Last wrongs

Commonweal, August 13, 2004 by John C. Cort

Caring for the Dead

Your Final Act of Love

Lisa Carlson

Upper Access, $29.95, 640 pp.

Rest in Peace

A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth-Century America

Gary Laderman

Oxford University Press, $35, 245 pp.

Funerals have become so costly that many families must either go into debt to finance one or resort to cremation when they would really prefer and old-fashioned casket. Does the modern funeral truly embody the religious values that the church insists should characterize it? Is there an alternative to the current system, one that is less expensive yet still in keeping with church teaching? A number of books have been published that deal with these questions.

One of the best-known books about the American funeral business was written by a Brit. Jessica Mitford riddled the industry with wit and hard-hitting facts in books that she kept revising: The American Way of Death, 1963 (revised in 1978), and The American Way of Death Revisited, 1998. Her books exposed the excesses of the funeral industry, though they did little to curb them.

In Caring for the Dead, Lisa Carlson, one of Mitford's disciples and founder of the Funeral Ethics Organization, explains how to conduct a funeral "with or without a funeral director." Her book includes information on organ donation, embalming, cremation, and a helpful list of the death-related laws in each state. It also features some interesting stories of families who chose to have nontraditional funerals.

Not surprisingly, Carlson does not have many kind words for the funeral industry. For that you must look to Gary Laderman's Rest in Peace. Laderman has provided an all-out defense, and even exaltation, of your local undertaker, making a distinction between the latter and the "greedy" and "predatory" corporations that have been taking over the local enterprises. They include Service Corporation International (SCI), which by 1995 owned more than fifteen hundred funeral homes and "close to 250 cemeteries."

Why are these big fellows moving in on the little fellows? Mostly because they have discovered that funerals can be very profitable. No one has stated the reason for this fact with greater clarity and authority than former Surrogate Court Judge Fowler of New York:

  One of the practical difficulties in such proceedings is that
  contracts are ordinarily made by persons differently situated. On the
  one side is generally a person greatly agitated or overwhelmed by
  vain regrets or deep sorrow and on the other side persons whose
  business is to minister to the dead for profit. One side is therefore
  often unbusinesslike, vague, and forgetful, while the other is
  ordinarily alert, knowing, and careful.

Actually, Fowler neglected to mention several other factors that put the consumer at a disadvantage. One, there is the pressure of time, of concern about decomposition of the body plus concern, usually, about arrangements for a funeral within a limited period. Two, there is the powerful factor of shame, guilt, and the fear that the selection of a casket at a reasonable price will seem cheap.

Laderman unwittingly provides an indictment of those he wants to defend that is arguably more damaging than anything in Mitford's books, because it reveals the successful historical campaign to wrest control of funerals away from families and churches and center them in the funeral home and the funeral director. "American funeral directors ... not only became the primary managers in the disposal of the dead, they also began to determine the interpretive and ritual framework available to many Americans facing the loss of a loved one," Laderman writes.

Later, describing the success of the powerful funeral directors' lobby in persuading the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to abandon its earlier restrictions--what Mitford and Carlson describe as a shameful "capitulation"--Laderman notes with satisfaction: "Federal efforts to regulate the cost of funerals ... did accomplish one thing: the dead remained firmly under the control of America's modern death specialists."

How firm that control became, and how profitable, as a result of FTC's capitulation, is explored in Mitford's classic. She cites a Vermont survey by Carlson that included this staggering fact: a Swanton woman complained because her mother's funeral in 1993 cost $2,900 and when her father died in 1995 the identical funeral cost $7,100.

The "dominant role" and "firm control" of funeral directors did not go unchallenged by the clergy. Catholic priests, among others, have been vocal in protest. Father Henry Wasielewski of Phoenix, Arizona, is a veritable dynamo of reform. He bars mortuary personnel from the church, asserting, "There is no need for delivery men ... not members of the family or the parish, to insert themselves into our sacred liturgy and procession when they are not needed and are not requested to do so by the priest."

Wasielewski made an exhaustive survey of 120 funeral homes in the Houston, Texas, area. He found sixteen mortuaries that would provide a complete funeral, with metal casket, for $1,450 to $2,500. For the same services and products the rest charged from $3,000 to $9,910. In the top range, $7,020 to $9,910, were seven funeral homes owned by SCI, the giant conglomerate. Nota bene: These prices are at least five years old and have most likely increased.