For Moss Service Funeral Home director Mike Pepple, it’s the extended network of family working with him at Moss who understand and can relate to the sensitivities involved in guiding people through some of their most difficult times.
“I think it certainly helps with mental health. I know of situations that aren’t like ours and it’s definitely more challenging to do that and to not have that support,” Mike said. “Being able to openly vent as needed and having people who understand and who have even had the same type of experiences, I think aides to mental health and being able to cope.”
Mike said he thinks of every Moss employee as family, it is just that several of them happen to be biological. Although he said he occasionally forgets which ones are which.
His oldest son, Bradley, became the company’s newest licensed funeral director/embalmer after graduating from Jefferson State’s Funeral Service Education program in May.
His son-in-law, Ben Joslin, first began working at Moss selling preservice insurance plans, but went on to receive his national license in 2022. and while Mike’s youngest son, Grant, has plans to become a history teacher, he also spends his summers away from college “on loan” to Moss from its sister funeral home in South Florida.
Mike’s first cousin Cathy Robins also works for Moss as its front office manager and several spouses including Mike’s wife Rhonda and Ben’s wife Heather are always prepared to lend a helping hand as “unofficial employees” to provide music for services when needed.
Even the family pet Teddy, a one-year-old registered poodle owned by Joslin, has worked his way into the business as a comfort pet.
To have so many branches of a single family tree working under the same roof might be a violation for a larger company’s nepotism policies, but Mike said funeral homes have always operated this way. He said up until the 1980s and 90s almost all funeral service providers were family operated businesses. Brad said more than 70 percent still are.
“Families would own funeral homes and they would just be passed down through the generations,” Mike said. “Then back in the 80s and 90s my generation didn’t want them. When they were handed the reigns they were selling them to conglomerates and taking the cash.”
While many of Mike’s generation were stepping away from the industry, he was just finding his way into it. He said other than his grandfather, nobody in his family had ever worked in funeral homes. Even then, his grandfather was never a licensed director. Both Mike and Rhonda had settled into full-time careers as educators and Mike was also serving as a minister at his church in early 1994. By the time autumn of that year rolled around, Mike said he had begun to feel a different calling.
“In the spring and summer of 1994, between myself and my father-in-law — who pastored — we buried 27 people. Many of those were family members and church members. It just felt like in that moment, I heard God say that this is the direction he wanted me to go,” Mike said.
He earned his license in 1997 and “has never looked back.”
Brad and Grant said the family business became almost second nature as they grew up. Rhonda said she can remember watching her sons push empty caskets around the way many other children might imitate their parents pushing a lawnmower. It wasn’t until they became teenagers that Brad said they began to notice how their life was different than many of their peers.
“All of friends, especially when we got up into our teen years, were kind of freaked out by it and would ask ‘You really grew up in a funeral home?” Brad said.
But he said his childhood also gave him the opportunity to learn many valuable lessons which many aren’t fortunate enough to learn until they are well into adulthood.
“I think it gave us a much greater respect for life and death and for grieving families because we saw the intricate workings of a funeral home. We saw how Dad and the other directors he worked with cared for those families,” Brad said.
Grant said he might be the “oddball” in the family for wanting to pursue a career in education rather than follow in the majority of his family’s footsteps. But he believes his experiences growing up were no less impactful on shaping his future.
“From growing up in a funeral home family, I would hear people’s stories. That’s all history is, it’s not just dates and events. It’s stories. While at funerals, I have been able to hear the stories of people’s lives, so to me, there is a very big connection between the two,” Grant said. “Hearing those stories everyday helped me become a lover of history and now working to become a history teacher.”
For Mike, that personal approach is what the job is all about. It is about connecting with individuals and building relationships so that when somebody is experiencing one of their most tragic events, someone who feels just a little bit like family will be there to help guide them through it.
“This is not a financial transaction. We aren’t here to sell people anything. You have to buy things for a funeral like a casket and a vault, but if that’s why you’re doing this, then you’re here for the wrong reasons,” Mike said. “I won’t ever forget [one individual] told me that he would always remember that it was family who came to pick up his wife. That’s worth more to me than any amount of money. If I can help every family feel that, it’s worth more to me than anything.”