The American Way of Death Revisited

by Jessica Mitford

  Untouched by human hand, the coffin and the earth are now united.

  It is in the function of directing the participants through this maze of gadgetry that the funeral director has assigned to himself his relatively new role of “grief therapist.” He has relieved the family of every detail, he has revamped the corpse to look like a living doll, he has arranged for it to nap for a few days in a slumber room, he has put on a well-oiled performance in which the concept of death has played no part whatsoever—unless it was inconsiderately mentioned by the clergyman who conducted the religious service. He has done everything in his power to make the funeral a real pleasure for everybody concerned. He and his team have given their all to score an upset victory over death.

  Dale Carnegie has written that in the lexicon of the successful man there is no such word as “failure.” So have the undertakers managed to delete the word “death” and all its associations from their vocabulary. They have from time to time published lists of In and Out words and phrases to be memorized and used in connection with the final return of dust to dust; then, still dissatisfied with the result, they have elaborated and revised the list. Thus, a 1916 glossary substitutes “prepare body” for “handle corpse.” Today, though, “body” is Out and “remains” or “Mr. Jones” is In.

  “The use of improper terminology by anyone affiliated with a mortuary should be strictly forbidden,” declares Edward A. Martin. He suggests a rather thorough overhauling of the language; his deathless words include: “service, not funeral; Mr., Mrs., Miss blank, not corpse or body; preparation room, not morgue; casket, not coffin; funeral director or mortician, not undertaker; reposing room, not showroom; baby or infant, not stillborn; deceased, not dead; autopsy or post-mortem, not ‘post’; coach, not hearse; shipping case, not shipping box; flower car, not flower truck; cremains or cremated remains, not ashes; clothing, dress, suit, etc., not shroud; drawing room, not parlor.”

  This rather basic list was refined in 1956 by Victor Landig in his Basic Principles of Funeral Service. He enjoins the reader to avoid using the word “death” as much as possible, even when such avoidance may seem impossible; for example, a death certificate should be referred to as a “vital statistics form.” One should speak not of the “job” but rather of the “call.” We do not “haul” a dead person, we “transfer” or “remove” him—and we do this in a “service car,” not a “body car.” We “open and close” his grave rather than dig and fill it, and in it we “inter” rather than bury him. This is done not in a graveyard or cemetery, but rather in a “memorial park.” The deceased is beautified, not with makeup, but with “cosmetics.” Anyway, he didn’t die, he “expired.” An important error to guard against, cautions Mr. Landig, is referring to “cost of the casket.” The phrase “amount of investment in the service” is a wiser usage here.

  Miss Anne Hamilton Franz, writing in Funeral Direction and Management, adds an interesting footnote on the use of the word “ashes” to describe (in a word) ashes. She fears this usage will encourage scattering (for what is more natural than to scatter ashes?), and prefers to speak of “cremated remains” or “human remains.” She does not like the word “retort” to describe the container in which cremation takes place, but prefers “cremation chamber” or “cremation vault,” because this “sounds better and softens any harshness to sensitive feelings.”

  As for the Loved One, poor fellow, he wanders like a sad ghost through the funeral men’s pronouncements. No provision seems to have been made for the burial of a Heartily Disliked One, although the necessity for such must arise in the course of human events.*

  * The funeral people, ever alert to fill a need, have come up with a casket that can be written on. The York “Expressions” casket, introduced at the 1996 convention of the National Funeral Directors Association, features “a smooth surface with a special coating on which those who gather may write one last farewell to the departed.” The caskets come with a set of permanent markers and a Memorial Guide that rashly invites “those who gather” to “make known their hidden thoughts.” As happens when chums are invited to autograph a schoolmate’s surgical cast, there will predictably be the occasional nonconformist who is unable to resist the temptation to use the permanent marker to express his hidden thoughts, however derogatory.

  6

  The Rationale

  A funeral service is a social function at which the deceased is the guest of honor and the center of attraction…. A poorly prepared body in a beautiful casket is just as incongruous as a young lady appearing at a party in a costly gown and with her hair in curlers.

  —CLARENCE G. STRUB AND L. G. FREDERICK,

  The Principles and Practices of Embalming

  The words “costly gown” are the operative ones in the above paragraph, culled from a standard embalming-school textbook. The same thought is often expressed by funeral men: “Certainly, the incentive to select quality merchandise would be materially lessened if the body of the deceased were not decontaminated and made presentable,” says De-Ce-Co, the publication of a funeral supply company. And Mr. T. E. Schier, president of the Settegast-Kopf Funeral Home in Houston, Texas, says, “The majority of the American people purchase caskets, not for the limited solace from their beauty prior to funeral service, or for the impression that they may create before their friends and associates. Instead, they full-heartedly believe that the casket and the vault give protection to that which has been accomplished by the embalmer.”

  One might suppose—and many people do—that the whole point of embalming is the long-term preservation of the deceased. Actually, although phrases like “peace-of-mind protection” and “eternal preservation” crop up frequently in casket and vault advertising, the embalmers themselves know better. For just how long is an embalmed body preserved? The simple truth is that a body can be preserved for a very long time indeed—probably for many years, depending upon the strength of the fluids used, and the temperature and humidity of the surrounding atmosphere. Cadavers prepared for use in anatomical research may outlast the hardiest medical student. The trouble is, they don’t look very pretty; in fact they tend to resemble old shoe leather.

