Mrs. S., after hearing a social worker at the senior center advise about protecting funeral money before ending up in a nursing home, promptly visited the local funeral director to make arrangements. She wanted to be embalmed before she was cremated, she said—just to make sure she was dead. The funeral director started adding various other charges to the list on his yellow legal pad (urn, urn vault, tent at the cemetery) until the total was over $3,200. Mrs. S., eager to protect her children from any worry or expense, wrote a check on the spot, made out to the local bank where her trust account would be held. But after a few weeks, she was troubled. She had selected cremation because she wanted to keep the cost down. A bill of $3,200 seemed like too much, so she wrote to the state Funeral Board. There was nothing the board could do, she was told—her plan was “irrevocable.” Only after the intervention of the local memorial society—which pointed out numerous FTC violations in the transaction—and the help of an interested employee in the Department of Banking and Insurance did the funeral home agree to refund her money.
Irrevocable plans can almost always be transferred from one funeral home to another, but few morticians will offer this information. When Mrs. H. moved in, the nursing home insisted that funeral arrangements be made without delay. Her daughter—without any consultation—arranged for a $4,000-plus funeral at the only funeral home in town, written up in an irrevocable funeral contract and paid for from Mrs. H.’s own checking account. It had been difficult for Mrs. H. to manage her affairs—arthritis had taken away her sense of independence and control, and she’d depended on her daughter to write her checks, among other things. But she knew that the $4,000 funeral was not to her liking. With the help of a Senior Law Project attorney, she was able to transfer her “irrevocable” funeral plan to another funeral home. After writing up an irrevocable agreement for a $695 cremation, the new funeral director instructed the bank to refund the difference.
In short, an “irrevocable” trust does not require you to give up all rights to control your investment. If a funeral director attempts to take undue advantage of your situation, you may have legal recourse.
In most cases, shielding assets in order to qualify for government benefits is the only sound reason for paying for a funeral in advance. The only way to do that is with an irrevocable trust. But keep in mind that even though your trust account is irrevocable, you will be responsible for declaring the interest income because it will ultimately be used for your benefit. Mrs. M., in South Carolina, was irate: “The funeral home sent me a statement showing how much interest I’m supposed to declare on my income tax return. I don’t have that money anymore, and when I die the funeral home will get it all. Why should I have to pay taxes?”
20
New Hope for the Dead
At the June 1996 Nashville gathering of nonprofit funeral and memorial societies, Lisa Carlson—the executive director of the Funeral and Memorial Societies of America (FAMSA)—issued a call for social activism:
If every mortuary in the country offered fair prices and a wide range of options, did not indulge in manipulation of the grieving, did not hide the low-cost caskets, did not dominate the funeral boards with self-serving regulations, did not limit the options for caring for your own dead in certain states or who can sell caskets, there would be no reason for our societies. We are the only national group monitoring the funeral industry for consumers. We have an obligation to protect the public at large, not just our members, especially given the high rate of noncompliance with the Funeral Rule.
The following year—with the cooperation of other consumer groups including AARP and the Consumer Federation of America—FAMSA petitioned the FTC to reopen the Funeral Rule for new amendments. Key objectives will be: to outlaw the nondeclinable fee, to legitimize private viewing of unembalmed bodies, to specify costs in connection with body donation, and to bring cemeteries under the coverage of the Funeral Rule. The situation will demand close attention from consumers, given the predictable response from the industry—which is happy, indeed, with the rule as it stands.
Who are these meddlesome do-gooders willing to take on a well-heeled and powerful industry? “Unitarians, Quakers, eggheads, and old farts who are nothing more than a middleman for the industry and a cheap funeral,” was one glib characterization. Carlson cheerfully acknowledged that she qualifies for “at least three of those four.”
The practice of group planning for funeral arrangements started early in the century in the Farm Grange organization in the Northwestern United States. From there the idea spread to the cities, mainly under church leadership. The People’s Memorial Association of Seattle, organized in 1939 by a Unitarian minister, was the first urban group. Organizations spread gradually along the coast, then eastward across the United States, and again northward into Canada. Vancouver boasts the largest such society today, with over 100,000 members.
