Even more surprising than the quantity of letters was their quality. Those who are by the nature of their work on the receiving end of letters from the general public—newspaper editors, radio commentators and the like—have told me that a good percentage of the letter writers are crackpots of some kind, that all too seldom does the solid citizen trouble himself to set down his views on paper. The opposite was true of these letters. In tone, they ran the gamut, some bitter, some funny, some reflective; but they were almost without exception intelligent—in many cases deeply thought out—comments on a subject about which the writers obviously felt most strongly. They were indeed evidence of a widespread public revulsion against modern funerary practices, the extent of which even the funeral society advocates had never fully realized. Another extraordinary thing about the hundreds of letters I received was that only one took the side of the funeral industry. It was full of invective, it bore no name, it was signed simply “An American Funeral Director.” The Bay Area Funeral Society reported but three hostile letters out of the first eleven hundred.
Some of our correspondents had long since taken matters into their own hands. It seems that a variety of ingenious solutions to the problem were being tried. We learned of the “plain coffin” offered by the St. Leo Shop in Newport, Rhode Island: “For those who would not like to be caught dead in a plush-lined coffin, we offer the traditional plain box of pine, cedar or mahogany, with strong rope handles. Covered with cushions, it doubles as a storage chest and low seat, until needed for its ultimate purpose.” And we learned of “the world’s first do-it-yourself tombstone kit” offered by a South African inventor—“selling for a sum that is expected to shock traditional monument makers, whose prices generally start at ten times this figure.”
We learned of two burial committees connected with Friends Meetings, one in Ohio, the other in Burnsville, North Carolina. When a member dies, the committee supplies a plain plywood box, places the body in it, and delivers it by station wagon to the crematory or medical school. The next of kin pays for the cost of the lumber in the box plus crematory charges and obituary notices. There is no charge for the committee’s services, which include making the box. The total expense is generally under $250. The committee arranges for “help with the children or with food, a lift with the housework, hospitality for visiting relatives—a rallying of friends in a quiet coordinated way.” A memorial service is generally held three or four days after death.
In the wake of the Post article, several other publications took up the subject of disposal of the dead, evoking in each instance spirited response from the funeral industry. The Reader’s Digest of August 1961 ran an article, “Let the Dead Teach the Living,” which pointed to a critical shortage of cadavers for anatomical study in medical schools. Said the Reader’s Digest, “Every individual who bequeaths his remains to a medical school makes an important contribution to the advance of human knowledge.”
Medical Economics, a national physicians’ journal, carried a piece describing the participation of doctors in the funeral society movement. A Kentucky pediatrician is quoted as saying, “We should encourage people to use educational, health, or welfare funds as a memorial to the dead rather than throw a lot of money into a barbaric funeral ceremony complete with gussied-up bodies, expensive caskets, parades, and regalia.” Said Mr. Howard C. Raether in a speech delivered to the NFDA convention: “The ultimate of all these programs is to give the entire body to medical science. With no body there is no funeral. If there are no funerals, there are no funeral directors. A word to the wise should be sufficient.” Said the National Funeral Service Journal, “This is a practice that cannot openly be opposed without branding the funeral directors as being indifferent to the health and welfare of mankind.… The loss of a casket sale will create a financial blow in those cases where the body is contributed to a medical school. Fortunately, such cases are infrequent at the present time; unfortunately, they may become more frequent in the future.”
After Words
Now again the funeral folk are gazing hopefully into a clouded crystal ball. By 1996 more bodies, not fewer, were being donated for medical research, leading those in the trade once more to spread untruths. Thomas Lynch, a Michigan undertaker, wrote in The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade (Norton, 1997): “The supply of cadavers for medical and dental schools in this land of plenty [has been] shamefully but abundantly provided for by the homeless and helpless, who were, for the most part, more ‘fit’ than Russ.” Russ—after being discouraged from body donation—fit quite nicely in one of Mr. Lynch’s caskets, the author was pleased to report. A quick check with the three medical schools in Michigan indicated that Wayne State and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor have an “urgent need” for body donors; Michigan State University has a moderate need: “We can always use people.”
Once the FTC Funeral Rule was passed in 1984, publicity and protest quieted down. Cremation was more readily obtained, and prices were available over the phone. The spirit of social activism that spurred the memorial societies lost its steam, and membership began to dwindle. In some areas, societies died out altogether. In other areas—where a favorable price had been negotiated with cooperating mortuaries—they flourished quietly.
News stories popped up occasionally when a cemetery or funeral establishment went out of business, the proprietor having absconded with the funds. Lisa Carlson’s Caring for Your Own Dead—a state-by-state manual for those living in one of the forty-two states where it is legal to bypass the funeral industry entirely—was published by a small press and garnered good reviews, but it was not readily available in bookstores. The funeral industry continued to thrive with relatively little attention.
When the Funeral Rule was reopened for amendments in 1988, the media ignored the hearings. No one was there to hear the stories of continued consumer abuse at the hands of an industry that ignored the rule. No one was there to hear the pleas for bringing cemeteries under the rule. All seemed well for the industry.
