkes to grievers who’ve just lost their little friends.

‘An Annoying Bark But A Big Heart. Maxi Gail Ritters, Lover of Shoes,’ or ‘Jim was a horse, of course, of course 1991-2015’.

The booth is a fucking hit.

“Unbelievable,” I say to Sophie, eyeing the pet genocide cash machine.

“Maybe we’re in the wrong business,” I say, reflecting on the fact that our startup only planned on transacting humans.

We pause to take it all in, but before we can even make our way to the table, a peppy female voice catches us by surprise. “Hey there!” it says.

We turn to our right to see a pretty blonde who seems to have hailed from a flashy 25-foot green tower in the foreground. Along the side of the tower, a fabric is stretched from one metal post to the other with the words: ‘Faster. Better. Aftercare.’

“Gabby, from Requiem,” she says, sticking out her right hand while holding an iPad in her left. She seems good at her job — people selling high-margin software usually are. Gabby readies a demo. “Soooo, what program are you using to make family tributes?”

I smile, impressed.

Though Sophie and I have never had a family ask us to make them a death PowerPoint, part of me feels that I will end up giving this salesperson my credit card, but before I have a chance to ask follow-up questions, Sophie breaks the news to Gabby about us not being funeral directors, and it’s at this moment that Gabby should leave, as we’re no use to her sales goals, but for some reason, maybe because we’re the young blood or because Sophie is charming and seductive and it works on everyone, Gabby stays.

“Oh wow, what are you guys doing here then?”

We tell her that we’re on a mission: that we need our funeral license and that the state of California requires us to have an incumbent sponsor to stamp us so we can sit for the funeral director’s test. Gabby finds this very boring but invites us to a Requiem happy hour.

“What about the Riverwalk?” I ask her.

“The what?” Gabby asks, raising one brow.

“The Riverwalk. The CENA lady said that that’s the fun event to go to.”

“Ohhh. Thattttt. Hah,” Gabby says as if I revealed that I was going to a Dungeons and Dragons sleepover. “Do whatever you want,” she continues, “but I’d recommend our invite-only open bar.”

“Alex, we’re doing the open bar,” Sophie says, and Gabby nods approvingly, even though I don’t think this is the right decision — it’s not like we’re looking for cool funeral people, if those were to even exist — but before I can protest, a faraway voice says, “Gabby, you have a sec?” and then Gabby twirls and prances back to her aftercare tower.

Part 2:

It’s lunchtime, and Sophie and I have made no progress in our search for a licensure lead.

I mean, we have business cards of people selling eggshell-colored casket liners and vendors selling American flag-themed prayer cards, but we have yet to find someone who can actually help us, and this help is important because without our licenses, the only way for us to charge families for death services is by hiring funeral intermediaries who already have licenses, and that sucks because hiring people costs a lot of money and a lot of money is something we don’t have.

At the buffet, I pick up salad tongs, which remind me of the nasal forceps from a few booths ago. I use the tongs to plate iceberg lettuce and conference center chicken.

Food in hand, Sophie and I scan the lunch area, strategizing where to sit. From our recent conversations with greasy Richard and peppy Gabby, we’ve learned that people under 40 aren’t helpful.

“Him,” Sophie says, spotting an older potbellied gentleman who sits alone at a 10-person round table, wearing an ugly tweed suit. He has three cookies on his plate next to a bottle of lemon-flavored Lipton Iced Tea.

“Mind if we join you?” I ask.

He nods and gives us a closed-lip smile.

Bob is very nice. Most people here are. We get to talking about how he’s from Kansas, and I ask how long he’s been in the funeral industry, already knowing that his answer will be that he’s been in it his whole life.

“Well, I've been in it my whole life,” he says.

We tell him about our mission to find a licensure sponsor, and he tells us that we should talk to Dominic over there. “Dominic knows everyone. Works for the NAFD.”

