This piece was written in 2020 when I was still employed by a nonprofit called Funeral Consumers Alliance. It was first published on this Substack in January, 2023 for paid subscribers only. This outing is free to all.
It’s a toss-up how I’ll respond to the small-talk opener common to dinner parties. “What do you do?” Sometimes I’ll just say that I work in “consumer advocacy.” If I’m feeling expansive, I’ll say that I direct the Funeral Consumers Alliance. That requires more explanation. What in the world is “funeral consumer advocacy”?
The elevator pitch answer: “Think of us like we were Consumer Reports magazine, but only for the funeral and burial purchase.” I explain that we offer education about the options available to people making death arrangements with a focus on how to do it affordably. Unless you’ve done some homework and comparison-shopping, the average person’s funeral purchase is likely to cost a lot more than most people want to pay.
“It’s a shame/outrage/scandal to take advantage of people on the worst day of their lives!” is the most common reaction from a conversational partner.
Yes, it is a scandal to take advantage of grieving people. But there’s an unstated assumption behind this : That there’s something immoral about making a living—even a profit—by caring for the dead. People don’t say it out loud, but they don’t need to. Eighteen years of experience has shown me that most people are at least suspicious of funeral directors. Not suspicious just of obviously avaricious funeral directors, suspicious of funeral directors as a class and specifically because they make their living selling services to the bereaved.
There are reasons for this. The funeral home sector in the United States earned a reputation for being secretive and defensive about prices. Before the Federal Trade Commission’s ‘Funeral Rule’ took effect in 1984, too many funeral homes forced consumers to buy all-inclusive packages whether the family wanted or could afford a one-of-everything funeral. The industry hasn’t covered itself in glory, either, with emotional manipulations such as marketing sealed caskets as “protective”, or pushing the idea that loving family members should want to spend enough to give mom the very best sealed vault to keep the body from natural decay.
There is a sound public policy reason for requiring funeral homes to be transparent in pricing and truthful in how they represent their services. Unlike almost every other retail transaction, the funeral buyer is usually emotionally compromised. Grieving people are more likely to spend beyond their means, to buy services they may later regret. This isn’t the fault of funeral directors, but it is the reason we hold them to specific rules that attempt to make up for the grief that handicaps the bereaved.
But the common American suspicion of funeral directors goes beyond a normal distaste for vendors who take explicit advantage. We cast a jaundiced eye at undertakers for being undertakers.
We do this because we don’t like death, and we don’t like responsibility. It’s more appealing to see ourselves as victims than it is to admit that we put off death planning until the last minute. Most of us don’t compare funeral prices in our local market to see which firms fall within our budget. We sleep-walk into “our family’s funeral home” then some of us complain that they charged us such high prices. We will scour the Internet to save two dollars on detergent, but we won’t devote an hour to calling five mortuaries to get a price quote on cremation.
So we blame the undertaker for making a living.
The customer isn’t always right
Not every complaint is reasonable. “I was in grief” does not excuse every funeral choice we later regret. While the death of a spouse will cloud our judgment, it doesn’t account for all the time before the death we could have spent assessing costs to make sure they fit our budget.
Earlier this year Mrs. A. complained about the $15,000 “basic funeral” she held for her husband. “I didn’t have a choice,” she said.
Didn’t she? Couldn’t Mrs. A. have chosen a less elaborate funeral? Was she unable to patronize any of the other half-dozen funeral homes in her area with more moderate prices? Mrs. A. didn’t allege that the funeral home lied to her, that it hid prices, or that it obscured more affordable options. I asked.
Mrs. A telegraphed indignant offense when I asked if she’d considered de-selecting some of the services in order to make the bill more manageable. That wouldn’t have been “dignified” or “what my husband deserved,” she said.
Mrs. A didn’t have a complaint, she had buyer’s regret.
Most consumers aren’t so unreasonable, but Mrs. A isn’t just one in a thousand. A significant minority of consumers who file complaints with Funeral Consumers Alliance don’t have a legitimate grievance. Some of these people are just having a very hard time coping with a death, and they’re lashing out at the undertaker because he’s an easy target. A lot of them will think better of their accusations after time passes.
Some will not. When I was a child, there was a popular animated adaptation of the Rudyard Kipling story Rikki Tikki Tavi. In the movie, one of the cobras (the antagonists) menaces a human. A bird saves the humans by pretending to have a broken wing, distracting the cobra who thinks she’s found a soft target.