But in the eighties—with AIDS deaths a near epidemic—a much younger generation was becoming involved with the final arrangements, and many didn’t like what they found.
One of those was Karen Leonard. Her first foray into the realm of death care was as co-owner of a casket-and-urn “gallery” in San Francisco—Ghia—where one could purchase a work of art for the final resting place. Carlson thought that if people were going to purchase their own caskets, they might want a do-it-yourself guide for the rest of the funeral, and rushed off a carton of Caring for Ghia to display.
The gallery struggled and only a few books sold, but Leonard found herself surrounded by people with “new” ideas for the dying. Without exception, each had “horror stories” of unpleasant funeral experiences and were looking for more meaningful ways of “celebrating” a life once lived. It wasn’t long before Leonard was introduced to the memorial society folks and began her funeral education in earnest.
Carlson began passing along the occasional media inquiry to Leonard. One was from a producer for “20/20.” Undercover and with hidden camera, she was able to provide television audiences with a clear look at some of the less-than-ethical practices of the funeral trade.
The industry cried foul, saying that the portrayals were isolated incidents, but it was clearly stung.
The press began to take notice. In 1996 the magazine of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), Modern Maturity—which had avoided anything “downbeat” for years—finally ran a story on funeral planning. Kiplinger’s Personal Finance and Money Magazine followed suit the next year.
The mood in the Dismal Trade grew nervous. The NFDA opened a Washington, D.C., office where its liaison spends time trotting around Capitol Hill—to win friends and influence people, in preparation for a possible reopening of the Funeral Rule.
A June 1997 editorial in The Director might have been written thirty-five years ago but for its let’s-all-buck-up tone; President Maurice Newnam of
fers this fatherly counsel: “The importance of the memory picture created by the properly embalmed and restored loved one is something we must never lose sight of and never be ashamed to ask permission to do.… Hold your head high, take care in the work you do and be proud to be an embalmer.”
Ron Hast (Mortuary Management, February 1997) is more candid: “Think about how the public must perceive funeral service as we caress our solid copper caskets, and extol the virtues of embalming and extended preservation. Our critics are gaining attention, and more and more client families come to us with skepticism. In fact, some clients seeking death care service don’t come to us at all.”
19
Pay Now—Die Poorer
“In the Depression years, every community had a form of preneed,” mused North Dakota funeral director Tom Fisher in a poolside chat with the author in 1995. “In my own community we had the Farmers Union Burial Cooperative Society.”
The early funeral and memorial societies—most of them urban—expressed divergent views on the subject of paying for a funeral in advance. Many societies actively promoted “peace of mind by planning ahead,” negotiating for fixed prices with cooperating mortuaries. Not all were willing to part with their money, however. The societies’ Bulletin warned: “It always pays to plan ahead. It rarely pays to pay ahead.”
Today, the need to shelter assets for Medicaid eligibility is another reason people pay for their funeral in advance. There are now no federal guidelines limiting the amount that may be set aside for a funeral. Many states—exercising their options as administrators of Medicaid—have set their own limits. Connecticut has set its limit at $4,800; California, $10,000. In New Jersey, the sky’s the limit, and it need hardly be said that this is well known by the vendors of funeral services in that state. A hidden-camera “20/20” investigation captured an undertaker offering to accept $20,000 for a future funeral, assuring the client that any “extra” would be returned to the family.
Funeral directors have a strong motivation to sell ahead of time. Each funeral they have under wraps is one less that will go to a competitor. “A well-run, aggressive preneed program will increase a firm’s market share,” writes Thomas Barnard in the NFDA journal The Director. Given a nationwide proliferation of funeral homes, market share is a driving concern. According to the Funeral and Memorial Societies of America, “If people died Monday through Friday with two weeks off for the mortician’s vacation, the death rate in the U.S. could support 9,288 full-time funeral homes. Yet there are more than 22,000 mortuaries in this country. Many get only one or two funerals a week.”
Do people spend more or less when they plan ahead? Prearranged funerals tend to be much less expensive than those arranged by sorrowing survivors, according to some reports. Howard C. Raether took note of this fact long ago at a National Funeral Directors Association convention. He was discussing an analysis of funeral sales: “If it were possible to tabulate all the prearranged funeral services on record, how do you suppose the average of all of them would compare with the average adult figure shown here?” (Average adult figure means average price of an adult’s funeral.) “Are you ready, willing and able to become part of a program that is going to lower the quality of the average funeral service selected to the point where you will find it difficult if not impossible to stay in business rendering the service you now give?” He added, “It is good for those who survive to have the right and duty to make the funeral arrangements. Making such arrangements, having such responsibilities, is essential. It is part of the grief syndrome, part of the therapy of mourning. It is a positive hook upon which the hat of funeral service is hung. Why should we tear it down by saying the funeral is for the deceased, therefore he or she should make the arrangements?… If funeral directors insist on soliciting pre-need funerals, they are in fact prearranging the funeral of their profession.”