  The more dilute the embalming fluid, the softer and more natural-appearing the guest of honor. Therefore, the usual procedure is to embalm with about enough preservative to ensure that the body will last through the funeral—generally, a matter of a few days. “To the ancient embalmer permanent preservation was of prime importance and the maintenance of a natural color and texture a matter of minor concern; to us the creation and maintenance of a lifelike naturalness is the major objective, and post-burial preservation is incidental.… The Egyptian embalmer’s subjects have remained preserved for thousands of years—while the modern embalmer sometimes has to pray for favorable climatic conditions to help him maintain satisfactory preservation for a couple of days.” The same textbook, The Principles and Practices of Embalming, cautioning the neophyte embalmer on the danger of trying to get by with inadequate embalming, says, “But if we were to approach the average embalmer and tell him that the body he had just embalmed would have to be kept on display for a month or two during the summer, what would his reaction be? To fall in a dead faint from fright, no doubt.”

  No matter what the more gullible customers may be led to believe about eternal preservation in the privacy of the arrangements-room conference, undertakers do not try to mislead the serious investigator about this. They will generally admit quite readily that their handiwork is not even intended to be permanent.

  If long-term preservation is not the embalmer’s objective, what then is?

  Clearly, some rather solid-sounding justifications for the procedure had to be advanced, above and beyond the fact that embalming is good business for the undertaker because it helps him to sell more expensive caskets.

  The two grounds chosen by the undertaking trade for defense of embalming embrace two objectives near and dear to the hearts of Americans: hygiene, and mental health. The
theory that embalming is an essential hygienic measure has long been advanced by the funeral industry. A much newer concept, that embalming and restoring the deceased are necessary for the mental well-being of the survivors, is now being promoted by industry leaders; the observer who looks closely will discover a myth in the making here. “Grief therapy,” the official name bestowed by the undertakers on this aspect of their work, has long been a second line of defense for the embalmers.

  The primary purpose of embalming, all funeral men will tell you, is a sanitary one, the disinfecting of the body so that it is no longer a health menace. More than one writer, soaring to wonderful heights of fantasy, has gone so far as to attribute the falling death rate in this century to the practice of embalming (which, if true, would seem a little shortsighted on the part of the practitioners): “It is a significant fact that when embalming was in its infancy, the death rate was 21 to every 1,000 persons per year, and today it has been reduced to 10 to every 1,000 per year.” The writer magnanimously bestows “a great deal of credit” for this on the medical profession, adding that funeral directors are responsible for “about 50 percent of this wonderful work of sanitation which has so materially lowered the death rate.” When embalmers get together to talk among themselves, they are more realistic about the wonderful work of sanitation. In a panel discussion reported by the National Funeral Service Journal, Dr. I. M. Feinberg, an instructor at the Worsham College of Mortuary Science, said, “Sanitation is probably the farthest thing from the mind of the modern embalmer. We must realize that the motives for embalming at the present time are economic and sentimental, with a slight religious overtone.”

  Whether or not the undertakers themselves actually believe that embalming fulfills an important health function (and there is evidence that most of them really do believe it), they have been extraordinarily successful in convincing the public that it does. Outside of medical circles, people who are otherwise reasonably knowledgeable and sophisticated take for granted not only that embalming is done for reasons of sanitation but that it is required by law.

  In an effort to sift fact from fiction and to get an objective opinion on the matter, I sought out Dr. Jesse Carr, chief of pathology at San Francisco General Hospital and professor of pathology at the University of California Medical School. I wanted to know specifically how, and to what extent, and in what circumstances, an unembalmed cadaver poses a health threat to the living.

  Dr. Carr’s office is on the third floor of the San Francisco General Hospital, its atmosphere of rationality and scientific method in refreshing contrast to that of the funeral homes. To my question “Are undertakers, in their capacity of embalmers, guardians of the public health?” Dr. Carr’s answer was short and to the point: “They are not guardians of anything except their pocketbooks. Public health virtues of embalming? You can write it off as inapplicable to our present-day conditions.” Discussing possible injury to health caused by the presence of a dead body, Dr. Carr explained that in cases of communicable disease, a dead body presents considerably less hazard than a live one. “There are several advantages to being dead,” he said cheerfully. “You don’t excrete, inhale, exhale, or perspire.” The body of a person who has died of a noncommunicable illness, such as heart disease or cancer, presents no hazard whatsoever, he explained. In the case of death from typhoid, cholera, plague, and other enteric infections, epidemics have been caused in the past by the spread of infection by rodents and seepage from graves into the city water supply. The old-time cemeteries and churchyards were particularly dangerous breeding grounds for these scourges. The solution, however, lies in city planning, engineering, and sanitation, rather than in embalming, for the organisms which cause disease live in the organs, the blood, and the bowel, and cannot all be killed by the embalming process. Thus was toppled—for me, at least—the last stronghold of the embalmers; for until then I had confidently believed that their work had value, at least in the rare cases where death is caused by such diseases.

