It was 2019. Life was good. Jay Siegel was four years removed from his retirement from Cummins Diesel after a long career as an engineer.
Siegel, a gabbai at BMH-BJ, spent some time consulting, and was even a part-time barista at Starbucks — just to keep busy.
As Siegel was nestling into retirement, Steve Miller, the longtime administrator of Mt. Nebo Cemetery, announced his own retirement. It was about that time that Siegel was having a discussion with Mt. Nebo board president John Berman.
“He said, ‘Yeah, we’re looking for somebody,’” Siegel remembers. “So I said, ‘I’ll throw my hat in the ring.’
“And I ended up being the guy.”
So much for retirement. Siegel took over the reigns at Mt. Nebo.
Running the cemetery demanded immediate crash courses in running a nonprofit, real estate management, accounting (there are 10,000 graves to manage), lawn care (Siegel can now expertly discuss the virtues of Tahoma 31, a hybrid bermudagrass now being used in a revamped area of the cemetery), wildlife (“bird watchers would love it out here”) and security.
“There are no college courses in running a cemetery,” Siegel says. “You just step in, you apply your skill sets and you utilize others around you and their skill sets.
“For me, it’s applying the skill sets that I got in my corporate career at Cummins and Caterpillar. The professional training we got — management training, leadership training, legal training, managing the different generations — all this marvelous training. You take those skill sets and a technical background and you apply it.
“People think maintaining a cemetery is just grass and graves. It’s not. It’s a lot of infrastructure — fences, roads, codes, compliance, the city, all this stuff. And perpetual care fees aren’t going to cover our costs, so you find other revenue streams.”
Those streams include nearby apartments on Mt. Nebo-owned land, which the cemetery leases
“There are about 33 developed acres right here that we’re still using,” Siegel says. “I have plenty of land for burials. Then we have probably in excess of 33 acres across the street. We own land up to 11th Avenue in Aurora, which is the next east-west street up.
“Also, the Aurora public schools have leased land. They pay us every year.”
Siegel considers himself as an even keel and patient person — two of the best attributes while accommodating families during the worst days of their lives.
“You’re working with families, and it’s a sad business,” says Siegel.
“Empathy and understanding what’s important at a given moment is what I focus on. I get calls from families with a lot of questions when somebody’s passed, like costs and things like that, and we direct them the best we can.
“I tell these people, ‘We’ll worry about all that stuff later. Right now, let’s focus on taking care of yourself, and let’s get through the period of the burial and mourning. All the other stuff can wait.”
Siegel scans the Mt. Nebo landscape. His father, Arnold Siegel, a past president of BMH-BJ, is buried here. So is his grandmother.
BMH-BJ operated Mt. Nebo until 2015; now the cemetery is a separate entity. Siegel and co-coordinator Sheila Abrahamsson accommodate 80-100 funerals each year.
“We choreograph every single funeral,” Siegel says. “Where the hearse will be, where we want the family to park. Funerals are like snowflakes. There’s just no two alike.
“I have one, specific example that always will stand out to me. One part of the family, the guy died and his wife — I don’t even think she was Jewish — wanted nothing to do with religion. The other part of the family — some of them were Holocaust survivors, and they were pretty religious.
“They show up out here, and we’re all ready to do a funeral. But they hadn’t thought about an officiant. So I led the funeral, but I had to balance between what the religious side wanted and what the non-religious side wanted. Somehow, I came up with some kind of eulogy to make everybody feel good. And it worked out.”
A budding clergy member, at 72.
No time for that sort of pursuit at the moment, though. It is springtime, which means constant communication with hydrology engi- neers. Siegel is indeed, a busy man. Who needs retirement, after all.
Says Siegel: “I’m just trying to keep a cemetery afloat in the middle of a drought.”
More from “Professionally Speaking”:
- Ilene Rosen, BMH-BJ
- Susan Rona, Mountain States ADL
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