The Whole Death Catalog

by Harold Schechter

“Go-Way! How you talk!” Then, with a confidential wink, a dropping of the voice, and an impressive laying of his hand on my arm: “Look here; there’s one thing in this world which isn’t ever cheap. That’s a coffin. There’s one thing in this world which a person don’t ever try to jew you down on. That’s a coffin. There’s one thing in the world which a person don’t say—’I’ll look around a little, and if I can’t do better I’ll come back and take it.’ That’s a coffin. There’s one thing in this world which a person won’t take in pine if he can go walnut; and won’t take in walnut if he can go mahogany; and won’t take in mahogany if he can go an iron casket with silver door-plate and bronze handles. That’s a coffin. And there’s one thing in this world which you don’t have to worry around after a person to get him to pay for. And that’s a coffin. Undertaking?—why it’s the dead surest business in Christendom, and the nobbiest.”

  The mercenary spirit of nineteenth-century hucksters like J.B. continues to pervade the mortuary trade—at least according to Jessica Mitford, who subjects the modern-day funeral industry to merciless ridicule in her 1963 best seller, The American Way of Death. Still, while it’s easy enough to score satirical points off a business that traffics in products such as Nature-Glo Embalming Makeup and Ko-Zee Burial Footwear, relies on mealy-mouthed euphemisms such as “interment space” instead of “grave,” and sponsors seminars on topics such as “Creating Exceptional Funeral Experiences for Today’s Educated Consumers,” there’s little doubt that undertakers perform a vital service for society, one the vast majority of people are only too happy to place into the hands of an experienced pro.

  What exactly does that service consist of? The clearest, most complete description of the job—written for the benefit of people who are thinking of entering the profession—appears in the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Outlook Handbook. According to this source:

  Funeral directors arrange the details and handle the logistics of funerals. They interview the family to learn what family members desire with regard to the nature of the funeral, the clergy members or other people who will officiate, and the final disposition of the remains. Together with the family, funeral directors establish the location, dates, and times of wakes, memorial services, and burials. They arrange for a hearse to carry the body to the funeral home or mortuary. They also prepare obituary notices and have them placed in newspapers, arrange for pallbearers and clergy, schedule the opening and closing of a grave with a representative of the cemetery, decorate and prepare the sites of all services, and provide transportation for the remains, mourners, and flowers between sites. They also direct preparation and shipment of remains for out-of-state burials.

  Most funeral directors are also trained, licensed, and practicing embalmers. They wash the body with germicidal soap and replace the blood with embalming fluid to preserve the tissues. They may reshape and reconstruct disfigured bodies using materials such as clay, cotton, plaster of Paris, and wax. They may also apply cosmetics to provide a natural appearance, dress the body, and place it in a casket.

  Funeral directors handle the paperwork involved with the person’s death, such as submitting papers to state authorities so that a formal death certificate may be issued and copies distributed to heirs. They may help family members apply for veterans’ burial benefits, and they notify the Social Security Administration of the death. Also, funeral directors may apply for the transfer of any pensions, insurance policies, or annuities on behalf of survivors.

  Funeral directors also work with those who want to plan their own funerals in advance. This provides peace of mind by ensuring that the client’s wishes will be taken care of in a way that is satisfying to the client and to the client’s survivors.

  Last but not least, funeral directors comfort the family and friends of the deceased—a task that requires tact, discretion, and compassion.

  The Department of Labor stresses the “long, irregular hours” involved in funeral directing. “The occupation can be highly stressful. Many are on call at all hours because they may be needed to remove remains in the middle of the night.” The pay is decent, though (despite the accusations of muckrakers like Mitford) money would not seem to be the primary motivation for those considering the profession since the median annual income is somewhere in the neighborhood of $50,000.

  To learn more about the profession, go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics website (www.bls.gov) and search under “Funeral Directors.”

  From Furniture Maker

  to Undertaker

  Check the word undertaker in the Oxford English Dictionary and you’ll find that the modern meaning of the term—“one who makes a business of carrying out arrangements for funerals”—only extends back to around 1700. Before then, no such job existed because there was simply no need for it. Except for the aristocracy—whose corpses were sometimes eviscerated and packed with supposedly preservative spices by authorized barber-surgeons—few people were embalmed or even interred in coffins. Ordinary folk were laid out by relatives, carried on foot to the churchyard, and buried in shrouds.

  FROM THE NFDA “CODE OF PROFESSIONAL CONDUCT”

  1. Members shall not engage in any unprofessional conduct which is likely to defraud or deceive the public.

  2. Members shall not engage in false or misleading advertising.

  3. Members shall not pay or offer to pay a commission or anything of value to third parties, such as medical personnel, nursing home and hospice organizations or employees, clergy, government officials or others, to secure deceased human remains for funeral or disposition services.

  4. Members shall not use alcohol or drugs to the extent that such use adversely impacts the member’s ability to carry out his or her obligation as a funeral professional.

