What the funeral industry doesn't want you to know (article)
Alan Smithee
Christianity Today
Carol Stream
Apr 26, 1999
Authors: Lauren F Winner
What the funeral industry doesn't want you to know.
Recently, I called up a Methodist minister I've known for some years. I
was in his area for a few weeks, and I hoped to find a time when he and
I could squeeze in lunch. "Tuesday's out," he said. "I have a funeral.
And on Wednesday I have two finerals; Thursday I am booked with counseling;
and on Friday I have to attend an unveiling at the Jewish ceremony. Saturday?"
A lot of death, I thought, and when we met at a coffee bar on Saturday,
I asked him how he got through a week where he was bombarded with so much
bereavement and loss. "Well, I've been doing this for 20 years," he said,
"and it comes and goes in cycles. I may go through the next three or four
weeks and not have a single funeral."
We got to talking about what a funeral entailed from the minister's perspective.
Did he go with the family to pick out the casket? I asked. Did he hang
around the funeral parlor during the viewing of the body? "I do usually
go with them to pick the casket out," he told me. "I guess I've been down
to Bob's funeral parlor three times in the last week. That's where I always
send people, of course; Bob and I worked out an agreement a long time ago
that he'd give me a little cut of whatever profit he made selling caskets
to the folks I sent his way. Like at summer camp, you know, where your
kids get 10 percent off their tuition if they manage to sell some other
family on the same camp."
Call me daft, but I failed to see the parallel between a camp's offering
a financial incentive to satisfied families who might pass along the camp's
brochure to another family, and a minister who directed his parishioners
to a particular funeral parlor because he got a percentage of the profits.
It seemed at the very least like a conflict of interest, but I figured
that if my friend saw it that way, he wouldn't have been so cavalier about
mentioning it to me over chai latte and biscotti. And when it turned out
that he had two funerals the next week, I dug out a navy dress and heels
and slipped in discreetly to the funeral of an elderly lady who had died
in her sleep. I was not surprised to notice that the casket was one of
the most gussied-up monstrosities I'd ever seen-all pastel and shiny, satiny,
and lacquered looking. It looked like a giant Easter egg had met the interior
of a luxury automobile. "I bet that cost a mint," I thought. I couldn't
help wondering if my friend were knocking off his parishioners: maybe he,
Bob, and the local arsenic dealer had a three-way deal.
In Roughing It, Mark Twain tells the story of Jacops the coffin maker,
who "used to go roosting around where people was sick, waiting for 'em,"
towing with him a coffin that he imagined would "fit the can'idate." Robbins,
an elderly man, took sick and for almost a month, "in frosty weather,"
Jacops loitered around the Robbins place, coffin in hand, waiting for the
old man to kick of Much to Jacops's disappointment, Robbins got well; the
next time he got sick, Jacops gave the old man a bargain. "He bought the
coffin for ten dollars and Jacops was to pay it back with twenty-five more
besides if Robbins didn't like the coffin after he'd tried it." During
the funeral, Robbins, who hadn't been dead after all, climbed out of the
coffin and collected his $35.
When Jessica Mitford published The American Way of Death, her muckraking
expose of the American funeral industry in 1963, she revealed that
twentieth-century
coffin makers-and undertakers, vault manufacturers, florists, and monument
makers (she's pretty nice to clergy)-had no more scruples than their
nineteenth-century
predecessor Jacops. The American Way of Death, which was a bestseller for
months, portrayed an industry of bloodsuckers who were out to squeeze every
possible penny from grieving families. Before her death in 1996, Mitford
had all but put the finishing touches on an updated account of the funeral
industry, which has now been published. The original version sent shock
waves through the professional funeral community in the 1960s-the author
became known as "the notorious Jessica Mitford," and Mortuary Management
began referring to her simply as Jessica, a la Jackie or Malcolm. But has
her book had any lasting impact? Has the funeral industry been forced to
shape up in response to the outrage elicited by Mitford's book?
In The American Way of Death Revisited, Mitford suggests that those dying
at the end of the twentieth century will be no better off than those who
died 40 years before. Prices have continued to skyrocket. Undertakers continue
to charge outrageous amounts for applying cosmetics to the corpse, embalming,
the use of a hearse, flowers, the casket. To sell expensive procedures
and goods, undertakers have taken to outright lying, telling customers,
for example, that embalming is required by law. In 1961, the average cost
for a casket and "services" was $750. It is nowand this according to the
presumably conservative figures of the industry itself-a whopping $4,700,
"to which must be added the cost of a burial vault, flowers, clothing,
clergy and musician's honorarium, and cemetery charges. When these costs
are added to the undertaker's bill, the total average cost for an adult's
funeral today is $7,800."