  Dr. Carr has carried on his own campaign for a decent, commonsense approach to cadavers. The morgue in his hospital was formerly a dark retreat in the basement, “supposedly for aesthetic and health reasons; people think bodies smell and are unhealthy to have around.” Objecting strongly to this, Dr. Carr had the autopsy rooms moved up to the third floor along with the offices. “The bodies aren’t smelly, they’re not dirty—bloody, of course, but that’s a normal part of medical life,” he said crisply. “We have so little apprehension of disease being spread by dead bodies that we have them up here right among us. It is medically more efficient, and a great convenience in student teaching. Ten to twenty students attend each autopsy. No danger here!”

  A body will keep, under normal conditions, for twenty-four hours unless it has been opened. Floaters, explained Dr. Carr in his commonsense way, are another matter; a person who has been in the Bay for a week or more (“shrimps at the orifices, and so forth”) will decompose more rapidly. They used to burn gunpowder in the morgue when floaters were brought in, to mask the smell, but now they put them in the Deepfreeze, and after about four hours the odor stops (because the outside of the body is frozen) and the autopsy can be performed. “A good undertaker would do his cosmetology and then freeze,” said Dr. Carr thoughtfully. “Freezing is modern and sensible.”

  Anxious that we not drift back to the subject of the floaters, I asked about the efficacy of embalming as a means of preservation. Even if it is very well done, he said, few cadavers embalmed for the funeral (as distinct from those embalmed for research purposes) are actually preserved.

  “An exhumed embalmed body is a repugnant, moldy, foul-looking object,” said Dr. Carr emphatically. “It’s not the image of one who has been loved. You might use the quotation ‘John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave’; that really sums it up. The body itself may be intact, as far as contours and so on; but the silk lining of the casket is all stained with body fluids, the wood is rotting, and the body is covered with mold.” The caskets, he said, even the solid mahogany ones that cost thousands of dollars, just disintegrate. He spoke of a case where a man was exhumed two and a half months after burial: “The casket fell apart and the body was covered with mold, long whiskers of penicillin—he looked ghastly. I’d rather be nice and rotten than covered with those whiskers of mold, although the penicillin is a pretty good preservative. Better, in fact, than embalming fluid.”

  Will an embalmed corpse fare better in a sealed metal casket? Far from it. “If you seal up a casket so it is more or less airtight, you seal in the anaerobic bacteria—the kind that thrive in an airless atmosphere, you see. These are the putrefactive bacteria, and the results of their growth are pretty horrible.” He proceeded to describe them rather vividly, and added, “You’re a lot better off to be buried in an aerobic atmosphere; otherwise the putrefactive bacteria take over. In fact, you’re really better off with a shroud, and no casket at all.”

  Like many another pathologist, Dr. Carr has had his run-ins with funeral directors who urge their clients to refuse to consent to postmortem medical examinations. The funeral men hate autopsies; for one thing, it does make embalming more difficult, and also they find it harder to sell the family an expensive casket if the decedent has been autopsied. There are, said Dr. Carr, three or four good concerns in San Francisco that understand and approve the reasons for postmortem examination; these will help get the needed autopsy permission from the family, and employ skilled technicians. “It’s generally the badly trained or avaricious undertaker who is resistant to the autopsy procedure. They all tip the hospital morgue men who help them, but the resistant ones are obstructive, unskilled, and can be nasty to the point of viciousness. They lie to the family, citing all sorts of horrible things that can happen to the deceased, and while they’re usually very soft-spoken with the family, they are inordinately profane with hospital superintendents and pathologists. In one case where an ear had been accidentally severed in the course of an autopsy, the mortician t
hreatened to show it to the family.”

  In a 1959 symposium in Mortuary Management on the attitudes of funeral directors towards autopsies, some of this hostility to doctors erupts into print. One undertaker writes, “The trouble with doctors is that they think they are little tin Gods, and anything they want, we should bow to, without question. My feeling is that the business of the funeral director is to serve the family in the best way he knows how, and if the funeral director knows that an autopsy is going to work a hardship, and result in a body that would be difficult to show, or that couldn’t be shown at all, then I think the funeral director has not only the right, but the duty, to advise the family against permitting an autopsy.” Another, defending the pathologists (“After all, the medical profession as a whole is reasonably intelligent”), describes himself as a “renegade embalmer where the matter of autopsies is concerned.” He points to medical discoveries which have resulted from postmortem examination; but he evidently feels he is in a minority, for he says, “Most funeral directors are still ‘horse and buggy undertakers’ in their thinking and it shows up glaringly in their moronic attitude towards autopsies.”

  To get the reaction of the funeral men to the views expressed by Dr. Carr now became my objective. I was not so much interested, at this point, in talking to the run-of-the-mill undertaker, as in talking to the leaders of the industry, those whose speeches and articles I had read in the trade press—in short, those who might be termed the theoreticians of American funeral service. They, I felt, would have at their fingertips any facts that might bolster the case for embalming, and would be in a position to speak authoritatively for the industry as a whole.