  5. Members shall not be convicted of any felony or any crime involving immoral conduct.

  During the following century, however, the use of coffins became increasingly widespread. As a result, woodworkers started adding them to their inventories. By the beginning of the 1800s, American cabinetmakers typically carried everything from bedroom furniture to burial caskets. Before long, they had branched out into other funerary paraphernalia: palls, shrouds, grave clothes, and assorted mortuary merchandise.

  Gradually, these tradesmen began to perform other functions as well: laying out the body in the home, supervising the funeral service, providing the hearse, transporting mourners to the cemetery. By the middle of the nineteenth century, funeral undertaking had evolved into a distinct occupation in America—a precursor of the modern profession of licensed mortician or funeral director.

  NFDA

  The NFDA, or National Funeral Directors Association (not to be confused with other organizations whose acronym is also NFDA, such as the Northeast Florida Dressage Association, the New Frontier Dance Association, and the National Fish Decoy Association), is the world’s oldest, largest, and most influential funeral service organization—the NRA for morticians. It traces its origins back to 1880, when two dozen forward-looking Michigan undertakers met to discuss ways of transforming their trade into a bona fide profession. One of the first steps was to dispense with the déclassé designation “undertaker” and adopt the more high-toned title of “funeral director,” a decision made after much heated debate at the organization’s first national meeting in 1882.

  Today, the NFDA devotes itself to various political and public relations activities on behalf of its more than 20,000 members. It lobbies Congress, monitors legislation, disseminates information to the media, and sponsors a yearly national convention. From the first—in its efforts to win the trust and respect of an ever-wary public—it has established constantly evolving standards of ethical behavior, acted to boost the educational requirements for licensed embalmers, and, in general, sought to project an image of its members as “men of means, intelligence, taste, and refinement.” Its website, www.nfda.org, features a number of consumer resources, including a toll-free Funeral Service Help Line (800-228-NFDA) and
a “Bill of Rights for Funeral Preplanning.” In 2004 it adopted, for the first time, a fully enforceable Code of Professional Conduct (www.nfda.org/files/CodeofConduct.pdf). The NFDA also produces a handsome series of free pamphlets, including Planning a Meaningful Funeral Service, Helping Children Through Their Grief, and Understanding Cremation.

  Needless to say, foes of the funeral industry take a far more jaundiced view of the NFDA, decrying it as nothing more than a propaganda agency for morticians. Its annual conventions also make a ripe target for critics, who invariably describe these gatherings as ghoulishly festive affairs where the attendees party it up while exhibitors pitch the latest in embalming cosmetics, mortuary fridges, and cadaver deodorizers. For a typically sharp-tongued attack on the NFDA, see Chapter 13 (“The Newest Profession”) in Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death Revisited (Vintage, 1998). In a piece called “Merchants of Death,” journalist Ashlea Halpern offers a wry, closely observed description of the 2006 National Funeral Directors Association Convention and Expo, held in Philadelphia. Originally published in the Philadelphia City Paper, it can be accessed online at www.citypaper.net/articles/2006/10/26/Merchants-of-Death.

  The Funeral Home

  Experience

  What exactly happens to you inside a funeral home? Well, that very much depends on whether you are alive or dead—that is, a family member there to make arrangements or the actual corpse.

  If you fall into the former category, you will first be ushered into a hushed and tastefully appointed receiving room by the funeral director, whose demeanor is designed to assure you that, at this supremely difficult moment, you can leave all the details in his capable hands. Without laying it on too thick, he will offer a simple, apparently heartfelt expression of sympathy after you are comfortably seated. With this preliminary out of the way, he will quickly get down to the business at hand.

  Gently—but in his perfectly professional manner—he will ask if you have given any thought to the kind of arrangements you wish to make. (Under these emotionally trying circumstances, and particularly if this is your first time dealing with a death in the family, you may feel at a loss. Experts suggest that you bring along a trusted friend—someone less deeply grief-stricken—who can be more objective about the decisions and ask the relevant questions.) Assuming that, like most Americans, you are interested in a traditional burial, the funeral director will then explain your options and present you with an itemized list of his goods and services. Besides the basic fee for his time, trouble, and overhead, these items typically range from cosmetic care of the corpse and use of the chapel and other facilities to the transportation of the mourners and remains to the cemetery.

  You may select individual items from the menu or opt for a complete soup-to-nuts package deal. Embalming, though rarely required by law, will almost certainly be part of any package. Since federal regulations prohibit today’s funeral director from performing this procedure without express permission, you will be asked if you wish to include it. You have every right to refuse. The funeral director, however, will undoubtedly indicate that unless you wish to bury your loved one right away, with no viewing, embalming is a necessity.

  You will be asked for various kinds of information, which the funeral director will jot down on a notepad: personal data for the death certificate, the names of friends and family members who will serve as pallbearers, the type of music you’d like to have played at the memorial service, and so on. It will then be time to choose the burial container.

  You may need to steel yourself for this experience. Many people find it profoundly distressing since there is nothing like a roomful of yawning coffins to drive home the terrible finality of death, the awful realization that your mother or father, husband or wife, daughter or son is about to be forever consigned to a narrow box in the ground.