The NAFD is the National Alliance of Funeral Directors. Its conferences, according to everyone we’ve met in the past six months, are not as cool as CENA’s, and when I first learned this, I laughed because I couldn’t understand how that could be possible.

“Dominic!” Bob shouts across the lunch area, waving him over. Dominic looks excited to be called over. He puts down his fork and bounces our way like the bubbly 42-year-old former-ad-salesperson-who-chose-to-leave-media-and-enter-death that he now is.

“Bobby, how are ya?” Dominic says, placing his hand on Bob’s shoulder.

Dominic takes a liking to Sophie and maybe me, especially when we tell him that we’re looking to give out equity to people who can act as advisors. Dominic then says that he knows the perfect person who, he thinks, won’t end up being the person who gets us our license but will be the person who will know the person who can help us get our license. And as I say, “sure,” Dominic turns his head towards his former table about to call for someone, at which point I begin to feel like Dominic and Bob have, in a matter of seconds, designed a multi-level marketing scheme where we give them equity in exchange for them calling out names.

Sophie and I look at each other as if to acknowledge that we seem stuck in funeral purgatory. A carnival of grim-reaping middlemen who enjoy passing us from one unhelpful person to the next, each handoff a cute little box wrapped in an illusion of progress but filled with nothing but our own wasted time.

But then, “Hugh,” Dominic calls, and as he does so, a man in his late 50s with a perfect head of white hair and an extremely handsome face, stands from his table and walks over, and I notice that the lunch-goers all around us all seem to settle. It’s like that moment from a teen movie where the hot girl walks through the room and the fan blows and the fuggos hold their breath.

Hugh arrives.

“Hey there,” he says, with a grandfatherly aura that quiets the chitter chatter, “what can I do for you?” And at this moment, the vast, unmanageable universe of funeral conferencing suddenly feels comfortably small.

Ten minutes pass as Sophie and I sit, hypnotized, answering each of his questions while he lures us into explaining, step by step, how our “online funeral concierge” would work, and, because I become thirsty, I momentarily fall out of his spell and look around, only to realize that both the ad salesman and the potbellied man holding the Lipton have long gone.

“Wait. Hugh,” I say. “Who are you though?”

Hugh smiles and takes a breath, responding with an “Ahhh” in the same way you’d expect the question of one’s identity to be answered if you were to ask it to God. “I own a couple of cemeteries,” he pauses, “and funeral homes,” he smiles, “but mostly cemeteries.”

Sophie hesitates before asking, “where?”

“—Hugh!,” yells a cheery woman with wavy brown hair, who introduces herself as Hugh’s wife, “Sue,” as she glides into our conversation with the warmth and grace of a good Midwestern Christian but without the parts that sometimes make that bad.

Sue tells Hugh that he needs to talk with someone from East Lansing because, apparently, there’s been another Pokémon incident.

“Well, it’s very sad actually,” Hugh says, catching up Sophie and me. “Kids have been wandering into our cemeteries staring at their phones using that new Pokémon Go game and…it’s disrespectful to the deceased and their loved ones.”

“Not to mention dangerous,” Sue says. “At night they fall into the unfilled graves and can really hurt themselves.”

I imagine a 14-year-old screaming, stuck in a hole with a snapped ankle from a Charizard quest. I hold back a grin. Sophie catches me. So does Hugh.

“I know I know — it’s funny,” Hugh says. “But…it’s not good for our families. It’s rude.”

Sue taps his shoulder, and so Hugh tells Sophie and me that he’ll reach out to someone about our license, though this someone isn’t at CENA this time around and as I go to ask for more information Hugh and Sue float away leaving Sophie and me at the table with empty salad plates and some sort of weird funeral conference networking post-coital glow.

“You think he’s a big deal?” I ask Sophie as I begin to stand. “He seems like a big deal. But–”

“—I think he’s rich,” Sophie says, getting up.

