A place where people can come to gather, share, grieve, remember, celebrate and say goodbye. We are a funeral home here to serve anyone in need.
It was August 1984 and I ( the then Donna R. Georges) arrived at the National Mortician and Funeral Directors convention in New Orleans Louisiana, with a dream in my head and a hope in my heart of opening my own funeral home in my home town a multi-cultural melting pot called Passaic, New Jersey. I was not only in town to attend the convention but searching for a name for my new funeral home, a place that would serve all nationalities of people. I read every sign that I passed looking for a name that would reflect my vision, and told any and every one that would listen about my new funeral home, and its new concept.... to be multi-national. This would be one of the first in the NFD&MA, and many told me it couldn't be done. Not that I couldn't open up a funeral home, but that I would not serve all races of people, Blacks went to Blacks, Whites went to Whites and so on and so on and that's the way its always been. I was even nick named MULTI-D for MULTI-DONNA (a name I proudly use on my vanity license plates today) because no one believed it would work.
Well, it did! When I opened my doors in August 1985 to The Madonna Multinational Home For Funerals Inc. (Madonna in honor of the mother and child, I have a son Maurice, and the word Multinational, is pronounced the same in English and Spanish) I served over 52 families that year a multi-cultural mixture of African - Americans, eight or nine factions of Hispanics, Moslem and Hindu Indians. Over the past twenty-three years I the former Donna Georges who became Donna Hines-Davis in 1988 and is now simply and legally ''just'' Madonna since 1992, have served hundreds more families of all races and nationalities (including Polish, Russians, Yugoslavians,and.Chinese).
The city of Passaic now has a population of about 68,000 people in a combination of about 23% white, 68% Hispanic, 11% African American, 2% Asian Indians and others. I have shipped loved ones human remains to all parts of the world, Mexico, Honduras, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Guatemala, Peru, Argentina, the Philippines, to name a few. I have even shipped stillborns and newborns back to their parents homelands. I speak a very limited amount of Spanish, I know mostly funeral words like caja = casket or muerte = death, (however we have excellent Spanish speaking members on staff) and none of the Indian dialects, however I fair very well in my new ''Multicultural'' community where I am proud to say I was born and raised over 50 years ago.
