Making a family feel a sense of peace and comfort at the time of a loved one’s death is serious business.
And 40 years is a long time.
So why has the Gassett family been in the funeral business for 40 years? One would think that all that time spent with death would be a depressing endeavor.
Instead, Glenda Gassett Terrell, the owner of the business and widow of its founder, Joe Gassett, said they do it for the blessings.
“Sometimes you can get a blessing out of it,” Terrell said. “The families will talk to you and tell you things and it will bless you.”
One of the blessings that Terrell recalls specifically came from a father that lost a young daughter.
“I can’t think of the name now, but it was a child who had passed away and the daddy had been known to drink,” said Terrell. “And when he saw his child in the casket, he got down on his knees and asked the Lord to forgive him and said, ‘I’ll never drink again.’ As far as I know he never has. That happened when Joe was living. That’s been years ago. And that was a blessing to me to see something like that happen.
“Everyone one of us has had a sister, a husband or parents to pass away. We know how they feel.”
“When you know people are having a hard time with things, I mean, like any job, it has its ups and downs,” adds Dan Shockley, Terrell’s son-in-law (her daughter, Felecia’s husband. Felecia is also on the Gassett staff.).
Joe Gassett and his silent partner, Paul Hudman, Terrell’s father, opened their business, then called Gassett-Hudman in 1978. They had a brand new facility and a brand new hearse. Joe had attended mortuary school at Gupton-Jones College of Funeral Service in Nashville in the mid 1960s while employed by Howard Campbell at Campbell’s Funeral Home, which was located on Highway 231 north of Wetumpka.
Gassett began working for Campbell’s when he was 16 and, in a strange turn of events, Campbell worked for Gassett after retiring.
Currently, the Gassett staff includes Terrell, Shockley and Felecia, their son, Alex, and another daughter of Terrell and Joe Gassett, Michele Gassett Henderson. Other members of the staff include Mike Colquitt, who has been with the funeral home on and off since its beginning, and Eddie Taylor, who has been employed by Gassett for 13 years.
It’s a family business, the Shockleys say, and lends itself to an understanding of how families feel when they need their services.
“We’re a family that just happens to be in the funeral business,” said Shockley. “I think, because of that, we can relate to what families are going through.”
“We see so many people when they come in and we know what they’re going through,” Terrell said. “Like I said, we’ve all been through it. And we have real feelings for them because we do know what they’re going through.”
Joe Gassett started working for Campbell’s Funeral Home when he was 16. Back in those days it was an ambulance/funeral home.
“Mr. Campbell opened up in 1959 and Joe went to work with him just a few months after,” said Terrell.
Gassett actually had an appointment to interview for a position with the telephone company, but heard about an opening at Campbell’s. Though uneasy about the opportunity, he was hired by Campbell only three months after the now-defunct funeral home opened. He even transferred from his school in Eclectic to attend Wetumpka so that he would be closer to work.
Three years later in 1962, Gassett married Glenda Hudman (Paul’s daughter, now Terrell), whose father became Gassett’s silent partner when Gassett left Campbell’s to strike out on his own in 1978.
In 1978, Gassett’s records show a funeral cost approximately $3,800 as opposed to $6,800 today.
And the prices aren’t the only thing in the business that has changed in those 40 years. Often, the deceased would lie in state in their residence back in the 1970s, but, Shockley says, very few do now.
“I’ve only had a few of those and I’ve been in the business since 1991,” Shockley said. His son, Alex, said he’d never experienced a body lying in state at the deceased’s residence.
Cremation is also something that has become far more frequent in the business, both for reasons of expense and the number of options for the family that chooses to have its loved one cremated.
“We put in our crematorium in June of 2016 and I think we’ve done 128,” Shockley said. “And we just do them for our funeral home. We’re not contracted to do them for anyone else.
“I think the reasons more are choosing cremation vary. With some it’s the expense. It’s less expensive. With some it’s the lifestyle. It’s easier. You can do the cremation and have a memorial here or you can have it at your house or at your church. You can have a scattering ceremony. There are a lot of different options with cremation. Some families can have the body embalmed, have a viewing and then have a traditional funeral. Then after the funeral they can have a cremation instead of a burial. There are a lot of choices with cremation.”
Shockley said the first thing Gassett does when a family comes to them is “talk to them and get their wishes.”
“We have a cooling facility here that we put the body in until they make the arrangements,” Shockley said. “Then we have an arrangement conference and they come in and we go over their options, make the arrangements and pick out the casket. A lot of families now are having visitation on the same day (of the funeral). That’s something that’s really taken off in the last few years. Used to, you know, they’d come in at night and have visitation at night and the funeral the next day.
“We just carry them all the way through to the grave, graveside and after. If they have any needs after, we’re here for them, too.”
Despite the gravity of their job, the family said they do find time to laugh.
“We laugh a lot around here because we have to,” Shockley said.
Two of the most memorable – and funniest – events that happened in the recent past were apparent “hauntings” of the funeral home.
“A gentleman that was helping with visitations, he was thinking that it was haunted and that there was a ghost here and it turned out to be an automatic air freshener,” Alex Shockley said. “He thought he heard somebody sniffing and he swore up and down this place was haunted. He talked about that and laughed about it for months.”
Terrell tells of another person who thought the home was haunted.
“One of the guys was locking up and he’d turn the lights off and when he came back in the lights would be on,” she said. “He got convinced that the place was haunted but all it was was a sensor.”