“I mean, a couple of cemeteries isn’t rich,” I say, “It’s like, fine, I guess,” looking down at the map to find us a new row of vendors, knowing that Hugh has no reason to chat with us, the pee-ons, again. And so, he probably won’t.

We meet 20 or so more vendors, but it’s boring. The booths feel mostly the same: ashes this, embalming that — there is but one Hugh and none beside him.

My shoulders fall, hopeless. The important conference-goers who have enough influence to let us pay a ‘consultant’ to help us get our license tend to make deals behind closed doors, and out here, on the pit, all the attendees seem to be trying to sell us the latest and greatest in open-casket-mouth-sewing needle and thread.

“Let’s check out that last row,” Sophie says, pointing to the map, and as she does so, the head of a 6’5” bald giant catches our eyes as his voice bellows to our ears.

“And this here,” he shouts, while presenting a poster of a silver crematory oven to his audience, “is our largest oven yet! It’s fast, it’s quiet! Top of the line.” The enormous man speaks to normal-sized funeral directors who, juxtaposed, look like little people in big suits. “Here at American Crematory Services,” the giant continues, genuine and proud, “our ovens are unmatched and so is our service. All my clients have my personal cell, and though you’ll never need it, I’m always just one call away.”

The tiny men nod and clap.

The giant looks happy. Genuine and caring. He looks like he believes that he’s really doing good work — making a difference in the world in the way everyone always talks about wanting to, and the post-spiel smile that began to spread across his face now lingers as if it’s found a permanent home.

“He seems cool,” I say to Sophie.

“Yeah. He does.”

The tiny men walk away, oven flyers in hand, and Sophie and I acquaint ourselves with the friendly neighborhood giant who goes by Jerry.

He immediately feels like a friend.

“You met Hugh Walsh?” Jerry asks, looking shocked. “Quickly gettin’ to know the who’s who, aren’t ya?”

“Is he important?” Sophie asks, “he said he owns a couple of cemeteries.”

“A couple?!” Jerry shouts, “I mean, he’s gotta be in charge of…,” he counts aloud and does some quick math, “twenty cemeteries and maybe…fourty homes?”

“Holy shit,” I say.

“Yeah. And did it all himself,” Jerry says. “Made all his own money by being a nice, fair businessman,” he nods. “Not like those SCI cronies.”

SCI, Services Corporation International, is the behemoth in the land of death. Everyone has had things to say about them. Mostly bad. With a $12b market cap and over 1800 funeral homes at their fingertips, SCI jumps from town to town, buying up the well-known homes in a market without changing the name, creating the illusion that the funeral home in your town is still family-owned. Then, like any well-run corporation that grows via acquisition, SCI runs around snatching up the other worthwhile homes they can get a good price on until one day, you’re sitting in your cute little town figuring out what you want to happen to you when you pass, and you realize that no matter when or where or how you die, that you’ll be going to SCI.

At least, that’s what Sophie and I heard.

“You going to the Riverwalk tonight?” I ask Jerry.

“Ha!” the giant exclaims, his voice echoing through our chests like a megaphone blasting through the ribcages of small birds. “Absolutely do not go to the Riverwalk,” he says. “All the weirdos are there,” he continues and then lowers his voice, “the alkaline hydrolysis people.”

“The what?” Sophie asks.

“Those guys pushing the eco-friendly cremations. They…soak you in some sort of water until you just become…bone broth. They’re sick.”

Sophie and I nod in agreement — maybe flesh-burning is more natural.

“Anyway,” Jerry says, “Riverwalk. Don’t go.”

We nod, and he tells us to meet him at the Requiem cocktail party, which is where anyone who’s anyone, in funerals, will be.

—

We skip the Riverwalk.

Part 3

It’s 6 pm when we arrive at the happy hour — Requiem has reserved the hotel’s only bar. The bar is dark and gloomy, but not in a way that feels sexy. More in a “Hi, we’re an outdated Hilton, and we know we have enough conference demand that some vendor will end up booking any private space, so we’re not going to re-urethane the wooden countertops that aren’t dirty but always seem to stick.”

