For nearly six decades, funeral director David Chambers has helped families through some of the most difficult moments of their lives. Along the way, he has also helped ensure that death can become an opportunity to give someone else a better life.
For Chambers, of McGuinness-Chambers Funeral Home in Bettendorf, supporting eye donation is simply part of caring for families and honoring the people they love.
His commitment to eye donation goes back decades, when the recovery process looked very different from today.
Back then, Chambers was one of scores of Iowa funeral directors that Iowa Lions Eye Bank trained to recover donated eyes. A two-day program at the University of Iowa taught morticians about aseptic techniques and how to perform an enucleation of the whole eye for transplantation or research.
When a donor died, Chambers would retrieve a special kit and perform the enucleation. Iowa State Patrol troopers then transported the donors’ eyes across the state, sometimes relaying them from one trooper to another, until they reached where the eye bank’s then-location at University of Iowa Health Care Medical Center-University Campus in Iowa City.
Chambers remembers that the call for an enucleator often seemed to come at “2 in the morning.”
“And we always were glad to do it,” he says. “It was necessary.”
As a certified enucleator, Chambers also volunteered to assist other funeral homes that did not have someone trained to perform the procedure.
His involvement was reinforced by the fact that he is a Lion. With the Lions Club’s historic commitment to preventing blindness, Chambers saw helping make eye donation possible a natural extension of that mission.
“As a Lion, I just felt it was kind of an obligation that I lend a hand,” he says.
Today, funeral directors no longer serve as enucleators. Iowa Lions Eye Bank now employs part-time recovery technicians who perform in-situ recoveries of the cornea in most cases, instead of enucleating the whole eye. Iowa State Troopers also no longer transport eyes. Instead, the recovery technicians or Lions transport the tissue to Iowa Lions Eye Bank’s headquarters on the third floor of the BioVentures Center in Coralville.
A funeral director by chance — and then by choice
Chambers did not originally plan on being a funeral director.
A native of Bloomington, Illinois, he began college studying forestry. But after his second year in college, his great-grandmother died. The funeral director who cared for her invited the young Chambers to work at the funeral home that summer.
The experience changed his career plans. The funeral director became his mentor, and Chambers switched to mortuary science, attending Worsham College in Chicago. After graduating in 1968, he returned to Bloomington and began a career that has now spanned 58 years.
Eventually, Chambers wanted to operate a funeral home of his own. That brought him to Bettendorf and McGuinness-Chambers, which operates from a distinctive Victorian home along the riverfront in Bettendorf that was built in 1890.
Although funeral directors no longer enucleate eyes for donation, Chambers says funeral homes still have an important role to play by supporting donors, accommodating recovery teams and reassuring families.
One concern he sometimes encounters: whether eye donation will affect a family's ability to have an open-casket visitation. Chambers can answer from experience.
“I’ve been there. I’ve seen it. I know that’s not the case,” he says.
He has also seen firsthand the care recovery technicians take with donors. Chambers described a recent case where an Iowa Lions Eye Bank recovery technician was attentive, considerate and respectful — someone who understood that the donor before him was “somebody’s mom or dad.”
“He was gentle. He was very professional in what he did,” Chambers says.
That respect matters to Chambers. Funeral directors and eye bank staff share a responsibility to treat each donor with dignity while helping fulfill their wishes and those of their family.
Keeping the gift at the center
Chambers understands that donation can add steps to a funeral director’s work. But after 58 years of serving families, he believes those considerations should never outweigh the significance of the gift.
“Yes, it adds some time. Yes, it adds some issues for us, but not to the point that I would ever try to deter someone from being a donor,” he says.
Instead, Chambers encourages people to consider the person on the other side of donation — the recipient whose life could be changed because another family was willing to give.
That perspective is rooted in what nearly six decades of funeral service have taught him: life can change without warning.
“You’re a blink of an eye away from a life-changing event,” Chambers says. Rather than making him fearful, that knowledge has made him more aware of the importance of making each day count.
Donation, he believes, can also provide a measure of comfort amid grief. A family is still mourning someone irreplaceable, but at the same time, something good can continue because that person chose to give.
For Chambers, that possibility is reason enough to keep advocating.
As difficult as losing someone can be, he says, there can be comfort in knowing that somewhere another person has a better life because of that loss.
“That in itself is enough motivation for me,” Chambers says, “to be a cheerleader for the eye bank.”