The casket, of course, is where the undertaker will really stick you. The
Reverend Laurence Cross, of the Berkeley Community Church, described casket
sales to Mitford like this: First, you come to a magnificent casket-it's
like a pink show window. You'd think it had the Queen's jewels on display.
The inside is made of beautiful satin and it's set out on a thick white
carpet. You walk along and come to the next one. There's another beauty,
maybe in a different pastel shade. You see a few more, and then you come
to the absolute end. There aren't any more. Those you have seen are priced
very high.
Most people, the Reverend Mr. Cross explained, say to themselves,
"I hadn't planned to spend that much, but since these are my only options,
I guess I'll have to get one." Only the very bold tell the undertaker that
his goods are outside their price range and that they'll have to go somewhere
else. For those few bold bereaved, however, the funeral director opens
a door you never knew existed. You go into another room where there are
maybe half a dozen caskets-in less attractive colors than the other beauties-and
at somewhat lower prices. That's where the psychology comes in. The average
person who has managed to avoid the more expensive caskets now feels that
at least he has saved several hundred dollars. But if you're mean as the
devil, you may still insist that the caskets you've seen are more than
you were prepared to pay. So you go through the same procedure. The funeral
director opens yet another door you never knew existed, and here are some
for even less. If you are still so mean that you won't spend that much,
you are led into the last room. Here the funeral director. . . shows you
an ugly casket, maybe purple in color. The cheap ones are purposely made
up in hideous colors, and they have no handles, no lining. If you still
won't buy that, you are taken from there through a concrete alleyway as
dark as Egypt. You come to a garage where all the funeral cars are parked.
Then he pulls out a box. It's just six pieces of redwood nailed together....
He'll charge anything he can get out of you for it.
Those looking to avoid the high cost and the fuss of funerals have often
turned to cremation as an alternative. Mitford has bad news for those of
us who, like me, envision cremation as a simple and frugal way to dispose
of our remains. I am not alone in thinking cremation is the way to go.
In 1961, only 3.75 percent of the American dead were cremated; in 1995,
that figure was up to 21 percent, and it's still on the rise.
[IMAGE PHOTOGRAPH] Captioned as: The American Way of Death Revisited
Captioned as: by Jessica Mitford Alfred A. Knopf 296 pp.; $25
For cremation done right, go to England. There, 72 percent of the dead
are cremated, usually for around $280, which includes the use of a chapel
(an amenity not often provided in American cremations). Every effort is
made by English crematoria to facilitate the scattering-or "strewing" as
English clerics call it-of the ashes, and when families do opt to preserve
the ashes in an urn, then a simple but tasteful container is provided.
American crematoria are a different story. As Mitford tells it, "cremation
has become just another way of making a buck, principally through the sale
of the niche and urn, plus `perpetual care,' for the ashes. Cemetery men
are most reluctant to relinquish the ashes for any form of private disposition;
as one told me rather plaintively, `If everyone wanted to take the ashes
away and scatter them or bury them privately, we'd soon be out of business:
"
Cemetery lobbyists pushed a bill through the California legislature that
made the scattering of ashes in any public or private area illegal-and,
not surprisingly, undertakers rarely acknowledge to families that it is
legal simply to take the ashes home with you and stick them on your mantel
or in your closet. Increasingly, the cremation urn is becoming akin to
the casket-funeral directors push the fanciest, most expensive urns upon
customers, often exploitatively.
In 1993, Ron Hast, editor of Mortuary Management, described a scene where
several siblings turned up to purchase several urns to hold a portion of
their mother's ashes. "There was something of a power struggle to see who
would purchase the nicest urn." It is not unusual for a fancy urn to cost
over $1,500. During a 1997 "Keys to Cremation Success" symposium sponsored
by the Funeral Service Insider, one presentation was called "How to add
$1,400 or More to Each Cremation Call." The presenter told his audience
that "Seeing Mom in a cardboard box sometimes prompts a family member to
ask if we don't have something a little nicer." A similar suggestion was
put forward by the Funeral Service Insider: "When families don't buy an
urn, require them to purchase a temporary container to hold the cremains.
But make sure you label (or stamp) that box with the words `temporary container'
on all four sides.... That makes families most likely to upgrade beyond
the temporary container."
In 1975, it looked like things had improved a little for the general public
vis-a-vis funerals. The Federal Trade Commission, after a two-year study,
put forward a "trade rule" that required that the consumer would have a
right to choose or refuse services such as embalming or grief counseling,
with an appropriate reduction in cost for those customers who refused such
services; that prices must be quoted over the telephone; that undertakers
had to inform customers that embalming was not required by law; that the
cheapest casket must be displayed with the others; and that funeral providers
would be prohibited from telling the customer that the "eternal sealer"
casket will preserve the embalmed corpse for a long or indefinite time.