The bargoers don’t seem to mind.

With the ovens and pendants and ash-filled fireworks all stripped away, it feels like any other B2B happy hour. There are the old-timers who tell you about how the industry has changed, and there are keynote speakers who are proud of the boring topics they just presented, surrounded by groupies, who, for some reason or another, hope to one day speak boringly as well. There are attractive salespeople who work for tech companies, and then there are the less attractive people who buy from them.

Sophie and I spot Requiem Gabby. She stands next to an overweight man in his 60s, and she laughs at something he says while she allows him to graze her arm.

Gabby sees us.

“Sophie!,” she beams. “And Andrew, right?”

“Yes, Alex,” I say.

She ignores this.

“Meet Bill,” Gabby says, “from Carriage.” After SCI’s recent 358-facility acquisition of a company called Stewart Enterprises, Carriage now stands as player number two.

“Now why do you go exposing me like that?” Bill says, chuckling.

Gabby fake-giggles.

“We won’t hold it against you!” Sophie says, oversmiling.

“You’ve gotta do a better job at hiding your nametag then!” I joke, pointing to his shirt and laughing, though my joke, like its two predecessors, is also not funny.

Sophie continues to quip with Bill, which temporarily pulls his eyes away from Gabby, so I try, for a second time today, to ask Gabby for advice on us getting our license. She’s drunk and tells me that she has no idea how to help, but she’s very fun and orders us all shots, and as we arrive at shot number three, Rich Cemeterian Hugh walks up to say hi to Sophie and me before telling us that he wants to introduce us to a man named Chris Clarke.

Upon hearing this name, Overweight Bill’s face changes.

The words Chris Clarke mean something here.

Not to Gabby and certainly not to Sophie or me, but Bill immediately looks me and Sophie up and down, trying to figure out who we are and why anyone would ever care.

“He told me to give you his number,” Hugh says. “You should send him a text. That’s probably easiest with him.”

“And…who is he?” Sophie asks.

Bill adjusts his posture.

“Chris owns a few places out near you guys,” Hugh says. “If he likes you, he’ll help.”

Hugh gets pulled away to another circle of people who are much more important, and Gabby follows the herd by putting her hand through Bill’s arm, and as this is all going on, Sophie and I hear a laugh as loud as a thousand laughs coming from the other end of the bar, where we spot Jerry The Oven Giant standing next to two skinny 30-something-year-old dudes who wear stylish matching button downs and look like they’re judging everyone else here.

“Let’s say hi,” Sophie says.

Jerry smiles and introduces us to his frail friends, Seth and Gabriel, a couple from Massachusetts who run a large urn manufacturing operation in the northeast.

“Our urns are all made in the USA,” they say.

“Does that matter?” I ask.

“It does to the people who buy them.”

We all take more shots.

“Are there a lot of gays in the funeral industry?” I ask before realizing that that might have sounded odd because we were absolutely not talking about their sexuality and that I, instead, was just thinking about it, and so I respond to their side-tilted heads with, “I mean. I’m gay. And I was just wondering.”

“Oh!” Jerry screams, shattering martini glasses. “I told you!,” he says to the homosexual urn sellers. “But I thought you two (nodding to Sophie and me) might be together,”

Sophie cackles before looking my way and batting her eyes, “Just a messed up couple, in love with death.”

“See?” I say to her, “It’s true! You’re killing my game.”

“Um...,” she begins, “or you’re killing my game,” and then she looks around the bar for a prospect. “How about that guy in the suit with the—”

“Ugh,” Jerry says, following her gaze to the beefcake across the bar. “Married.”

“How married?” And then the girl laughs alone while the four fags smile.

We take another shot, and now we’re all drunk.

My phone buzzes.