  Leading the way downstairs, the funeral director will escort you into the casket selection room, where you will find an array of a dozen or so open coffins, varying in material, quality and cost. There will be no hard sell from the funeral director, who will simply describe the different options before leaving you alone to wander about the room, examine the merchandise, and decide between, say, the 20-gauge Olivetone at $1,250, the stainless-steel Chateau Slate at $3,295, or the velvet-lined Mahogany at $5,295. Most Americans end up choosing a coffin in the middle price range. With this amount added to the cost of a standard burial package, you can expect to shell out somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000 for the funeral.

  Once the casket has been chosen, it’s back to the office, where you will tie up a few loose ends and review the arrangements before taking your leave.

  At this point, the funeral director will turn his attentions to your loved one. If he has not already done so, he will immediately have the remains conveyed to his mortuary and wheeled into the white-tiled basement prep room, where—assuming you have opted for a traditional viewing—the body will be embalmed and cosmetically restored (or, as Jessica Mitford gibes, “sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged, and neatly dressed”). When you next set eyes on your loved one, the spiffed-up body will be handsomely displayed in its shiny new casket—“transformed,” as Mitford says, “from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture.”

  RECOMMENDED READING

  In the opening chapter of his excellent survey of modern-day burial practices, Grave Matters (Scribner, 2007), Mark Harris takes the reader inside a typical funeral home as a grieving family makes final arrangements for their eighteen-year-old daughter. A far more scathing look at the funeral home experience can be found in Evelyn Waugh’s classic satire The Loved One (Little, Brown, 1948). Much useful information is also contained in Constance Jones’s R.I.P.: The Complete Book of Death and Dying (HarperCollins, 1997).

  Funeralspeak

  Like the members of other professions (military types, for example, who refer to dead civilians as “collateral damage”), undertakers rely on a great deal of jargon to disguise the disturbing realities of their trade. Here are some of the more common euphemisms employed by the funeral industry along with their actual meanings:

  FUNERALSPEAK PLAIN ENGLISH

  Moved on Dead

  Loved one Corpse

  Cremains Human ashes

  Restorative art Embalming

  Preparation room Embalming room

  Dermasurgeon Embalmer

  College of mortuary Embalming school

  science

  Display area Coffin showroom

  Celebration of life Funeral service

  Funeral coach Hearse

  Memorial garden Graveyard

  Interment space Grave

  Opening interment space Gravedigging

  Monument Tombstone

  Funeral director Undertaker

  DEATH DEFINITION:

  Church Truck

  WHILE THE TERM MIGHT SEEM TO REFER TO A vehicle used to transport elderly and/or handicapped parishioners to and from Sunday services, a church truck is actually a vital piece of mortuary apparatus—namely, a wheeled, adjustable metal cart used to move caskets in funeral homes. We’re not exactly sure why it’s called a “church truck"—but then again, we have no idea why beer openers are called “church keys.”

  Mortuary Hall of Fame:

  Howard Raether

  Every now and then, a person comes along who achieves such dominance in a particular field of endeavor that he or she is crowned with an honorific title: the Wizard of Wall Street, the King of Rock and Roll, the Father of Modern Computing. In the twentieth-century death care business, one towering figure earned such a distinction. His name was Howard Raether, and he was known to his admiring peers as “Mr. Funeral Service.”

  Born and educated in Milwaukee in 1916, where he received his bachelor’s and law degrees from Marquette University Raether began his long funeral-focused career in 1940, when he was retained as general counsel for the Wisconsin Funeral Directors and Embalmers Association. Eight y
ears later, after serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, he was named executive director of the National Funeral Directors Association, the world’s preeminent funeral trade association—a position he occupied for the next thirty-five years.

  It was during his tenure that the American funeral industry faced the greatest challenge to its legitimacy since its inception: the firestorm ignited by Jessica Mitford’s 1963 bombshell, The American Way of Death. Mitford’s book took particular aim at the two bedrock practices of the mortuary business, embalming and viewing, which she regarded as crass, morbid rituals perpetuated by the undertaking trade for its own financial welfare. As the public face of the funeral industry, Raether—who genuinely believed that traditional open-casket funerals offered therapeutic benefits for survivors—became Mitford’s chief antagonist, defending his profession in scores of radio and television appearances. He also represented the funeral industry during fifty days of public hearings and debate in the early 1980s, when the Federal Trade Commission was about to implement its landmark Funeral Rule.

  Revered among his colleagues (who paid him the tribute of bestowing his name on the NFDA’s research library, one of the world’s largest collections of funeral-related books and historical papers), Raether—in the way such things frequently happen—will forever be linked to his bête noir, Jessica Mitford. In his essay collection, Bodies in Motion and at Rest (Vintage, 2001), Thomas Lynch neatly sums up their enduring connection: “Back in the Sixties they would fight it out on radio and TV and in print interviews. She’d talk money. He’d talk meaning. He’d do values. She’d do costs. She said the funeral was a ‘barbaric display’ He said the funeral was ‘for the living.’ They disagreed on almost everything. She died in the summer of 1996. He died in October of 1999. Their old contentions still shape the meaning and marketing of American funerals.”