The American Way of Death Revisited

by Jessica Mitford

il faut souffrir pour être belle.

Clearly, some rather solid-sounding justifications for the procedure had to be advanced, above and beyond the fact that

embalming is good business for the undertaker because it helps him to sell more expensive caskets.

scientific method in refreshing contrast to that of the funeral homes.

The old-time cemeteries and churchyards were particularly dangerous breeding grounds for these scourges. The solution, however, lies in city planning, engineering, and sanitation, rather than in embalming, for the organisms which cause disease live in the organs, the blood, and the bowel, and cannot all be killed by the embalming process.

“If embalming is taken out of the funeral, then viewing the body will also be lost. If viewing is lost, then the body itself will not be central to the funeral. If the body is taken out of the funeral, then what does the funeral director have to sell?”

“Grief therapy” is most commonly used by funeral men to describe the mental and emotional solace which, they claim, is achieved for the bereaved family as a result of being able to “view” the embalmed and restored deceased.

The body is removed from this type of casket and cremated as is—which leaves the problem of disposing of the casket. “State law prohibits the reuse of them,” the crematory operator said. “You can’t very well take it out to the city dump, because what if the family should happen to pass by

and see it there? So we have to break them up and scrap them.”

The American Cemetery reports a discussion on “immediate-need” selling in which suggestions were made about how the cemeteries can get around this problem. The first thing is to insist that the family make a personal visit to the cemetery and not permit the purchase of the grave to be handled through the funeral director.

‘Open a thirty-five-dollar single

Louisiana-based Stewart recently negotiated an agreement with the Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles, the nation’s largest (home to nearly 4 million Catholics), to build and operate mortuaries in its six biggest cemeteries. In return for this invaluable endorsement, the Church, to the anguished distress of the independent Catholic funeral directors in the diocese, will receive a percentage of the proceeds from each funeral Stewart performs at the cemeteries.

As before, among the major dailies only the New York Times and the Washington Post will accept the proscribed words. The San Francisco Chronicle will accept “in lieu of” in lieu of “please omit.”

recently the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that a cemetery, even if privately owned, is a public burial ground “whose operation for purposes of profit is offensive to public policy.”

The sales organization usually works on a 50 percent commission; the individual salesman gets 20 to 40 percent of the selling price. “In most cemeteries which have pre-arrangement sales programs, four to ten times more is spent for direct selling than is spent for the total cost of planning, development, and landscaping,” complains a cemetery architect.

SCI, Loewen, and Stewart, are able to circumvent these high costs by advertising for salespeople, “No experience required.” The hungry hopefuls, once enticed, learn that they will be obliged to meet a sales quota set by the company—

one easily met by the novices when they sign up their kith and kin, but impossible to continue once that has been done. It’s a cruel but effective way to market a community at low cost...

Today, the unassuming fellow who kept up the cemetery grounds has been supplanted in place of first importance by a more dashing breed—a Memorial Counselor,

“We are merely giving the public what it wants,” they say.

When Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy

decided that President Kennedy’s casket would remain closed while his body lay in state, she acted as many religious leaders wish that all bereaved families would.… They feel that it is pagan rather than Christian to focus

attention on the...

Disposal of the dead falls rather into a class with fashions, than with either customs or folkways on the one hand, or institutions on the other…. [S]ocial practices of disposing of the dead are of a kind with fashion of dress, luxury and etiquette. —A. L. KROEBER, “Disposal of the Dead,” American Anthropologist, July-September

They might rashly conclude that twentieth-century America was a nation of abjectly imitative conformists, devoted to machine-made gadgetry and mass-produced art of a debased quality; that its dominant theology was a weird mixture

of primitive superstitions and superficial attitudes towards death, overlaid with a distinct tendency towards necrophilism.

And if your minds are set upon me, and ye remember me as a father, permit no man to take my body and carry

it into Egypt, lest, according to the custom which they have, they embalm me and lay me up in their houses, for it was [to avoid] this that I came into this desert. And ye know that I have continually made exhortation concerning

this thing and begged that it should not be done, and ye well know how much I have blamed those who observed this custom. Dig a grave then, and bury me therein, and hide my ...

observed carefully by you, and tell ye no man w...

The two widely divergent interests

which spurred the early embalmers—scientific inquiry, and the fascination and financial reward of turning cadavers into a sort of ornamental keepsake—were to achieve a happy union under the guiding hand of a rare nineteenth-century character, “Dr.” Thomas Holmes.

“Glacier Age”—when preservation on ice was the undertakers’ rule—and is often affectionately refer...

men as “the father of American embalming.” Holmes was the first to popularize the idea of preserving the dead on a mass scale, and the first America...

pall-covered

“There is no doubt that people view the dead out of curiosity.”

“The highest of ideals are worthless unless they are properly applied. The funeral director who thinks only in terms

of serving would very likely find himself out of business in a year or less.… And if he were compelled to close up his establishment what possible use would be all his high ideals and his desire to serve?”

In short, they long to be worthy of high regard, to be liked and understood, a most

human longing.

“Casket,” dating from Civil War days, was denounced by Hawthorne: “a vile modern phrase which compels a person to shrink from the idea of being buried at all.”

Yet, we know that the body shall return to the elements from which it came.… This means that we will be conservative in the purchase of casket, burial, and additional services, conserving frequently

limited funds to meet the needs of the living. Let us recognize that ordinarily this would also be the desire of the deceased.…”

So glad to see you” said all around—but “sometimes the deceased is overlooked.”

Funeral directors have greater power over the bereaved who put themselves in their hands. It is so sad to see this

power turn into manipulation. Attempts to undermine what we are doing, it seems, involve more than the individual funeral director on duty. It seems that Americans have been rendered powerless by the funeral industry. Bright, independent people permit themselves to be moved as if they were mechanical.

Funeral directors smile, exude friendliness, purr

never thought of these sweet folks as anything but gentle and deferential. Then I saw them transfigured before me.… Something akin to guerrilla war broke out in our church.… The funeral industry is big business. Maybe they own the parish church and nobody told us.

That the poor pay more is a truism that has not been disregarded by the conglomerates.

Father Henry’s Web site is: www.xroads.com/~funerals.

~funerals.