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As for the Loved One, poor fellow, he wanders like a sad ghost through the funeral men’s pronouncements. No provision seems to have been made for the burial of a Heartily Disliked One, although the necessity for such must arise in the course of human events.*
The funeral directors have certainly mastered the controlled vocabulary
One might suppose—and many people do—that the whole point of embalming is the long-term preservation of the deceased.
Therefore, the usual procedure is to embalm with about enough preservative to ensure that the body will last through the funeral—
“To the ancient embalmer permanent preservation was of prime importance and the maintenance of a natural color and texture a matter of minor concern;
If long-term preservation is not the embalmer’s objective, what then is?
The two grounds chosen by the undertaking trade for defense of embalming embrace two objectives near and dear to the hearts of Americans: hygiene, and mental health.
Whether or not the undertakers themselves actually believe that embalming fulfills an important health function (and there is evidence that most of them really do believe it), they have been extraordinarily successful in convincing the public that it does.
I wanted to know specifically how, and to what extent, and in what circumstances, an unembalmed cadaver poses a health threat to the living.
in cases of communicable disease, a dead body presents considerably less hazard than a live one.
In the case of death from typhoid, cholera, plague, and other enteric infections, epidemics have been caused in the past by the spread of infection by rodents and seepage from graves into the city water supply. 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,
“A good undertaker would do his cosmetology and then freeze,”
few cadavers embalmed for the funeral (as distinct from those embalmed for research purposes) are actually preserved.
The caskets, he said, even the solid mahogany ones that cost thousands of dollars, just disintegrate.
The funeral men hate autopsies;
it does make embalming more difficult, and also they find it harder to sell the family an expensive casket if the decedent has been autopsied.
In one case where an ear had been accidentally severed in the course of an autopsy, the mortician threatened to show it to the family.”
It must be asked how one "accidently" severs an ear? Kind of with the undertaker here.
To get the reaction of the funeral men to the views expressed by Dr. Carr now became my objective. I was not so much interested, at this point, in talking to the run-of-the-mill undertaker, as in talking to the leaders of the industry,
They, I felt, would have at their fingertips any facts that might bolster the case for embalming,
In this, I was somewhat disappointed.
Death to Dust: What Happens to Dead Bodies? (Galen Press, 1994).
The true purpose of embalming, he suggests, is to facilitate an open-casket funeral—with the emphasis on casket. Embalming, he suggests, is a procedure that boils down to sales and profits.
“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?”
If the public health benefits of embalming are elusive, ten times more so is the role of “grief therapy,” which is fast becoming a favorite with the funeral men.
“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.
his skill and interest will largely determine the degree of permanent mental trauma to be suffered by all those closely associated with the deceased.”
Lately, the meaning of “grief therapy” has been expanded to cover not only the Beautiful Memory Picture but any number of aspects of the funeral.
I had a long discussion with Mr. Raether about “grief therapy,”
no qualified psychiatric reference was forthcoming.
Demonstrably flimsy and absurd as the justifications for universal embalming and “viewing” may have been, these patently fraudulent claims of undertakers for their product remained immune from government intervention until 1984, when the Federal Trade Commission’s funeral rules were adopted. These provided, among other things, that: It is a deceptive act or practice for a funeral provider to: • Represent that state or local law requires that a deceased person be embalmed when such is not the case; • Fail to disclose that embalming is not required by law except in certain special cases.
The rule went on to provide that prior approval for embalming must be obtained from a family member.
The howls of dismay that greeted these seemingly innocuous rulings we...
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When, in the early eighties, the outbreak of AIDS became a matter of public anxiety, there was panic on the part of funeral directors and embalmers for their own safety.
But embalming was done as a protection to public health
The New York State Funeral Directors Association (NYSFDA), on June 17, 1983, advised members to institute a moratorium on the embalming of AIDS victims. Reaction was quick.
But i thought embalming was a public health interest. The moratorium was lifted when the state threatened to enact legislation. Surcharges were added for handling Aids victims.
It is now cash-in time. The mortuaries that did take AIDS cases began charging healthy “AIDS handling fees,” usually $200 to $500.
The undertaker, who pockets slightly more than half of the funeral dollar, has generally drawn the spotlight upon himself when the high cost of dying has come under scrutiny.
Behind the scenes, waiting for their cue, are the cemeteries, florists, monument makers, vault manufacturers.
The casket companies reported that the alarming condition of the industry’s accounts receivable was “far more aggravated in the casket field than in any other manufacturing endeavor.”
Back in 1961, the funeral establishments owed the casket makers more than $39 million, 20 percent of the year’s production, an amount equal to about 317,000 caskets, of which, groaned the creditors, some 40 percent had “already been interred!”
The answer to this problem is, of course, to sell in ever-higher brackets.
The method hit upon by the casket makers to solve this knotty problem is essentially the method used by furniture manufacturers (whose direct descendants they are): that is, to make the cheaper lines so hideous that only customers who can afford the barest minimum will buy them.
In most cases where funeral directors are not showing enough profit, they are showing too many low price metal caskets that look too good,
So enthusiastically are metal caskets pushed that fairly often they are sold even in cases where the deceased is to be cremated.
Over the years, the occasional hardy storefront casket retailer attempted to compete with the mortuaries in the sale of caskets. These efforts largely failed because the mortuaries resorted to various anticompetitive measures,
When in 1994 the FTC adopted a rule prohibiting the practice, retail casket sellers, offering substantial discounts, began to flourish.
The conflict between cemetery and funeral director is of a different nature, for they are in direct competition for the dead man’s dollar.
The cemeteries are not taking it lying down. They have developed their own potent counterweapon—“pre-need” sales, for which salesmen roam the neighborhoods of metropolis and suburb like thieving schoolboys in an orchard, snatching the fruit before it has fallen from the tree.
Funeral flowers accounted for 65 to 70 percent of the cut-flower industry’s revenue in 1960,
By 1970 the market share had dropped to 40 percent, and it has, according to trade sources, gone down steadily since then. By 1995 sales had further declined to 14 percent of what was now a $14 billion industry
One-half to two-thirds of the notices contain requests such as “Donations to (charity) preferred.”
The cemetery as a moneymaking proposition is new in this century.