By 1963 the societies had become a continent-wide movement, and the Cooperative League of the USA called a meeting in Chicago, where Canadian and American societies together formed the Continental Association of Funeral and Memorial Societies. Canadian societies later dropped out, and the name was changed to the “Funeral and Memorial Societies of America” in 1996.
Funeral planning and memorial societies generated public pressure that resulted in the 1984 Funeral Rule. But once members were convinced that consumers had what they needed, social activism waned. Only a few of the societies continued to conduct annual price surveys of area mortuaries. Many had negotiated discounts for members with cooperating establishments; as a cooperative buyer’s club they had been very successful, and their memberships grew without fanfare. Smaller societies, staffed by volunteers, were still struggling; others went out of existence altogether.
John Blake, who lived in Egg Harbor, Wisconsin, knew nothing about memorial societies in 1986. That year, when his mother died in Bremerton, Washington, Blake flew out to arrange for her cremation. “The funeral director was going to burn a $150 box,” Blake said. “My mother won’t get into that,” he told the funeral director with a chuckle. “She was a very frugal woman.” So Blake and his son-in-law and two grandchildren built “a nice little box” with $20 worth of lumber. Only after her death did they discover that she had been a member of the People’s Memorial Association. Had they known, the cost would have been even less.
Blake soon became involved in the Wisconsin societies. But the personal satisfaction of family participation remained a strong force in his life. When Lisa Carlson’s Caring for Your Own Dead was published the next year, he felt that disseminating it through the societies was a matter of importance. It was on his urging that Carlson became involved in the society movement.
A new option had become available—handling all funeral arrangements without an undertaker, as had been the custom a century ago. The first edition of Caring for Your Own Dead sold 10,000 copies.
Karen Leonard—seduced into casket sales for the “fun” of it—soon found herself the director of the Redwood Funeral Society in Northern California. Taking a page from the funeral industry’s own indispensable Grief Therapy mantra, she perceived the therapeutic benefits of caring for one’s own dead. Jerri Lyons and others, with Leonard’s support, started the Natural Death Care Project in 1996. They assisted families in handling nearly fifty deaths the very first year. Members from their group expect to establish similar projects in other states.
The option of caring for your own dead, if it takes hold, will mark a break with the trend towards ever-more-costly and -mechanically impersonal journeys to the grave. Which direction will the American public choose? On the one hand, there can be a return to funerals in the true American tradition, where friends and family do everything necessary without the intervention of so-called professionals; or, on the other, a further abdication of personal responsibility, where we accept the best and most costly merchandise the trade has to offer, not excluding absurdities such as Batesville’s Burping Casket.*
On the East Coast,
after months of persistence by Byron Blanchard of the Boston-based Memorial Society, the Public Health Department conceded, in the summer of 1996, that consumers had a legal right to care for their own dead. A regulation promulgated by the Funeral Board—requiring a funeral director to obtain the disposition permit—had been declared illegal in 1909 but had nonetheless remained on the books.
FAMSA has taken on the daunting task of monitoring funeral laws countrywide. Aware that not everyone will opt to handle all funeral arrangements without a mortician, they stand ready to assume the cause of the consumer’s right to choose meaningful and affordable funerals. At Carlson’s prodding, societies are doing more price surveys and checking for FTC compliance. The FAMSA office serves as a clearinghouse for consumer complaints and maintains a Web site with a wide range of funeral information: www.funerals.org/famsa.
That spirit of social activism has attracted new resources. Lamar Hankins, a Texas lawyer with a history of contributing pro bono time to social issues, is typical. He is working to build an endowment for a legal fund to assist consumers—those with few other options, or residents of states where issues have national implications. Individual societies—many of which had been somnolent for the last decade—are responding with enthusiasm to the renewed spirit of activism, and new societies are emerging.
