The Whole Death Catalog

by Harold Schechter

  YELLOW PAGES FOR MORTICIANS

  Are you in the market for a high-performance human crematory? Does your hydraulic embalming table need replacing? Have you been thinking about switching to a different brand of mortuary cosmetics?

  No problemo! Just let your fingers do the walking through the Catalog of Funeral and Cemetery Supplies issued annually by Nomis Publications of Youngstown, Ohio. From antique funeral equipment to vault sealants, casket accessories to urn beds, embalming supplies to odor control devices, this 250-page directory— the yellow pages of the funeral industry—lists suppliers of every conceivable mortuary product (plus a fair number that most of us would never dream of, such as formaldehyde vapor monitors, and burial garments for stillborns).

  Copies of this indispensable volume can be obtained for $30 from Nomis Publications, P.O. Box 5159, Youngstown, OH 44514. For more information, visit the company website at www.yelobk.com.

  Step into My Parlor

  In the 1979 cult movie classic Phantasm, two brothers sneak into the local funeral parlor, which turns out to be a nightmarish mausoleum run by a cadaverous undertaker who transforms human corpses into black-robed dwarf zombies and uses a unique home-security device—a flying metal sphere armed with a skull-piercing corkscrew—to deal with intruders. Needless to say this is not an accurate depiction of the average American funeral home. It is, however, a fair reflection of the spookhouse fantasies such places inspire.

  To dispel the creepy aura that has always clung to their establishments and educate people about what really goes on inside, funeral directors have often opened their doors to the public. As far back as 1929 (according to historian Gary Laderman) one newly opened mortuary in El Paso, Texas, drew a crowd of more than a thousand curiosity-seekers on a single day. Funeral directors across the country continue to offer tours of their facilities. Some, such as the Conley Funeral Home in Elburn, Illinois, even host mortuary visits for schoolchildren—a nice change of pace from those boring field trips to the local art museum.

  The interior of a typical funeral home—at least the parts that the public gets to see—is a highly controlled environment, as artificial in its way as a movie set or a Disney ride. Every feature of the surroundings, from the lighting and sound effects to the furnishings and other elements of décor—is designed to produce exactly the right atmosphere of reverent contemplation and solace.

  The public areas of a typical funeral home consist of a handsome entrance hall or foyer; a comfortable reception room where the director and the bereaved meet to make arrangements; a spacious and well-lighted casket selection room; one or more visitation (or “slumber”) rooms, where the body is laid out for viewing; and a chapel for on-site memorial services.

  Besides these spaces, there are also areas off-limits to the public: the private office where the funeral director does his paperwork; the living quarters for his family and/or members of the staff; and the tiled, hospital-like preparation room where bodies are embalmed, restored, dressed, and casketed for display.

  And then, of course, there’s the secret subterranean room where cadavers are turned into black-robed dwarf zombies. (Just kidding!)

  RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

  A very fine article, “The American Funeral Home: An Archaeology of the Viewing” by Sean Patrick Dockray, is available online at http://spd.e-rat.org/wp-content/uploads/funeralhome.pdf There is also an excellent chapter on funeral home design in the volume Successful Funeral Service Practice, edited by Howard C. Raether (Prentice-Hall, 1971). Times being what they are, you will not be surprised to learn that various funeral homes now offer virtual tours of their facilities. Among them are the Uecker-Witt Funeral Home of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin (www.ueckerwitt.com), and the Eaton Funeral Home of Sullivan, Missouri (www.eatonfuneralhome.com).

  Pre-need: Pro or Con?

  Whether they work as funeral directors or consumer advocates, people who deal with end-of-life issues will all tell you the same thing: being a responsible grownup means planning in advance for your eventual demise—talking to your children about your final wishes or, even better, writing everything down so as to make life a little easier for your survivors when you die.

  There is no such consensus, however, about another form of long-range death planning: the increasingly popular arrangement generally referred to as “pre-need.” This refers to the practice of paying in advance for your own funeral.

