Last wrongs.

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.

There are many weird statements in Laderman's book, but none weirder than this one: "Most [funeral directors] agreed on one central point that inspired [their] mythic imagination: embalming is the bedrock of the industry, and secures America's place as the greatest nation on earth."

Perhaps it was the very weirdness, the very craziness of that statement, that got me started in the direction of a possible solution to the problem of reducing (a) the financial cost of funerals and (b) the spiritual cost that churches and bereaved families have suffered from this campaign to highjack the funeral experience and place it under the "firm control of the funeral directors."

This would not have been enough, however, but for the arrival in our parish of a new pastor, Father Terrence Curley, author of books on the subject of grieving and former president of the board of trustees of the National Catholic Ministry to the Bereaved. Curley informed us that the church's Order of Christian Funerals encourages and provides a liturgy for the holding of a vigil in the church on the evening before the funeral. The body is left in the church overnight and the traditional wake held after the vigil in the church hall or an adjoining room. There is, or need be, no embalming, no open casket, no viewing.

Jessica Mitford reminds us that over the centuries, over most of the world, embalming has been virtually unknown, except for Egyptian pharoahs and European royalty. It is a peculiarly North American novelty. But consider what it makes possible: the wake with the open casket, the friends and relatives approaching for one final view of the loved one. The funeral industry has tried mightily to make this "one final view" an absolute essential for the psychological and spiritual welfare of the nearest and dearest. Better theologians than I have pointed out, without much success, that this fixation on a prettied-up corpse represents the opposite of what a believing Christian is supposed to be thinking and praying about, namely, the welfare of the loved one's soul and one's own resignation to the loss of the loved one's body.

A wake puts the casket right up there at the center of attention. It reveals the cheap casket in all its cheapness and engraves the fear of being cheap in the minds of all who may be contemplating, when the time comes, the purchase of something at a price they can afford.

And "the industry" has taken pains to make its cheap caskets look cheap. Some of them look like cardboard, or they are covered with a discouraging shade of gray flannel cloth. Carlson quotes an article in the January 1998, issue of Mortuary Management, an industry publication:

  From consumer surveys it is clear that families select caskets mainly
  on eye appeal.... That is the reason that casket companies produce
  inexpensive caskets in rather unflattering finishes. If they looked
  too good, people might buy them [emphasis added].

This is most important because it is in the purchase of caskets, dear reader, that you find the major source of profit to the undertaker and financial loss to those less affluent families who cannot afford a casket that does not look cheap.

Now let us consider the comparative advantages of a vigil in the church. One recommended procedure:

1. You ask the undertaker to pick up the body at the hospital or the home and refrigerate it. Hospitals and some funeral homes have refrigerating facilities. This avoids any need for embalming, which, contrary to popular opinion, is not required by law.

2. You instruct the undertaker to deliver the body in the casket to the church of your choice, where six able-bodied men or women--relatives or friends--will carry the casket into the church. It will be immediately covered by a cloth pall and wheeled up to the sanctuary. This will occur perhaps a half-hour before the vigil so that very few people will have any chance to see whether the casket looks cheap or expensive.

3. After the funeral, the casket will be wheeled from the sanctuary to the front of the church, where the priest will conclude the funeral rite, the pall will be removed, and the casket will be placed in the hearse.

4. The driver will deliver the casket to the cemetery.

I have checked with local funeral homes and found that the charge for these services ranges from $955 without embalming ($1,315 with minimal embalming) to $3,195 ($3,790 with embalming). These figures do not include the cost of the casket.

Up to now I have proceeded on the assumption that you, like the Catholic Church and about 75 percent of the American people, prefer the traditional burial of the deceased in a casket rather than cremation. Since 1963 the church, somewhat reluctantly, has permitted cremation, and the percentage of those who choose it is rising every year. The cremated remains may also be present at a funeral ceremony in church and buried in a cemetery, of course.

Cremation reduces the cost of dying, since the casket is a major expense and for cremation a plain rigid container, wood and/or other material, is sufficient. Being a hopeless traditionalist, I share the church's reluctance. About twelve years ago my wife Helen and I purchased two beautiful pine coffins, with rope handles, for $400 apiece from James Casey in Newport, Rhode Island (401-847-5573). These coffins also make excellent blanket boxes and/or window seats. Casey now makes them from cherry and the price is $785 plus delivery (about $1 per mile). Our local funeral directors charge anywhere from $195 to $29,000. An undertaker with reasonable impulses can probably provide you with an acceptable casket for something under $1,000, or under $500 if you don't care much about appearance.

The question then remains: How do you find an undertaker who has reasonable impulses? Suggestion: talk to your local "memorial society," which may well have changed its name to the Funeral Consumers Alliance. To find your local branch, contact the FCA headquarters (www.funerals.org or phone [phone]). And, if you want to help others beside yourself, join your local society / alliance.

This review has barely scratched the surface of a huge subject. Cemeteries, whether owned by towns, churches, or profit-hungry corporations, are a problem. Plots can be expensive, and you may be required to purchase an outer burial container, an additional expense. Preneed planning is a must, but the consensus is to avoid preneed contracts, which tend to enrich the funeral director and rarely protect the consumer from the escalation of prices. Organ donation is a consideration for many people. More information is available from the FCA.

John C. Cort is author of, most recently, Dreadful Conversions: The Making of a Catholic Socialist (Fordham University Press).