By 1997—with more and more commercial cremation businesses calling themselves “Societies”—the nonprofit societies felt they were undergoing an identity crisis. The “Ohio Cremation and Memorial Society,” for example, was attracting customers who thought it represented the well-respected nonprofit consumer group. As a result, FAMSA is encouraging member societies to change their names to “Funeral Consumer Information Society of———.”
The name change also reflects a broader base of interest. Those who join are not just those choosing immediate burial or cremation with a memorial service; even those planning a funeral with the casket present are avoiding funeral excess by seeking society help. Larry Burkett, founder of Christian Financial Concepts, admonishes his following to live without debt; that includes funeral debt. On a weekly show syndicated to more than six hundred stations, Burkett—a member of the Atlanta, Georgia, society—has commended the societies. After a half-hour interview with Carlson in January 1997, the FAMSA phones were flooded with inquiries about how to contact a local society.
Men and women who support legislative changes and see the need for an ongoing watch of the funeral industry will want to get involved in society activities. For those seeking alternatives to a costly funeral, a onetime lifetime membership in one of the nonprofit societies will offer up-to-date local price information.
What is to be done if at the time of crisis you are unable to reach a memorial or funeral society? Send a friend to two or more mortuaries to obtain their general price lists and casket prices. Ask for the cost of direct cremation, including transportation costs and crematory fees. Likewise, for the cost of immediate burial. Pay no money in advance. If death has not yet occurred and you wish to pay in installments, do so by setting up a Totten Trust, naming yourself or a relative or close friend as beneficiary. Remember, above all, that many funeral homes have a “no-walk” policy, which means simply that if and when you start to walk out, the price will come down, down, down until a level acceptable to you is reached.
* So-called protective caskets, having been heavily merchandised over the years, now outsell all other burial receptacles combined. Ask a funeral director why someone already dead will need protection, and he will, if he follows the manufacturer’s script, reply with severity, “To prevent alien and foreign objects from reaching your loved one.” There is one Southern mortician who, following his own drummer, has reduced the explanation to: “To keep bugs and critters out.” But as with any lucrative idea that has not been thought through, the casket manufacturers and the undertakers who serve as their exclusive distributors soon had to face up to the consequences. Protective caskets, which command substantially higher prices than those that are “unprotected,” achieve protection by using an impermeable, inexpensive rubber gasket as a sealing device. This causes a buildup of methane gas, a byproduct of the metabolism of anaerobic bacteria, which, thriving in an airless environment, have a high old time with the contents of the sealed casket. Exploding-casket episodes occurred with sufficient frequency to induce Batesville, the acknowledged leader in the field, to design a new line of protective caskets to deal with the crisis. A “permeable” seal is used, which lets the accumulated gases leak—or “burp”—out, to prevent the buildup of gas that causes the lids to blow off (and the appalled relatives to go to court).
Directory of Not-for-Profit Funeral and Memorial Societies
Memorial and funeral planning societies do area price surveys and may have negotiated a discount for members. Request a brochure for affordable funeral options. Most societies are run by volunteers. Consequently, the phone numbers in this directory may change from time to time. If you have difficulty contacting a society, you may call the FAMSA office at 1-800-765-0107. If there is no society nearby, you may join Friends of FAMSA and receive benefits until a new society is launched.