More recent developments in the techniques of pre-need selling, a matter of prime importance to the trade, have proved Mr. Raether’s dour prediction wrong. According to Ron Hast, that knowledgeable sage of the industry, people tend to be more gullible when seated comfortably in their own living rooms. “Pictures of beautifully displayed caskets are far less intimidating when shown to the prospect while sitting on the sofa than when they are presented in a mortuary’s casket selection room.… They start to think of them as quality furniture. They will spend more, not less, on a prearranged casket.”
In any case, those gloom and doom predictions on the impact of prearrangement have long since fallen on deaf ears. By 1995 no less than $20 billion was, according to Consumers Digest senior editor John Wasik, tied down in prepaid funeral and cemetery plans. That estimate, outsized as it seems, is surely on the low side, because SCI alone today lays claim to holdings of $3.2 billion in prepayments.
Today, it is the corporate chains that are doing some of the most aggressive selling. What do they know that the public does not? And what can be wrong with paying in advance to guarantee prices?
Inflation is the bugbear that is used most effectively by the sellers of prepayment plans. In recent years, however, while inflation has been raising the cost of living generally by 2 to 3 percent annually, funeral costs have been increasing by 6 to 7 percent—which is more than the interest the mortuary is pocketing on your prepaid funeral contract. As the numbers pile up, funeral providers are becoming wary of the trap of the guaranteed price. The Midwestern owner of several funeral homes is quoted in the NFDA organ The Director as predicting: “Ninety-nine percent of the guaranteed preneeds will be performed at a loss.” Likewise aware of the problem, Funeral Service Insider advises against guaranteeing prices on future contracts, suggesting the following disclaimer: “If the death benefits are less than the current retail price at the time of death, an additional amount of funds will be due.” With an escape clause like that, you—the consumer—have saved no money with a pre-need arrangement. All you’ve done is paid part of the money in advance, and committed your survivors to pay the funeral director whatever he’s charging at the time of death—eliminating the chance that your nearest and dearest will be free to shop around for a better deal.
If you have already purchased a guaranteed-price plan—which leaves you with the feeling that you’ve got a great deal because the local funeral home will take care of everything—then what?
It’s a situation that invites abuse. The daughter of one Vermont woman, who a few years earlier had paid $3,000 for her funeral, was billed for an additional $1,000 service charge by the funeral home’s new owner.
How else can the undertaker make up for funeral inflation on a prepaid contract? “Cash Advance” items—cost of the obituary (if there is a fee), the death certificate, flowers, or cemetery expenses—will not have been included in your funeral package. An SCI-owned funeral home charged a Denver husband $200 to fax four copies of his wife’s obituary to area newspapers—where the obits ran for free. A New York widow was told, “We’ll take care of everything.” The mortician charged her $175 to have her husband’s date of death inscribed on the existing family monument. Actual cost of the inscription? $75.
Among the creative ideas currently favored by the industry, none is more profitable, nor more subject to abuse, than its appropriation of the legal fiction of “constructive delivery.” Prepayment laws in most states require that prepaid funds be placed in trust. California, for example, requires 100 percent trusting, but, like many states, has a loophole wide enough to accommodate a Cadillac hearse. It exempts from the trust requirement monies paid in advance for the prepurchase of goods such as burial plots, vaults, markers, and so on—the bulk of the cost of burial—provided that the prepurchased items are stored or warehoused for the customer’s future use. Constructive delivery is in reality no delivery, and it is the rare consumer who will have the wit to even try to ascertain whether or where the prepaid goods are being stored, let alone have the persistence to demand a glimpse of the items he or she presumably owns.
Neptune Society prov
ides an instructive example of the invitation to large-scale fraud afforded by constructive delivery. A recent release by the California Department of Consumer Affairs announced that three of Neptune’s eleven locations (San Pedro, Burbank, and Santa Barbara) were charged with “unprofessional conduct” for allegedly failing to place $12.6 million into a trust fund “or to maintain sufficient merchandise to match purchases.” For this egregious fraud, Neptune must have been delighted to receive no more than the customary slap on the wrist in the form of three years’ probation, during which they were permitted to remain in business. There is also an order to pay $55,000 to reimburse the department for costs, but nothing is said about reimbursing the consumer $12.6 million for the apparently misappropriated boodle.
Of the $12.6 million, $9 million was allegedly for the sale of caskets and urns. This is odd, because Neptune, numero uno in the for-profit cremation business, well knew that caskets are not required, nor are urns. Karen Leonard, however, has the videotape of a “Dateline NBC” program in which she participated, on which one of Neptune’s top salespeople explained, in an expansive mood, that the law requires a casket (cost: $400), while in practice bodies are cremated in a shroud. This avid seller likewise explained that an urn is required by law (cost: $75), whereas a $2 cardboard box is used.
The American Way of Death Revisited Page 31