  In theory, there doesn’t appear to be any downside to a pre-need purchase. Everyone seems to benefit. For funeral directors—as Thomas Lynch puts it—“It’s money in the bank.” For the buyer, the arrangement is supposed to offer peace of mind: the knowledge that, by taking care of business now, you have relieved your loved ones of an enormous burden in the future. It is also touted as a wise financial decision: a hedge against inflation that nails down a major purchase at a guaranteed price.

  Unfortunately, there have been widespread abuses in the practice. Indeed, consumer rights organizations that monitor the death care industry routinely warn potential customers that while it always pays to plan ahead, it doesn’t necessarily pay to pay ahead.

  Though entering into a pre-need contract would seem to be a foolproof way of ensuring that your loved ones won’t be faced with large expenses when you die, some funeral directors have come up with ingenious ways of extorting extra money from survivors. When the sad day of the funeral finally rolls around, family members may suddenly discover that there are hefty additional charges for services not covered in the contract: opening and closing the grave, for example, or placing an obituary in the papers. Or the casket preselected by the purchaser is no longer manufactured and there is a significant “upgrade cost” for the current equivalent model. Funds laid out in advance by pre-need purchasers have also been subjected to various financial shenanigans by unscrupulous funeral industry types.

  Though there are distinct advantages to pre-need arrangements, you should carefully examine the pros and cons before you sign up. Read the chapter called “Pay Now—Die Poorer Later” in Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death Revisited (Vintage, 1998), as well as the chapter “The Body Snatchers: Preneed Greed” in Lisa Carlson’s Caring for the Dead (Upper Access Books, 1998). You should also familiarize yourself with the Funeral Consumers Alliance’s “Position Statement Concerning Prepaid Funerals,” which can be found at www.funerals.org/PreneedFunerals/Policy.pdf.

  GPL

  Back in what Jessica Mitford calls the “bad old days”—that is, before the advent of the modern consumer rights movement—people with a loved one to bury had no choice but to pay whatever their local mortician charged for a traditional funeral. Funeral homes rarely explained exactly what they were billing for, other than the casket and the “full range of services.” All that changed in April 1984, when—after years of lobbying by groups such as the Funeral Consumers Alliance—the Federal Trade Commission’s Funeral Rule went into effect.

  The Funeral Rule (which has since undergone several revisions) requires funeral directors to provide their customers with a written, itemized list of goods and services at the start of any arrangement meeting. This document, known as a general price list (GPL), must also contain certain disclosures:

  Consumers have the right to choose only those goods and services they want.

  Embalming is not required by law except in certain special cases.

  A basic nondeclinable service fee will be added to the bill.

  Inexpensive “alternative containers,” such as those made of cardboard, are available for direct cremation.

  A price list for caskets is available.

  A price list for “outer burial containers” (or vaults) is available.

  The Funeral Rule also stipulates that funeral directors must, if requested, provide prices over the phone (to allow for comparison shopping).

  GPLs vary in complexity. Some are as simple as a McDonald’s menu, while others offer a dizzying range of options. A relatively straightforward breakdown might look li
ke this:

  Basic services of the funeral director and staff $1,695

  Transfer of remains to funeral home $225

  Embalming $1,015

  Cosmetic care, dressing, and casketing $215

  Use of viewing room $175

  Use of chapel for memorial service $350

  Transportation of deceased to cemetery $175

  Transportation of flowers $85

  Transportation of clergy and pallbearers $85

  TOTAL SERVICE COST $4,020

  This charge does not include the cost of the casket, which—if purchased directly from the funeral home—typically adds between $3,000 and $12,000 to the bill.

  Besides the itemized lists, GPLs invariably include all-in-one funeral packages, presumably to simplify matters for clients. (A common tactic used by funeral homes is to front-load their GPLs with these discounted bundles, under the theory that grieving family members will simply settle for one of these “bargains” rather than deal with a daunting list of individual items in an effort to trim costs.)