In the United States
Alabama
Call the FAMSA office
Alaska
Anchorage Cook Inlet Memorial 907-566-3732
P.O. Box 102414, 99510
Arizona
Phoenix Valley Memorial Society 602-929-9659
P.O. Box 0423, Chandler, 85244-0423
Prescott Memorial Society of Prescott 520-778-3000
P.O. Box 1090, 86302-1090
Tucson Memorial Society of Southern Arizona 520-721-0230
P.O. Box 12661, 85732-2661
Arkansas
Fayetteville NW Arkansas Memorial Society 501-443-1404
P.O. Box 3055, 72702-3055
California
Arcata Humboldt Funeral Society 707-822-8599
P.O. Box 856, 95518
Bakersfield Kern Memorial Society 805-854-5689
P.O. Box 1202, 93302-1202 805-366-7266
Berkeley Bay Area Funeral Society 510-841-6653
P.O. Box 264, 94701-0284
Fresno Valley Memorial Society
P.O. Box 101, 93707-0101
Los Angeles Los Angeles Funeral Society 818-683-3545
P.O. Box 92313, Pasadena, CA 91109-2313 818-683-3752
Modesto Stanislaus Memorial Society 209-521-7690
P.O. Box 4252, 95352-4252
Palo Alto Funeral and Memorial Planning Society 650-321-2109
P.O. Box 60448, 94306-0448 888-775-5553
Sacramento Sacramento Valley Memorial Society 916-451-4641
P.O. Box 161688, 95816-1688
San Diego San Diego Memorial Society 619-293-0926
P.O. Box 16336, 92176
San Luis Obispo Central Coast Memorial Society 805-543-6133
P.O. Box 679, 93406-0679
Santa Barbara Channel Cities Memorial Society 805-640-0109
P.O. Box 1778, Ojai, CA 93024-1778 800-520-PLAN
Santa Cruz Funeral and Memorial Society of Monterey Bay 408-426-3308
P.O. Box 2900, 95063-2900
Sebastopol Redwood Funeral Society 707-824-8360
7735 Bodega Ave., #4, 95473
Stockton San Joaquin Memorial Society 209-465-2741
P.O. Box 4832, 95204-4832
Colorado
Denver Rocky Mountain Memorial Society 303-759-2800
4101 E. Hampden Ave., 80222
Connecticut
Bridgewater Funeral Consumer Information Society of Connecticut 860-350-4921
P.O. Box 34, 06752
Delaware
Served by Memorial Society of Maryland
District of Columbia
Washington Memorial Society of Metropolitan Washington 202-234-7777
1500 Harvard St. NW, 20009
Florida
Cocoa Funeral and Memorial Society of Brevard County 407-453-4109
P.O. Box
276, 32923-0276 407-636-3363
DeBary Funeral Society of Mid-Florida 904-789-1682
P.O. Box 392, 32713-0392 407-668-6822
Ft. Myers Funeral and Memorial Society of Southwest Florida 941-743-0109
P.O. Box 7756, 33911-7756
Gainesville Memorial Society of Alachua County 352-378-3432
P.O. Box 14662, 32604-4662
Orlando Memorial and Funeral Society of Greater Orlando 407-677-5009
P.O. Box 953, Goldenrod, FL 32733-0953
Palm Beach Gardens Palm Beach Funeral Society 561-659-4881
P.O. Box 31982, 33420
Pensacola and Fort Walton Beach Funeral and Memorial Society of Pensacola and West Florida 904-477-8431
7804 Northpointe Blvd., 32514
Sarasota Memorial Society of Sarasota 941-953-3740
P.O. Box 15833, 34277-5833
St. Petersburg Suncoast-Tampa Bay Memorial Society 813-898-3294
719 Arlington Ave. North, 33701
Tallahassee Funeral and Memorial Society of Leon County 850-224-2082
1006 Buena Vista Dr., 32304
Tampa Memorial Society of Tampa Bay
45 Katherine Blvd., #307, Palm Harbor, 34684-3648
Georgia
Atlanta Memorial Society-of Georgia 404-634-2896
1911 Cliff Valley Way NE, 30329 800-840-4339
Macon Middle Georgia Chapter 912-477-1691
4825 Brittany Dr., 31210
Hawaii
Honolulu Memorial Society of Hawaii 808-946-6822
2510 Bingham St., Room A, 96826
Idaho
Boise Idaho Memorial Association 208-343-4581
P.O. Box 1919, 83701-1919
Illinois
Chicago Chicago Memorial Association
P.O. Box 2923, 60690-2923
The American Way of Death Revisited Page 33
