Funeral Home Co-Founders Issue Joint Statement Describing 56 Unprocessed Decedents As 'An Exciting Opportunity To Revisit Our End-To-End Customer Journey'

CHICAGO — Leadership at Eternal Rest Partners LLC convened an unscheduled all-hands meeting Thursday morning following what Chief Operations Officer Dale Pruett described in his opening slide as a 'routine compliance touchpoint that escalated due to factors outside the team's sphere of influence.'

City officials, who arrived at the facility after receiving complaints described only as 'olfactory in nature,' discovered the remains of 56 individuals in conditions the city's health inspector characterized as 'deplorable,' a word Pruett asked employees to reframe as 'under-resourced.'

'We hear the feedback,' said Pruett, advancing past Slide 3, which read 'PEOPLE ARE OUR PRODUCT' in a bold sans-serif font. 'And we want to be transparent: some of our guests have been with us longer than our retention model originally projected.'

The all-hands, which ran 94 minutes and included a 12-minute icebreaker, addressed several agenda items, including a proposed audit of what Pruett called the company's 'remains throughput pipeline,' a new color-coded tagging system for 'active versus legacy inventory,' and the temporary suspension of co-founders Brett Lund and Carla Mossner, who are linked to a crematory previously shuttered over what officials described as 'mishandled remains,' a phrase Pruett replaced on Slide 7 with 'prior deliverable disruptions.'

When an employee asked directly whether the 56 individuals had been cremated, Pruett paused, consulted a legal notepad, and said the matter was 'in a discovery phase internally and we're committed to landing the plane on this.'

The plane metaphor appeared three more times before the Q&A portion was quietly cancelled.

City officials, reached for comment, said they were 'aware of the all-hands' and described their ongoing investigation as 'proceeding,' adding that they declined to characterize whether 'proceeding' implied progress, momentum, or a simple gerund denoting continuation. A press release is expected by end of quarter, defined internally as 'when we feel good about it.'

Attendees reported that the meeting concluded with a slide reading 'TOGETHER WE DECOMPOSE — wait, COMPOSE — TOGETHER WE COMPOSE EXCELLENCE,' which Pruett acknowledged was a 'mail merge error' and asked everyone to 'hold that in grace.'

A follow-up all-hands has been scheduled. Attendance is mandatory. Employees are asked to bring their whole selves, though HR noted this phrasing should not be taken as an inventory directive at this time.