By Brett Ashley Hawkins
Editorial Intern
With death comes new life. It’s been said over and over again, and it rings even truer of Long Beach funeral director Kenneth McKenzie’s latest fundraiser for KAMM Cares, a nonprofit benefiting women who are persevering through breast cancer. McKenzie, who owns and operates McKenzie Mortuary Services, 3843 E. Anaheim St., has released a tell-all book about the funeral services industry— Mortuary Confidential: Undertakers Spill the Dirt. Although it documents the end of life and the funeral process, the book was conceived with the aim of helping those afflicted with breast cancer to live and thrive.
The book was co-written by McKenzie and Delaware mortician Todd Harra, with whom McKenzie had previously worked on a fundraiser for KAMM Cares— a calendar that features shirtless male morticians. “[Harra] applied to be in the Men of Mortuaries calendar for the 2008-2009 year,” said McKenzie. “In the calendar biographies, I discovered he’s a writer. We put the book together in the course of a year.”
The calendar’s proceeds went to KAMM Cares, which was founded in 2005 in honor of McKenzie’s sister, Katherine Alyce McKenzie-Meadows, who battled and eventually overcame breast cancer. The foundation aspires to support women with breast cancer to help them pay normal life expenses such as groceries and childcare costs. “It was funny how the whole thing started because, around the time my sister got breast cancer, her washer and dryer broke,” said McKenzie. “She seemed more upset about the washer and dryer than by her cancer!”
Having entered funeral services in 1984, he opened McKenzie Cremation and Burial Services in Signal Hill in 1994 with the goal of cutting funeral costs in half. Then in 2005, he established McKenzie Mortuary Services.
His years in the industry have provided the book with a behind-the-scenes perspective on what funeral directors fear, what moves them, and what outrageous situations arise at funerals.
McKenzie feels one of his most notable experiences as a funeral director was when he received a picture of six ladies and was told to style the cadaver as the third from the left. Doing so, McKenzie cut and dyed her hair to match the photograph, only to find he was supposed to emulate the third woman from the right.
To learn more about McKenzie Mortuaries and KAMM Cares, visit and kammcares.org, respectively. Mortuary Confidential: Undertakers Spill the Dirt is available at most Long Beach book retailers and www.amazon.com.