“He wrote back!” I say to Sophie, whose eyes still linger in the distance.

“You sure he’s married?”

“Who wrote back?” Jerry asks.

“Some guy that Hugh introduced us to. Chris, um…,” I click into the message, “Clarke.”

Jerry’s face changes, “Wowww,” he drawls, “….good luck.”

“Why does everyone keep saying that?” I say. “Is he like, terrible or something?”

“No no,” Jerry says. The couple agrees. Or maybe they don’t.

“He’s just…well…he’s very smart. But…,” Jerry withholds. “Look…if you can make him money, he’ll make it happen. Just…don’t get on his bad side.”

“Dramaaa,” Sophie says.

“You’ll see,” Jerry says.

The night continues with drinking and laughing as Sophie and I stumble through the lobby, passing by plainclothed funeral people like Cinnamon Embalming Liquor Richard, who didn’t get the Requiem invite. With my arm locked in Sophie’s, I ask her what she thinks this Chris guy will be like and whether or not we’ll be able to win him over.

“Of course we will,” she says. “That’s literally the only thing we’re good at.”

Sophie and I arrive at the elevator bay and come upon the stout blonde woman from this morning who originally gave us our nametags and neck lanyards. It’s weird seeing her not in a chair. And also not sober.

“Well,” the woman begins, teeth reddened with wine, “looks like you two are having a good time.”

“Heyyyy,” I say, my words a bit slurred. “Wait! You’ll know this,” I begin, “who’s Chris Clarke?”

Her lips purse.

She pauses and takes a deep breath in. And then out. “Well,” she begins, using the tone of a teacher who’s about to explain to one student about how another student received detention, “he used to be the CENA president, of course. But,” she lifts her left finger as if to ‘tsk-tsk,’ “he’s on my naughty list this year. Who does he think he is? Not showing up after he already RSVP’d. Should have at least given us more notice. I had a whole speech introducing him and…,” she continues, going on about CENA politics and how she barely found someone in time to take his slot, and I lose interest because it’s 930pm and we’re drunk on a Wednesday at a midwestern funeral conference, and so I start to say goodnight.

“Hold on!” The woman says, putting her hands on her hips. “I didn’t see you two at the Riverwalk!”

“Oh. Um,” I begin. “I guess—”

“We thought it was tomorrow!” Sophie says, cutting me off while squeezing my arm.

“Oh no!” the blonde woman responds. “It was tonight.”

“So sorry. I say,” falling in line. “How was it?”

“It was really nice,” the woman says.

“That’s great to hear,” Sophie says, her voice warm and kind. “This has been such a fun conference. We’ll see you before we leave in the morning,” she says, and this pleases the conference woman, who then turns and waddles away.

My phone buzzes as Sophie and I hop into the elevators.

Chris: Call me tomorrow. 3pm.

I’m nervous.

“We’ll be fine,” Sophie says, exiting the elevator, leaving me to think back on today: the man selling dead dog paraphernalia and the lady proudly holding the nasal forceps. Or the urn gays. People who maybe didn’t choose the dolls they were given but who have chosen to spend the rest of their lives charting a path in death.

A people and a path that might actually not be that bad.

And as I drift off to sleep, I let out a small end-of-day-one-at-a-funeral-conference sigh through lips not yet touched by open-casket mouth-sewing thread, hopeful that this search might be finally coming to an end when, at 3 pm tomorrow, a man named Chris Clarke – smart, vindictive and maybe sketchy enough actually to help us, will finally end up being our guy.

Questions (please comment below!)

Did you like this more or less than the typical essay format? (Essay = arc with more manufactured closure)
Do you wish it was more business-y?
Would you read more stuff about the death industry, or was that all you think you’d ever want to read about it?
Not a question, but a statement: I’m probably changing my future Substack Domain to KrugerWrites.com. It feels more on-brand. Thanks for reading ❤️

Garden of Anxiety

Discussion about this post