MV Business Spotlight
"The first thing we do is listen" — Brent Dillinger of Loess Hills Memorials
By Don Harrold
News Editor
I expected the owner of a monument company to be cold, unfeeling and hurried.
But, Brent Dillinger seemed genuine as he shook my hand. He was welcoming, with expressive eyes — open to conversation.
There are signs on the wall at Loess Hills Memorials in Missouri Valley. One of them says, "The first thing we do is listen." Another one explains you don't have to have it all figured out before you come in.
I asked him about that one.
"Oftentimes, people coming in to our doors, they're here looking for a headstone or memorial product, but it might be the first time they've really considered a purchase like that," he said. They often say they don't know where to start.
Brent begins with granite, size, style. Then he listens to the story of the life which will be told on stone.
Some orders take four or five conversations. "But I've found sometimes people just want to take it slow," he added. "I mean just kind of let it soak. Let it fall into place."
"And sometimes I think people just want someone to talk to."
About half the people who come through his door just lost someone. The other half are planning ahead, which surprised him when he opened.
He described what happens when he turns the demo screen around and a living person sees their own name cut into stone. "That's pretty surreal, seeing my name up there," one of them told him.
What he hears afterward is relief. "I feel good that this is done. Now my kids don't have to think about it."
Once, he sat with a family in which the person choosing the stone already knew how much time was left. "It's been a little eye-opening to me," he said, "to hear just how thoughtful many people are, and how willing they are to address their own mortality."
I asked how he sits with that.
Brent answered by taking me to a cemetery in eastern Kansas more than forty years ago. His mother did genealogy. She took him along to old rural burial grounds, where they pulled blackberry bushes off the stones so he could do the rubbings with a crayon.
Then came the library, where she worked through books and microfilm, and he was bored. There was usually a candy bar and a pop in it for him.
He said he never thought about those afternoons again until the past year.
What he did in between was public service. Most recently he ran an area nonprofit. Supervisors told him he had a high EQ, and for a long time he wasn't sure what they meant. The more he studied it, the more he came to accept that's how God made him.
He wanted to be a funeral director once. He interviewed one for a college paper. As a young man he couldn't get past what he called the weirder side of it, but he was always drawn to the man in the suit, or the woman, being kind to a family in that moment.
Brent and wife Elizabeth Dillinger built a business centered on helping families through decisions most of us would rather not make.
Elizabeth's a retired schoolteacher, woodworker and gardener, and she'd rather take what Brent heard from a family and go build the design. She's honing in on laser engraving and the precision it takes. While I was there, she was at the cemetery photographing someone's stone. Their son-in-law works in the shop too.
Asked what a person actually finds when they walk in, Brent said, "Headstones, grave markers, that's all the core product.” The shop also does laser engraving, and he's been asked to clean tarnished bronze markers. For most families, he said, a memorial is a fairly large purchase, which is part of why he doesn't rush anyone.
They don't hand out a catalog. They don't send you home to fill out a form on a website. Every design is custom, and they've been setting markers in two to three months.
Missouri Valley had a monument business once. It closed 10 or 12 years ago, and after that, a family that lost someone had to leave town to arrange the stone. Brent saw the gap, and he is steadfast about filling that need.
They're chamber members and belong to the National Monument Builders Association. They've raised their family here, and they live just outside town. As Brent put it, they live, shop, eat and play here.
We talked for a long while about what his business is, and he never once brought up money. I never asked. That isn't what the hour was about. It was about two people trying to serve the town they live in.
I asked him what was fun about this work.
"I enjoy building the relationships with people in my community," he said. "I enjoy taking something that's a concept that I hear from people and figuring out a way to capture it on stone."
Near the end, he mentioned they're working with a couple dozen families right now, four months in, and that the community's response has been better than they expected.
When we finished, I stepped out and looked south down Erie Street. I put my hand on my camera bag, turned back and looked at Loess Hills Memorials.
The wind was warmer than when I arrived and I was not in a hurry.
Loess Hills Memorials is at 204 E. Erie Street, Missouri Valley, Iowa.