Some people pretend they have a broken wing. Every consumer advocate knows this, but few dare say it. There’s a good social living to be earned as a professional victim. It took me some years to be able to see through this ploy. Once you do, you cannot un-see it.
Those of us who work in human services fields tend to be sympathetic to people who appear to be mistreated. We want to right the world’s wrongs. This makes us vulnerable to people who sense our sympathy and target us because they’ve been indulged by others like us before.
For anyone who spends time helping consumers, learning discernment is important. Being able to tell the difference between a legitimate complaint and a confected one matters. The funeral directors subject to these complaints are the same kinds of humans that you and I are. They have to eat, they have to pay their bills, they have families to support. Even ordinarily reasonable people can be so temporarily deranged by grief that they magnify honest mistakes beyond their proper scale.
We should extend extra compassion. We can forgive a bereft widower for making a mountain out of a molehill because we can imagine what it must be like to lose a wife of forty years.
But we should do so for the undertaker as well. Mr. Smith’s grief may excuse his lost temper, but it doesn’t go farther than that. More than once a consumer has complained to me of funeral home behavior that is, at worst, callous and disorganized. Sometimes the outrage level is in inverse proportion to the offense; some of these complainants have demanded help “closing down that funeral home.” One complainant sent a letter to the state funeral board naming the individual funeral home employees (she could not possibly have interacted with all of them) and insisting they all have their licenses pulled and be put out of employment in the business permanently.
We should not succor those who want a pound of flesh for an ounce of sin.
Funereal fantasies
I like to read histories and novelizations of the English royal courts in the Middle Ages through the Renaissance. One book detailed the care and pomp accorded the body of a dead queen by the royal undertakers. The “embalmment,” the winding sheet, the lying-in-repose in the chapel royal, the purchase of hundreds of pairs of gloves for the mourners.
Authors dwell on royal obsequies because readers like to contemplate the pageantry of the exalted. We’re interested precisely because this was not the experience of the common people that most of us would have been. We would have gotten our hands dirty. We would have handled the body. We would have built the coffin ourselves. We would have sweat through the grave-digging.
It still surprises me that it took me until recently to see it: We are utterly unaware of what an extraordinary and recent luxury it is to have such a business we call a “funeral home.” In historical terms, it happened yesterday. Nearly all humans who lived before our time would marvel at the convenience of being able to call an undertaker in the small hours and have the corpse disappeared and dandied up.
When death moved out of the domestic sphere and into the commercial, we lost touch with reality. What was recently a sad but prosaic domestic duty became a specialized process filtered through veils literal and metaphorical. The mundane dead of 1820 were a common sight in a box set by the front parlor window. Someone who lived in that house washed that body and laid it out.
By the late 19th century our domestic dead became capital-C Corpses, simulacra of the living who achieved better dying through chemistry. Arterial embalming, cosmetic restoration, and preservation of the dead were the foundation of the American commercial funeral industry.
Whether you, I, or anyone think this is a good, bad, or indifferent thing is immaterial. The newfangled funeral made the familiar strange. The void left when reality departs is filled by fantasy.
And what fantasies we have.
“He didn’t smell right,” said Mrs. K. “He didn’t look like himself. Then I kissed him, and he didn’t smell like himself.”
Almost unbelievably, Mrs. K’s complaint about the embalming done on her husband was the second such complaint we got in a week. The other caller, too, said his dead father “didn’t smell right.”
It wasn’t decomposition; people aren’t shy about reporting that. There are isolated cases of poor embalming jobs, or bodies that can’t be thoroughly embalmed enough to prevent the sweet-rotten odor of decay.
I don’t know just what these callers smelled, but I have a hunch it was formaldehyde. Embalmers have told me that properly prepared corpses shouldn’t have a detectable odor, but I know from experience that you can sometimes detect the sharp scent of formalin if you get very close to a body at a funeral home. I smelled it on my grandmother and have never been able to shake that disturbing memory.
Other people have lodged complaints at my office before about dead family members who “didn’t look like themselves.” One woman sent a complaint about the poor presentation of her husband’s body, accompanied by a picture of him in an open coffin. He looked quite smart to me. Dressed in a suit, hair parted and pomaded. There was no obvious trauma or facial distortion. Nothing about him looked “wrong”.
Almost nothing. Like all bodies I’ve ever seen in repose, he had mortuary-face. There’s a set to the jaw and the eyes that is just a little bit off. The embalmed dead occupy the uncanny valley, presenting as startlingly realistic mannequins.
As well they might; the dead don’t “slumber”, they decease.