  Whether or not the GPL has really made much of a difference in the price of the average American funeral is debatable. As poet-undertaker Thomas Lynch puts it in describing his own business practices: “I used to use the unit pricing method. It meant that you had only one number to look at. It was a large number. Now everything is itemized. It’s the law. So now there’s a long list of items and numbers and italicized disclaimers, something like a menu or the Sears Roebuck Wish Book, and sometimes the federally mandated options begin to look like cruise control or rear-window defrost. At the bottom of the list there is still a large number.”

  SCI: The 800-Pound

  Funeral Gorilla

  Way back in 1969, a nineteen-year-old longhair named Mo Siegel and his buddy Wyck Hay began gathering wild herbs from the woods around Aspen, Colorado, packaging them in hand-sewn muslin tea bags, and selling their concoction to a local health food store. Their enterprise, Celestial Seasonings, swiftly expanded. Before long, their all-natural herbal teas—dubbed with whimsical Sgt. Pepper-style names—could be found in markets throughout the country. This inspiring story of countercultural entrepreneurship culminated in 1984 when the company was acquired for many millions of dollars by Kraft, Inc., which retained the product’s playful, Woodstockian packaging under the theory that boomer consumers would prefer to believe that their beloved herbal teas were still being handmade by Mother Earth-loving hippies and not mass-produced by a faceless multinational corporate leviathan.

  FIND A

  FUNERAL HOME

  Need to locate a reputable funeral home in your area? Try the easy-to-use Funeral Home Directory at www.funeralhomes.com, which allows you to search by city, state, zip code, or (if you have a particular death care provider in mind) business name.

  This same phenomenon—the takeover of small human-scale businesses by a huge corporate entity that keeps its identity concealed behind the original trusted brand name—has, in recent decades, spread to the funeral industry. The most conspicuous practitioner of this strategy is a Houston-based outfit called Service Corporation International or SCI.

  Since its founding, SCI—often described as the McDonald’s of the mortuary trade—has become the world’s largest chain of funeral homes. Its success is based on a state-of-the-art business technique known as “clustering.” First, SCI buys up a choice selection of funeral homes, cemeteries, crematoria, and flower shops in select metropolitan areas. Next—as explained in The American Way of Death Revisited (Vintage, 1998), the updated version of Jessica Mitford’s classic exposé—“the essential elements of the trade are moved to a central depot. ‘Clustered’ in this hive of activity are the hearses, limousines, utility cars, drivers, dispatchers, embalmers, and a spectrum of office workers, from accountants to data processors, who are kept busy servicing, at vast savings, the needs of a half-dozen or more erstwhile independent funeral homes.”

  Of course, it is crucial that consumers feel that they are dealing, not with a monolithic corporation—a provider of what Thomas Lynch calls “McFunerals”—but with their friendly neighborhood mortician. To achieve this goal, SCI cultivates anonymity. You won’t see the SCI corporate logo adorning any of its more than three thousand funeral homes in North and South America, Europe, and Australia. When the company acquires one of its mom-and-pop operations, it not only keeps the original name of the establishment but often retains the former owner as a salaried manager, thus ensuring that the long-established relationship between the funeral director and his community is maintained.

  It’s a formula that (with a few setbacks during the late 1990s) has turned SCI into a death industry powerhouse. And the financial prospects only look brighter now that the expression “going back to the land” is about to acquire a whole new meaning for the Woodstock generation.

  Coffins and Caskets:

  What’s the Difference?

  Since both coffins and caskets are “boxes for the dead” (in the words of poet-undertaker Thomas Lynch), the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably. There are, however, a few significant differences between them.

  Most obviously, there is the matter of shape. Coffins, which are generally made of wood, correspond roughly to the form of the human body—that is, they are tapered at the head and foot and wider at the shoulders. They also have lids that lift off completely.

