I was quietly working away in bookkeeping last Saturday evening, minding my own business and not bothering anyone else.  It seemed a little chilly, which is understandable since bookkeeping is in the garage, so I turned on the heat for the first time this season, and went back to the tasks at hand.  A few minutes later the strangest alarm started sounding.  It resembled the ringing of an old-timey telephone followed by a sick goose.  Seriously.  Three rings.  Three honks.  Three rings.  Three honks.  Over and over and over.  I kept wondering whose house or car had such a funky sounding alarm . . . and why in the world didn’t they shut it off?

Then my cell phone rang.

It was my husband, who was answering the funeral home phones that night, telling me the monitoring service for our alarm company had called to report a fire alarm at 450 Church Street and they had notified the fire department.

Hmmmm . . .

I rose from my chair, still on the phone with my husband, walked out of bookkeeping into the garage, then out of the garage into the hallway by the mechanical electrical room.  That’s when I realized the “goose” was actually the little man who lives in the fire panel yelling, “FIRE.  FIRE.  FIRE.”  And the hallway was filled with smoke.

I’m fairly certain I said something I probably shouldn’t have.

My heretofore unformed mental check list kicked in.  First out, any living breathing human beings.  We actually have a code to be used over the intercom system in case there’s a fire in the building—Code Jerry Lee (for Jerry Lee Lewis who sang “Great Balls Of Fire”)—but since I was the only qualifying individual present, an announcement didn’t seem necessary.  Second out, any deceased human remains.  I checked the preparation room.  Empty.  I searched the staterooms looking for the person for whom a visitation was to start the next day.  At this point the employee who lives across the back yard—the one I had frantically summoned—arrived and the casket was removed from the stateroom and placed in the back of the hearse, ready to be taken away from the building.

In the midst of the chaos I remembered turning on the heat, a fact I mentioned to the fire fighters as they arrived.  To the roof they went, quickly locating the offending unit (the smoke billowing from it was a dead giveaway . . . no pun intended . . .).  A dismantling of the thing revealed smoldering insulation that vaguely resembled the glowing embers of a camp fire.  No flames, but enough smoke to make you think there should have been some somewhere.

When the excitement subsided and the world went away, I started thinking about how much there was to lose in this building.  I don’t mean furniture or caskets or even equipment and vehicles.  I’m talking about history.  We have records of families we’ve served dating back to 1926 and all the insurance money in the world won’t replace those files.  Granted, for years one of the motivating factors for several actions we’ve taken has been, “What do we lose if the building burns?”  That’s why we’ve archived basic information from the older funeral records we have into computer databases, back to the very first service.  That’s why we now have the records for the cemetery entered into the computer so we know who’s buried where and who owns what.  It’s why we used to run back-ups to external hard drives that we changed out each day, storing the latest one in the safe.  It’s why we’ve started backing up to the cloud.  But there’s so much more.

Now we’re beginning to scan our preneed files, creating digital copies of the paper that presently occupies six file cabinet drawers.  Next on the list will be the monument orders.  And I’m still trying to figure out how we get the bookkeeping records out if the opportunity is there, keeping in mind that no record is worth someone’s life.  But if there is time, where do we start and in what order do we go?

There were always fire drills when I was in school and today we’re encouraged to have escape plans in place should our homes ever catch fire.  That may mean a designated gathering spot and collapsible ladders for second floor bedrooms with smoke alarms in all the appropriate places and fire extinguishers in the kitchen and by the electrical box.  The main goal should always be to save lives.  In a fire that’s all that really matters.  But there are steps we can take before that ever happens that will safe guard our history—like scanning family pictures and storing the back-ups in a safe place or copying important documents and placing the originals in a safe deposit box or fire-proof safe.

As I mused about the evening and all the suggestions I’d received from various members of the staff regarding building evacuation and document salvaging, I remembered one observation that was definitely an accurate assessment, whether you’re talking about your own personal home or a business . . . like a funeral home.  You can’t protect everything.  And he was right. But you know what?

I can sure try.

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