I have no idea how this gentleman appeared in life. More to the point, it’s unlikely the embalmer did, either. Even the most gifted embalmer can’t give slack jowls the muscle tone of life. They are artisans, not necromancers.
Yet we ask them to be. And like all craftsmen or artists, dedicated embalmers take pride in their work and want to show decedents at their best. Whatever one’s view of the desirability of making the dead appear life-like, it is clear that embalmers believe they are doing the living a service that offers a salve to their grief.
Does it? We ask undertakers to create and collude with us in a lie. You may say that is harsh, or if a lie it be, then surely it is a white lie. Is it “good” for us to order up and gaze upon a visual misdirection whose point is to make death look like something other than it is? Do we truly believe that all of humanity, prior to the introduction of cosmetic embalming in the 19th century, experienced unresolved grief because they viewed the dead in their natural state?
My grandmother’s embalmed and made-up corpse scared me precisely because she looked like a realistic mannequin of herself, a caricature fixed in formalin. On the other hand, I carried disturbing fantasy images of my friend Angie’s corpse for years after her closed-casket funeral. Angie hung herself at 16 years old and I often wonder if I’d have been better off seeing the body instead of ruminating on what lay hidden inside that flower-bedecked box.
A friend reported how unsettled she was after viewing the embalmed body of Chip, who died in a car accident. I asked her if he looked good. “Here’s the problem,” she said. “He looked better than good. He looked hot.” My friend couldn’t shake the dissonance of looking at a man who died in a violent accident who was so well-prepared that he still had fetching looks. She would have preferred not seeing him at all.
This is all to say that if we want to weigh the merits and demerits of the American funeral trade, we should also weigh our contributions to it. It is easy to document the professionalization of caring for the dead, to trace the withdrawal of the corpse from the domestic economy and its deposit into the retail market. It is true that, like every other business, the funeral trade created and employs myths and marketing designed to justify itself and its profits. This is not a criticism; it is a morally neutral observation about capitalist practice.
We pretend, however, that the funeral transaction is above the grubby everyday reality of money changing hands. And that’s the rub. We want our sacred rites to be sacred rites, but we don’t want to admit that they’re dressed in commercial drag.
It’s easy to say some version of, “The American funeral industry took control of our our death rituals and profaned the sacred with money.” I’ve said it. But I was wrong, insofar as that’s only a half-description. For a market to exist, there must be willing buyers.
We are those.
How can someone be content to make a profit from someone else’s grief? We might also ask how we can expect a stranger to get out of bed at two in the morning to retrieve a corpse that we can’t bear to have in the house. If we wish to criticize undertakers for making money from sorrow, we need to be prepared to take responsibility for the final offices of a family member. Grandmother is, after all, our grandmother, not the undertaker’s.
Vanishingly few of us are willing to do so. Although it’s legal in most US states for a family to complete the funeral process without ever hiring a funeral home, only a fraction of a percent will. Most people find the very idea shocking. They have no answer when asked why this is so unthinkable considering that our recent ancestors did this as a matter of course.
Our reactions to candor and responsibility about death are only so understandable. Modern Americans have a histrionic aversion to death that we should not excuse as easily as we do. Our lack of familiarity with death is a very modern luxury. While none of us as individuals is primarily responsible for the economic, physical, and emotional infrastructure that has made the death transaction commercial, we are also not excused for the part we play as consumers.
If undertakers created a product, we bought it. If they manufactured a need, we created our own helplessness. When we hold them to account for their commercial excess, we should look squarely at our own behavior too.
The dismal trader’s dance card is always full because we write our names on it.
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Like many other products people buy on emotion. They end up with a $700 car payment because they think their working hard deserves a luxurious car. Grandpa dies and he’s due a great send off. Or worst a child dies and how can you not give the best as the final gift. Few can separate emotions from practicality. Even more so in our growing Cluster B world.
As a side note with our exploding obesity rates, drug addictions, mental illness and other unhealthy outcomes this is a business with great future demand. If a young person wants an in demand job this might be it. Just go to any airport and look at all the 50 year olds already in a wheelchair.
Well dam, that was extremely thought provoking to me. Being Honor Guard for a time, I've seen and carried more than I needed to. I've heard a few whispered complaints and always dismissed them for whatever seemed to fit. My mother did not complain at the cost of father's urn. I made it. It never occurred to me what I would actually charge a random non family member for that. It was asked of me and I did it. I have some skill with metal. Things I have never given two thoughts to. Invoking. Thank you.