Man
helps others deal with loss
It’s Sunday, and shortly after daybreak in Signal Hill. Bargain
hunters sift through boxes containing all that is left of a few lives.
Dozens of oil paintings and hundreds of pieces of pottery, polyester shirts with winged collars, campy 50’s lamps, and Navy footlockers that have never been opened.
It’s the stuff of a retired Navy commander and his wife who died within days of each other, and 2 men who succumbed to AIDS.
Deadly
business
While shoppers
with sleepy eyes sip coffee from Styrofoam and lazily rummage through the heaps,
organizer Ken McKenzie keeps things running in front of his Orange Avenue mortuary.
A sign above him explains that proceeds will go to AIDS hospices.
This isn’t your ordinary yard sale, but then McKenzie’s not your ordinary mortician. He’s become expert at taking the business of death and finding a positive somewhere in its midst. He refers to it as “a calling.” He first answered it at 22, after his father committed suicide. He became a mortician to help others deal with losing a loved one, just as another mortician had helped him.
Opening his own mortuary in 1994, he halved the price of funerals by eliminating a chapel. The idea was to offer an alternative and pass on the savings to the community, which McKenzie says pays too high a price for burials.
Conducting visitations and memorials in the deceased’s church instead of a home is uncommon in today's mortuaries, but already the idea is showing signs of changing the future of the business.
“I had 150 services in my first seven months, more than most small mortuaries have in a year,” says McKenzie, who donates 3 percent of his professional service charges to the families’ favorite charities.
Not bad for someone who didn’t even understand the role as a mortician until he needed one.
This time around, McKenzie wants to give meaning to the lives of friends who've died of AIDS—more friends, he says than his grandfather has lost in a lifetime.
Weekend
fund-raiser
Sundays’ estate sale allowed him to raise money for victims, while drawing
attention to the hideous disease that’s killing them.
The idea came about when he learned, coincidentally, that none of the executors involved had time to sort through their loved ones’ belongings and sell what’s left.
He offered to take care of the job for them, if they would agree to donate the proceeds to hospices.
Deal struck, McKenzie advertised the event, hung the sign in front of his mortuary, and rounded up volunteers to help sort and price the stuff.
By mid-afternoon Sunday, he counted $1,800 in his cash box, not including what he’ll make in the yet-to-be-sold antique clothing, stamp and toy collections. You can bet this won't be the last AIDS sale he’ll organize.
If he keeps it up, he may single- handedly restore public trust in a business badly damaged by the Paradise Memorial Park fiasco.
Maybe then he’ll get a well-deserved past
on the back from the peers who told him he’d never make it. 
