Customs: The Business of Dying

The American funeral director—that dispenser of authoritative and soothing advice—has suddenly found himself shouted at, reproached and de plored in a clamor that has shattered the hush of the nation’s funeral parlors and made many an undertaker sweat uneasily beneath his decent black suit.

In what seems a sudden concerted attack, Americans all over the country are rebelling against the high cost of dying. Funerals, it seems, just do not mean as much to most people as undertakers would like them to.

Pre-need Competition. The big funeral once beloved by first-generation Americans is growing rarer. “It’s a thing I can’t explain,” says Lloyd C. Kenwood, vice president and general manager of San Francisco’s prestigious Halsted & Co., for which he has been “selling funerals,” as they say in the trade, for 30 years. “But I do know that this generation seems to want things done more simply. It’s probably the most significant trend since the 1930s, when people stopped hanging crepe on their doors, and funeral services were moved from the family living room to the mortuary chapel.”

A Philadelphia undertaker says: “You don’t see so many people taking off from work to go to a friend’s funeral, or companies closing when one of the officers dies, so that all the employees can turn out for the service.” “I don’t know whether the younger generation doesn’t care, or what it is,” says Houston Burial Insurance Salesman Victor Landig. “A few years ago when a schoolteacher died, the whole school turned out, but now the only people who attend are those his own age.”

What’s more, the burial business, like most other businesses, is plagued by rising costs. Undertakers are also getting competition from cemeteries, which are sending out high-pressure door-to-door salesmen to sell plots on a “preneed” basis. Cemeteries are also selling their own vaults (outer casings to protect the coffin), and in California they are even supplying their own funeral chapels and mortuaries for “one-stop” funerals.

The Corpse in the Parlor. With funerals growing smaller, the undertakers have done what any good businessman would do—made up for it somewhere else. The result has been the slumber room and its attendant abuses.

Before the development of intravenous embalming in mid-19th century (probably by Thomas H. Holmes, who made $400,000 embalming Civil War dead), the dead man laid out in the parlor was a corpse, and there was no doubt about it. But embalming made it possible to mitigate many of the grimmer aspects of death. The resulting display of the deceased has become the focus of a range of gimmickry and hard-selling that has raised the average bill from $350 in 1935 to about $1,400 (including plot) today, and brought on a storm of criticism.

Recently published have been two full-length, full-strength books excoriating the merchants of death-warming-over: The High Cost of Dying, by California Professor Ruth Mulvey Harmer (Crowell-Collier Press; $3.95), and The American Way of Death, by British-born Author Jessica Mitford (Simon & Schuster; $4.95). Both of them tend to tear down the mortician’s carefully nurtured image as a compassionate, reverent family-friend-in-need and substitute an equally distorted picture of a hypocritical racketeer in black.

The Memory Picture. Author Mitford’s basic argument is that the cult of the prettied-up corpse, put on display in a ghoulish, make-believe sleep, is neither reverent nor religious, but a giant feat of merchandising. She has deadly fun with such astonishing specialists as the Practical Burial Footwear Company of Columbus, Ohio, which offer Fit-a-Fut oxfords (in patent, calf, tan or oxblood) and Ko-Zee, with its “soft, cushioned soles and warm, luxurious slipper comfort, but true shoe smartness.” Courtesy Products has a “new Bra-form, Post Mortem Form Restoration . . . they accomplish so much for so little ($11 for a package of 50),” and at a recent convention of the National Funeral Directors’ Association, Florence Gowns Inc. of Cleveland showed a line of “hostess gowns and brunch coats” for loved ones.

Caskets are now “styled” with an eye to customer appeal. Very strong now in casket styles, Miss Mitford writes, is the patriotic theme represented by “the Valley Forge,” once advertised in color in an undertaker’s trade journal with some Early American cupboards and a portrait of George Washington. For “the bon vivant who dreams of rubbing shoulders with the international smart set, the gay dog who would risk all on a turn of the card, there is the ‘Monaco’ with ‘Sea Mist Polish Finish, interior richly lined in 600 Aqua Supreme Cheney velvet, magnificently quilted and shirred, with matching jumbo bolster and coverlet.’ ”

Finnegans Wake. Relations between the quick and the dead have been conditioned by a variety of practical factors. The custom of sitting up with the deceased before burial—the wake—derived partly from the difficulty of determining whether a person was really dead. Metal coffins coincided with the rise of medical study in the late 18th century, when body-snatching was a profitable business. And those who had been great in life—kings, popes, heroes and commanders—have long been laid “in state” for public homage.

But for more common folk, the viewing of the often ravaged body was only a melancholy and intimate gesture of farewell, conducted in the privacy of parlor or bedroom. Today, thanks to the embalmer’s art, the availability of insurance money, and the undertaker’s emotional blackmail, it is too often a kind of public spectacle.

Undertakers defend the beautifying and display of the dead as providing “grief therapy” for the bereaved, so that they are left with a Beautiful Memory Picture. But in countries where embalming is not customary (and contrary to popular belief, it is not legally required in the U.S.), those left behind do not seem to be noticeably worse off.

Under a Pall. Though 90% of U.S. funerals are conducted with open coffins, the clergy are generally opposed. “If they had their way,” says Stated Clerk Eugene Carson Blake of the United Presbyterian Church, “I think that most ministers would discourage the open casket during funeral services.” Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike points out that while a dead body should be treated with respect, Christian doctrine teaches that it is no longer the person, who “in life to come receives a new, appropriate means of expression and relationship.”

Bishop Pike, like most Episcopal clergymen, insists that the coffin be closed during the church service and covered with a pall, which makes the most elaborate bronze and silver casket look the same as a plain pine box.

Though Roman Catholics and Orthodox and Conservative Jews forbid cremation, many Protestant clergymen prefer it for its lack of ostentation (minimum cremation price is about $100); nevertheless, the national percentage of cremations to burials has stayed at less than 4% for the past ten years.

Pike recommends that the family’s pastor accompany them to the funeral parlor to help them resist whatever pressures may be brought toward overspending.

Not surprisingly, the unscrupulous undertaker views such clerical counsel with considerable alarm. Miss Mitford quotes some frank advice on the subject from the pages of Mortuary Management: “We tell the family to go ahead and look over the caskets in the display room, and that the minister, if he has come with them, will join them later. We tell the minister that we have something we would like to talk to him about privately, and we’ve found that if we have some questions to ask him, he seems to be flattered that his advice is being sought, and we can keep him in the private office until the family has actually made its selection.”

Plain Wood Coffins. Under such skillful manipulation, how many grief-stricken families have the maverick fortitude to select a plain wood coffin and demand that the undertaker dispense with embalming? The answer for a growing number of them is the memorial or funeral society, which contracts with undertakers to provide members with dignified burials costing about $150. Both Authors Harmer and Mitford (whose attorney husband, Robert Treuhaft, helped organize one in San Francisco) provide a list of such societies; there are 90 in the U.S., with a membership of 35,000. The undertaking business tends to dismiss them as aggregations of “do-gooders and left-wingers,” who are trying to wipe out beauty, sentiment and religion.

“We only give people what they want,” say the undertakers, and it is a point well taken. Fortified with the deceased’s insurance money and sadly out of touch with the spiritual traditions of the past, many Americans search for comfort in the face of death by conspiring with the technicians and gimmick merchants to pretend that it hasn’t really happened. This is their right. But it is wrong that anyone who wants to buy a plain wood coffin no matter what kind of car he drives should feel that it is disrespectful of the dead.