For more than five decades, Bill Skwarchuk and his family have been helping the community through the difficult process of grieving their loved ones.
In June, Mayor James Leduc presented the Skwarchuks with a certificate of achievement, in honour of the 50th anniversary of Skwarchuk Funeral Homes with the main location at 30 Simcoe Rd. in Bradford and another location in Mount Albert.
While Bill and his wife Joan took ownership of the funeral home in 1973, it’s since grown to include most of the family, including daughters Jodi Ben and Jill Skwarchuk-Tiano, as well as some of the grandchildren.
“It’s been very rewarding,” Bill said of operating the business for so long and helping so many people through “the worst thing in their life.”
He’s always reminded his daughters that while they can’t take away the hurt people feel, they can ensure the service runs smoothly to help people with the process.
It hasn’t gone unnoticed, and over the years, Bill has received more appreciative hugs than he can count and has a large stack of letters and notes from people thanking him.
With the daughters now leading the businesses, Jill has her own collection of thankful correspondence, and emphasized the important relationship the family has built by serving the community for so many years.
Both have degrees from McMaster University and Jill is also a licensed funeral director who has been working with the family businesses for the last 24 years, while Jodi has a degree in business, looks after the books, manages the office and has been working with the family business for the last 26 years.
“They do such a good job. I thought I was good, but they’re better,” Bill said.
Jill and Jodi both emphasized the mentorship their father provided and in particular, his advice to be compassionate by treating people like family.
“We’re the first people they see after someone has passed away,” Jodi said. “They’re lost or they’re angry.”
“This is the last place they want to be,” Jill added. “You have to just kind of guide them to say that it is a difficult time, but we’re here to help you through those days.”
While all careers come with challenges, Jill explained some funerals can be more difficult than others, especially when they involve children, tragic accidents or people who were close to the Skwarchuks.
While Bill acknowledges that “sometimes it’s very difficult not to cry with them,” the Skwarchuks understand the responsibility of staying strong and remaining professional for the sake of those grieving.
At one point while Bill and Joan were away, Jill oversaw the funeral of a close friend who had died in a car accident, and at first, wasn’t sure if she could do it, but a phone call to her father reassured her.
“You help them through those hard days, and that made me feel better. That’s how I dealt with it,” she said.
An unexpected career
While the Kilkenny family first ran the local funeral home starting in 1836, Bill wouldn’t become part of the story until the 1960s.
Bill explained that he grew up on a farm in Simcoe, Ont. and originally went to college in Oshawa to become an accountant, but a friend recommended he take a summer job in Bradford in 1968 working the ambulance and dispatch, which was also operated out of the funeral home at the time.
“It was exciting. It was everyday something going on,” Bill said. “Once you get a call you’re gone. Accidents and sick people, you were just going everywhere.”
By the end of the summer, Bill recalled the owner, Mac Lewis, asked him if he’d consider staying for the next two years while getting his funeral director’s licence, after which he could move up to that position.
Bill accepted and he and Joan married before moving into an addition built above the garage, where they were able to live rent-free while operating the dispatch for the ambulance, fire service and police.
By the time Bill had his licence in 1970, he recalled Lewis was so busy elsewhere, he asked Bill to run the funeral home.
Then in 1973, Lewis offered to sell him the business.
“I said, ‘Mac, I’ve got no money,’” Bill recalled. “He said, ‘You don’t need it.’ He shook my hand and that’s how we started.”
There was even more good news on the horizon, though.
“When we go and sign the papers and everything at the lawyer's office and we own everything, well then I get pregnant,” Joan said. “We signed the papers and then poof!”
The couple would also hire Neil Lathangue to work with them, who had previously owned the funeral home from 1950 to 1963.
“He was a good man,” Bill said.
The couple later assumed ownership of the Mount Albert location from Lewis in 1975.
An evolving industry
While death may be one of life’s certainties, the business of guiding people through grief has seen its share of changes.
In search of more space for expanded facilities, Bill recalled the ambulance operation moved out of the funeral home to Holland Street near Bingham Street in 1975, before eventually moving to Artesian Industrial Parkway. This May, the County of Simcoe opened a new paramedic station on Miller Park Avenue.
Bill said he has never been a fan of using the computer, so it was lucky that Jodi joined the business in the late 1990s, and was able to lead the charge on computerization, as the push was on to digitize parts of the business.
“It was a big challenge,” Jodi said of inputting all the ledgers and other paper documents from as far back as about 1986. “For a long time, I was doing it on the computer and some were still doing it by hand ... we still have our typewriters downstairs.”
Around 2003 or 2004 Jodi and her husband Rob also helped create the business’s first website, which she recalled Bill initially opposing because “everything doesn’t need to be on the web.”
He recalled coming around to the idea as more people began asking for it, including past mayor Bill de Peuter, and while Jodi described the initial version of the site as “very basic” by today’s standards, it laid the foundation for two revisions which followed and eventually became important during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“During COVID we had to bring in the live-streaming,” Jodi said, explaining that at one point, the Bereavement Authority of Ontario directed that only nine family members and one clergy member be permitted to gather at one time for a funeral.
Bill said that was particularly tough for some of the larger families with 80 to 90 members who wanted to pay their respects and Jill called it an “eye-opener.”
“When families are grieving and told they can only have nine people at their funeral, that was hard,” she said.
As restrictions eased, different groups could be rotated through the service 10 at a time, but with some having 100 people or more in attendance, Jill said it required a lot of co-ordination on their part and patience from guests who were sometimes lined up in the parking lot waiting their turn.
“But we’re a business that can’t shut down,” she said. “We kept doing what we needed to do on a daily basis.”
Despite the difficulties, Joan was thankful to have her family working together every day at a time when people were instructed to maintain limited social circles and some couldn’t see family for weeks at a time.
That social circle would expand significantly in the second half of 2022, as Ontario lifted most pandemic restrictions in stages between February and June that year, leading to a flood of requests for funeral services which had been postponed over two years, on top of the regular business.
Jodi and Jill both called it “overwhelming,” but the family came together to make it work.
Other changes they’ve noticed include a shift away from traditional wakes to more informal celebrations of life, a greater diversity of different cultural and faith-based traditions, and like most industries, an increased cost of business.
Over the years, Bill said he’s seen costs increase for grave sites from about $50 to $2,000, caskets from about $500 to $2,000, and hearses from about $45,000 to $165,000 as just a few examples.
Still, the family endeavours to provide a range of services and even offer temporary caskets as way to improve affordability for clients.
Mentoring future generations
Looking to the future, the Skwarchuks also mentor apprentices through the province’s only English-speaking Funeral Services program at Humber College, with which they have long-standing ties.
Bill once mentored a man who later taught Jill and whose daughter is now working at Skwarchuk.
They also have another young man working with them as an apprentice, regularly take on co-op students from high school, have hosted educational school trips and even provided presentations to different local groups over the years.
There’s certainly plenty to learn as the business includes funeral pre-planning, serving the needs of the family in their time of loss, traditional funeral services, cremation, memorial services, receptions and special personalized services.
To accomplish all of that requires not just an education, mentorship and a licence, but a well-equipped funeral home, which in the case of Skwarchuk’s includes: a chapel, several visitation rooms, coffee lounge, caskets and casket room, urns and urn room, appropriate facilities for preparing and storing the deceased, a small fleet of vehicles, including several hearses and more.
Some of Bill and Joan’s grandchildren already help out with the business, and time will tell if any of them take up the torch to continue the family legacy.
More information about Skwarchuk Funeral Homes can be found at skwarchukfuneralhome.com or by calling 905-775-3335.
