By STEVEN JUPITER
BRANDON—Gary Stanley has seen a lot as Funeral Director at Miller & Ketcham in Brandon. He’s seen the anguish of grief as well as the joy of remembrance. And he has had to be the unflappable guide for bereft families trying to make important decisions at some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives.
“I want you to feel ok about the decisions you’re making, without regrets,” he said in a recent conversation at the immaculate Victorian that houses his operations on Franklin Street. “Whatever you want to do, we’ll make it work for you.”
Stanley is closing in on 50 years at Miller & Ketcham, the oldest continuously operating funeral home in Vermont and one of the 10 oldest in the entire country. Through its predecessors, the business can trace its roots in Brandon back to 1827, making Stanley’s 50-year tenure at the helm nearly a quarter of the firm’s entire history.
Stanley grew up in Virginia and still retains a gentle lilt in his speech. His father was a coalminer who ended up suffering from black lung disease and relocated the family to Fairfax County, Va., where Stanley attended a two-room schoolhouse with 7 kids in his class.
He became familiar with funeral direction through his older brother, who owned Covington & Martin Funeral Home in Fairfax. His brother asked him to help with a removal (the retrieval of the deceased from their home) and he’s been in the business ever since.
“My brother taught me to be two hours early for a funeral and never two minutes late,” he said.
After a few years in the military in Vietnam, Stanley got a degree in Mortuary Science from the New England Institute of Anatomy in Boston and returned to Covington & Martin. He scored 96 out of 100 on his boards and received his license in 1971.
“Covington & Martin handled a lot of the military funerals from Vietnam,” Stanley recalled, estimating that they worked on over 9,000 cases.
Those military funerals were where Stanley honed his skills at “restorative arts,” the craft of restoring the appearance of the deceased. His talents in this area have earned him the admiration of his peers, who to this day still call upon him for help with especially tricky cases, such as victims of accidents.
“I take pride in my work as an embalmer,” he said. In fact, his Doctorate in Applied Embalming from the New England Institute of Anatomy hangs in his office. He’s so fastidious about embalming that he makes sure the deceased looks as good as possible even when he knows the body will be cremated or there will be a closed casket, often at no additional cost to the family.
“You never know when the family will want to say their last goodbye,” he explained. “You want the deceased to be as presentable as humanly possible.”
Stanley came to Brandon through a friendship he struck up with Frank Miller on a visit to Vermont back in the early 1970s. Miller was the proprietor of Miller & Ketcham at the time (though no relation to the original Miller in the firm’s name!) and indicated to Stanley that he was nearing retirement. Stanley asked to be given first crack at the business if and when Miller did retire.
Miller ended up retiring in 1976 and Stanley has been the owner ever since.
He’s overseen “several” funerals over the years and has watched tastes and trends change.
“Since the 1990s, more and more people are choosing cremation,” he said. “It’s about half the cost of a traditional burial.”
And he’s seen a greater openness about a once-taboo topic.
“Death is a closet subject,” noted Stanley. “Some people don’t want to talk about it, but more people are now wanting to plan their own services and make those decisions while they still can.”
People who may be flippant about their deaths while they’re healthy sometimes take a greater interest in the details when they’re facing their own mortality.
“I had a friend who used to say, ‘Just throw me in the manure pile.’ But when he was in the hospital at the end, he changed his mind. He ended up having a traditional burial in Pine Hill.”
And some folks retain a dark humor about it all until the very end.
“I knew a lawyer who asked to be cremated and have his ashes scattered over everyone he’d ever ‘screwed’,” Stanley laughed.
Those details include cremation versus burial, the type of casket, and even the music that will play at the service.
“The favorites are pieces like ‘Amazing Grace,’ ‘How Great Thou Art,’ and ‘Ave Maria,” he said. “But we’ve also arranged to play Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Beach Boys. Nothing’s too crazy.”
In addition to his management of the funeral home, Stanley is the President of the Brandon Cemetery Association, which oversees the active cemeteries in town: Pine Hill, Forest Dale, St. Mary’s. He and his crew make sure that the grounds are maintained and the stones are in good condition. Some of the stones in these cemeteries are over 200 years old and have required repair.
He’s also the man to talk to if you’d like to acquire a burial plot. He estimates that Pine Hill, the largest of the local cemeteries, still has enough room in its open fields for 2,000 more years of burials.
Asked whether the sorrow of the cases he handles ever gets to him, he reflected for a moment.
“Very much so. Especially when it’s young people and children. We’re seeing more overdoses and accidents. It’s easier with older people.”
Stanley “will turn 39 in December,” he said with a wink. After 50 years, he knows there will come a time when he will need to pass the business to the next generation. He and his wife, Andrea, have four children: Todd, Timothy, Danielle, and Jen, who recently passed away. He’s still going strong, but he has been grooming his longtime employee John Sanderson to take the reins when it’s time.
“John started at age 16 and went to mortuary science school,” said Stanley. “He’s worked in Middlebury, Maine, and Florida, and came back to work for me. He’s close to 60 and fully licensed. I have total confidence in him.”
But you can tell as he gives a tour of his operations that he’s in his element and in no rush to retire. He’s clearly a man who found his calling in life. He loves helping his community through their darkest times, and he loves the history of the business he’s run for 50 years. One of the rooms downstairs on Franklin Street is lined with sepia photographs of the various prior iterations of the business. His archives contain the funeral records for almost everyone who’s ever been buried in Brandon.
But at the end of the day, he says, “I’m just an old-fashioned country undertaker.”