Mild and straightforward as these measures may seem, the funeral industry
declared an all-out war upon the trade rule, which one member of the industry
publicly described as "a Soviet-style piece staged by the FTC." Within
three years, two components of the rule had been omitted-the section that
required undertakers to display their cheapest caskets with the other caskets,
and the section that prohibited the undertaker from trying to influence
the customer's choice of goods and services. When the public hearings about
the final adoption of the rule finally occurred in 1984, consumer advocates
had concluded that only a minimal protection for funeral shoppers had been
left in place.
But as Mitford shows, even that protection has proved, in the intervening
decade and a half, merely nominal. The FTC, which "makes no effort to ascertain
whether funeral establishments are complying with the rule," declared in
1990 that "the Rule has not contributed to a general reduction in the price
of funerals." In 1994, Lisa Carlson, author of Caring for Your Own Dead,
conducted a survey of Vermont's 70 funeral homes and determined that none
were in full compliance with the FTC's rule. In 1996, the FTC and the National
Funeral Directors Association struck a new deal. "Under the new plan,"
Mitford tells us, "no longer will funeral homes be subject to a fine for
violating the rule." In addition, as the Funeral Monitors discussion of
the new plan tells us, "The FTC will no longer publicize the names of funeral
homes accused of violating the rule. Funeral homes that violate the rule
will be able to avoid a complaint filed in federal court, as well as an
injunction against the funeral home and owner. And to top it off, violators
will receive an emblem telling consumers that the establishment is a program
participant and has voluntarily agreed to comply with the provisions of
the Funeral Rule." So much for progress.
I have only had a few moments in life where I have been deathly conscious
of being a white person. The first time I can remember having that sensation
was when I went to Howard University to do research, and the only other
white person I saw was the archivist. But here I am having it again. I
have spent the day at a black funeral parlor in Virginia-one that, I am
told, has been owned by the same family"forever." The American Way of Death
Revisited inspired me to take a short tour of those funeral parlors Mitford
ignores: African-American funeral homes.
Mitford tells the reader at the beginning that she is treating only the
mainstream of American funeral practices. "I have not included atypical
funerals: quaint death customs still practiced by certain Indian tribes,
the rites accorded the Gypsy kings and queens, the New Orleans jazz funerals.
.. . . I have regretfully avoided these byways, intriguing though they are,
for the main highway-the `average,' 'typical' American funerary practices."
Disappointingly, though, her "typical" funeral parlors seem to be exclusively
white, as do her "average" dead and bereaved. A portrait of African-American
funeral parlors and undertakers would present a different picture of the
funeral industry.
Not that black undertakers never indulge in the underhanded and mercenary
tactics that Mitford describes. I visited half a dozen black funeral parlors
in the South, and in the offices of every one I saw on display the industry
magazines that teach funeral directors how to jack up cremation prices
and rip off casket customers.
That having been said, historically the funeral parlor has played a much
different role in African-American communities than in white America. The
undertaker has held the same privileged role in black communities as ministers
and teachers. "You know, blacks built up these funeral parlors during
Reconstruction,
just as soon as we had the churches and schools built. Took a lot of doing
for people just out of slavery who were working for pitiful wages, but
we built them. Like Hawthorne said," a black funeral director, who had
The Scarlet Letter squeezed into his overflowing bookshelf between copies
of Their Eyes Were Watching God and Winesburg Ohio, told me, "a community's
got to build itself a graveyard. You're all going to die sometime, and
you've got to take care of your own." That the modern-day funeral parlor
didn't exist in the 1870s is of little consequence; that an African-American
undertaker would link black-owned funeral homes to the schools and churches
built in Reconstruction is itself a testimony to the importance of undertakers
and funeral parlors in African-American communities.
For white folks, funeral parlors are rather peripheral; you go there when
someone has died, and then you leave once the burial is taken care of.
For black Americans-in particular, black Southerners-funeral parlors have
often been a locus of black community life second only to the church. During
the Civil Rights movement, for example, small groups of black leadership
would sometimes meet in the funeral parlors, and black undertakers contributed
critical financial support to black grassroots organizations. In the same
county in Maryland where my friend is getting rich off the families of
his deceased congregants, there is a playground in an African-American
neighborhood that was built largely through the contributions of the black
funeral parlor. If there are black undertakers out to gouge their customers,
there are also black funeral workers who view their work as being not about
private gain but about contributing to the community.
Some of the funeral parlors I visited were historically black institutions
and are still owned by black families, but they now do "equal business
with whites and blacks," as one black undertaker told me. "See that stack
of Jewish calendars over there? We have hundreds of those printed up every
year, and you know we aren't distributing those to black folks." But the
funeral home in Virginia still serves mainly black folks, and as I sit
conspicuously in a corner, I see black women float in and out all day.