  Caskets, on the other hand, are rectangular in shape and usually have hinged lids. Though available in oak, mahogany, walnut, and other species of hardwood, they are also frequently made of metal—copper, bronze, stainless steel, or carbon steel—in a variety of grades, gauges, and finishes.

  The deeper distinction, however, is (as Lynch points out) a matter of meaning: the word casket “suggests something beyond basic utility something about the contents of the box. The implication is that it contains something precious: heirlooms, jewels, old love letters, remnants and icons of something dear. So casket is to coffin as tomb is to cave, grave is to hole in the ground, pyre is to bonfire, eulogy is to speech … The point is a casket presumes something about what goes in it. It presumes the dead body is important to someone.”

  For more of Lynch’s elegant musings on the subject, see his essay “Jessica, the Hound and the Casket Trade” in his collection The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade (Norton, 1997).

  Coffins for the Big-Boned

  As the media never tires of telling us, America has become a junk-food nation with the fattest population on the planet. This is a cause for concern. Obesity can lead to a host of problems, from heart disease and diabetes to an inability to attend the theater because you can’t squeeze into a seat. But being seriously overweight can do more than interfere with your life. It can even cause trouble once you’re dead.

  Most of us realize that it’s time to cut back on the cheese fries and quarter-pounders when our clothes don’t fit anymore. But some people have gotten so grotesquely out of shape that—once their poor, cholesterol-clogged hearts give out—their bodies won’t even fit into a standard-size coffin.

  One obvious option for surviving family members of supersized decedents is cremation. But according to the Cremation Association of North America, the average crematorium oven can only accommodate corpses weighing less than five hundred pounds, which (believe it or not) is no longer sufficient for a growing number of morbidly obese Americans. What’s a grieving family to do with the six-hundred-pound corpse of a beloved relative who has finally succumbed to an overdose of Oreo sundaes and fudge-iced crème-filled donuts?

  Fortunately, a solution is available from the folks at Goliath Casket, Inc., the world’s leading manufacturer of burial containers for the terminally overweight. Forrest “Pee Wee” Davis, of Lynn, Indiana, founded Goliath in 1985. A welder in a local casket concern, Davis was a true mortuary industry visionary who foresaw the need for quality jumbo-size coffins years before the American obesity epidemic was in full swing. His first models were made in an old hog barn and
came in just two colors and one size. Today under the stewardship of his son Keith, Goliath produces a wide range of oversize caskets, including a triple-wide colossus that can handle a body up to seven hundred pounds.

  Thanks to the ever-expanding waistlines of the American populace, business is booming for Goliath. In the late 1980s, the company sold just one triple-wide model a year. Nowadays, they ship four or five a month, and overall sales have increased about 20 percent annually.

  For more information on Goliath coffins, visit the company’s website at www.oversizecasket.com.

  Unsung Heroes

  of the Death Industry:

  Almond Fisk

  Americans have always taken pride in their mechanical ingenuity. After all, we’re the nation that produced Eli Whitney, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, the Wright brothers, and countless other homespun, do-it-yourself geniuses. Though his brainchild didn’t have quite the world-changing impact of the cotton gin, electric lightbulb, telephone, mass-produced automobile, or airplane, one name deserves inclusion in the pantheon of American inventors: Almond D. Fisk, creator of the “Fisk Airtight Coffin of Cast or Raised Metal.”

  Hailed by funeral historians Robert Habenstein and William Lamers as “the most remarkable coffin ever put into widespread use in America,” Fisk’s invention, patented in 1848, was a cast-iron container shaped like a human body and equipped with a glass faceplate that, in the words of one contemporary advertising brochure, permitted mourners “to behold again the features of the departed.” Resembling a factory-made metal mummy-sarcophagus with a diving helmet on its head, it “retarded the putrefaction process, protected the body against water seepage and vermin, and safeguarded against the spread of disease.” The only drawback was that, as originally designed, it was so ineffably creepy-looking that it gave people the chills.