It is clear that most of them have not come about a burial. One woman tells
me she is there to organize a meeting for getting out the vote in the
forthcoming
election. The Clinton scandal has permeated even this sanctum sanctorum:
"All the commentators are saying Democrats are going to stay home, that
it's a midterm election, and people are fed up with Clinton," Vivian tells
me as she bustles back out of the funeral parlor. "But black Democrats
are not going to stay home." Another woman comes to talk to the undertaker
about donating something to a church auction. What will he donate? I wonder.
Free embalming? An extra Bible verse engraved in your headstone gratis?
But the undertaker is disappointingly prosaic-he donates a gourmet dinner
cooked at the highest bidder's home. One woman does come in to look at
caskets-the inexpensive ones, I note, are displayed next to the pricier
models. f you don't know of any black funeral parlors to patronize, you
could move to Milford, Michigan, where the poet Thomas Lynch is the undertaker.
I was unable to make it up to Michigan on my tour, so I had to settle for
dipping into Lynch's 1997 book The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal
Trade, which should be required reading for anyone who reads The American
Way of Death Revisited.
In the first page of his lyrical account of deaths and burials, Lynch lets
you know about money: "In a good year the gross is close to a million,
five percent of which we hope to call profit. I am the only undertaker
in this town. I have a corner on the market." After that, Lynch leaves
aside the business of selling to talk instead about the business of assisting
people grieve.
As he describes the calling of an undertaker, it seems to be less about
hustling and more about midwifery, "less to do with what was done to the
dead and more to do with what the living did about the fact that people
died." It is hard to grasp that Lynch is a member of the same profession
that Mitford describes. "[T]his is the central fact of my business," Lynch
writes, "that there is nothing, once you are dead, that can be done to
you or for you or about you that will do you any good or harm."
If your parents live in Milford, rest assured that when you go to bury
them, the local undertaker will not try to sell you an overpriced coffin
by explaining that your mother will spend eternity in sublime comfort if
only you swathe her in limegreen satin.
There are, of course, alternatives to funeral homes. Although Mitford devotes
only three pages in her book to the practice of handling a burial yourself,
sans undertaker, it is a growing practice, and advocates of self-directed
funerals speak passionately on the benefits of skipping the funeral parlor
altogether.
June, a 30-year-old public school teacher, handled her father's burial
herself, without involving an undertaker. When her father was diagnosed
with prostate cancer, a friend of June's gave her a well-read copy of Carlson's
Caring for Your Own Dead, which is to self-directed funerals what The Moosewood
Cookbook is to vegetarian cuisine. When her husband committed suicide,
Carlson decided to skip dealing with funeral parlors and undertakers because
she was broke, but, as she argues eloquently in her book, there were unexpected
therapeutic benefits to handling things herself. "I felt a strong need
to express my love and caring for John even in death," she wrote.
June was sold on the idea and was able to talk to her father about it before
he died. "I wouldn't have done it any other way," she told me when I called
her at her home in upstate New York. "But," she added laughing, "I am also
a devotee of Diet for a Small Planet and all of Helen and Scott Nearing's
books. I know there may be some people who would think that having to deal
with all the details of the burial or cremation would be a burden, not
a blessing." Those details-from transporting the body to building a casket
or removing a pacemaker (a prerequisite for cremation, and, Carlson assures
us, really quite simple to do)-can seem daunting, but those who have gone
through it themselves say that dealing with those details helped them get
through the grieving process.
"I've had friends who have said to me that the only thing that kept them
together after their parents died was that they had to get on the phone
and call a bunch of relatives, that they had to cut up a brunch of cucumber
sandwiches to feed people after the funeral, that they had to select a
casket and track down a minister," said June. "Handling my father's burial
myself was like that, only more so. I was really involved. There was no
intermediary, trying to explain to me the benefits of satin lining for
motives that I'm sure had to do with something other than my own best interest,
and my father's best interest."
I went to a funeral the day after Labor Day. The minister made much of
the timing in his eulogy. My friend's father, who had died of leukemia,
had been a construction worker. His wife was a waitress. Mv friend was
thinking about taking a year off from her doctoral program so that she
could work and give some money to her mother.
"The medical costs while he was sick just got really high," she explained
to me, "even with insurance. The insurance didn't cover the hospice. I
think my mother's in some real debt now. I don't know what else to do."
Throughout the funeral, I couldn't help wondering how much deeper in debt
this funeral had put Mrs. North. As I was walking back to my car, I heard
a little boy say to his father, "What happens to you after you die?" It
was a relief to realize that he was asking about something that transcended
casket choices and the rising cost of cremation.
Lauren F Winner is Kellett Scholar at Cambridge University. This summer
she will join the staffs of CrY TODAY and BOOKS et CULTURE in a writing
residency made possible by a grant from the Lilly Foundation.