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A cemetery company is an association formed for “a pious and public use,”
This traditional view of cemetery land proved a blessing to the land speculators who began to enter the field,
The cost of burial has soared, at a rate outstripping even the rise in undertakers’ charges.
A very creative idea for cemeteries is to establish them as nonprofit corporations.
nonprofit aspect removes the necessity to pay income tax on grave sales.
profits that are now routinely extracted by the promoters of “nonprofit” cemeteries are spectacular beyond the dreams of the most avaricious real estate subdivider.
All of the clever planning to extract the maximum use from each acre of land would avail little if the cemetery promoter then had to sit back and wait upon the haphazard whim of the Grim Reaper.
One of the most successful devices in the history of merchandising, pre-need selling is the key to the runaway growth of the modern cemetery business.
“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,”
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,
Luckily, it takes only about a week for a person to acquire the right amount of sincerity and truth at a school for Memorial Counselors.
I find it hard to picture the customer placing the order for his own memorial ahead of time
The bronze deal, whether pre-, post- or at-need, can be greatly facilitated by the use of sales letters, which are followed up by telephone calls and personal visits from the Bronze-Memorial Counselors.
This would not work in modern times. I hang up on solicitors before they can even get a sentence out.
Another idea used by most cemeteries is the “perpetual care fund.”
Finally, Rabbi Elchonon Zohn, speaking for the Jewish Community Relations Council, also considered joint ownership problematic, maintaining that there is an incentive to adopt marketing practices that could generate immediate profits (such as selling two-for-one grave sites), but weaken a cemetery’s ability to maintain care when its space is sold out.
Again we have the problem of short termism
Certainly, with 9,000 employees, The Loewen Group or any other large mega-business is going to have its share of overzealous sales people who aggressively cross the line into unfair and/or fraudulent marketing
The Loewen Group and any other deathcare enterprise must maintain a strong company policy against high-pressure selling tactics—and promptly fire those who venture off the reservation.
Forest Lawn Memorial-Park of Southern California is the greatest nonprofit cemetery of them all; and without a doubt its creator—Hubert Eaton, the Dreamer, the Builder, inventor of the Memorial Impulse—is the anointed regent of cemetery operators.
for $31,000 you may join even more select company in the Garden of Honor (which features piped-in pop hymns, a feature that might make it, for some, their idea of perpetual purgatory).
The Dreamer is not through yet. In 1954 he announced his discovery of the Memorial Impulse.
The Memorial Impulse is a primary urge founded in man’s biological nature, and it gives rise to the desire to build (as one might have already guessed) memorials. It is also an indispensable factor in the growth of any civilization.
Coughing noise covers the sound of the word bullshit
The Memorial Impulse can also be channeled to remedy what was perhaps a tactical error in the early days of the Dream: insistence upon the use of small, uniform bronze grave markers.
In England,
it is today the mode of disposal for 72 percent of the dead.
The average crematory charge of $280 includes amenities such ...
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The ultimate disposition of 90 percent of cremated remains in England is scattering, or “strewing,” as the clergy like to call it.
The vogue for cremation is a very recent development in England. The cremation “movement” was initiated there in the nineteenth century. Its adherents included many distinguished physicians, scientists, intellectuals, radicals, and reformers; a few members of the aristocracy.
George Bernard Shaw was strongly in favor of cremation, and he sums up the argument for it with his usual pithiness: “Dead bodies can be cremated. All of them ought to be, for earth burial, a horrible practice, will some day be prohibited by law, not only because it is hideously unaesthetic, but because the dead would crowd the living off the earth if it could be carried out to its end of preserving our bodies for their resurrection on an imaginary day of judgment (in sober fact, every day is a day of judgment).”
cremation, like every other aspect of disposal of the dead, has long since been taken over by the cemetery industry and mortuary interests, which prescribe the procedures to be followed and establish the regulations to which the customer must adhere.
How might the funeral directors be expected to react to the menace of cremation?
The idea was to make the procedure sound as disrespectful of the deceased as possible.
Slowly, over the years the cruel realization dawned that cremation was not only here to stay but was increasingly the choice of the well-to-do and well-educated—precisely that segment of the population that could easily afford the finest offerings of the mortician. At this point the industry made a U-turn. The emphasis now is on making the best of a bad job.
A new development in the United States in the early 1970s was the establishment of “direct cremation” firms, commercial ventures offering simple cremation for a fixed fee of around $255,
Neptune’s cremation fees have soared. The minimum charge is now $1,200, up from the original 1970s price of $255.
As might be expected, accommodation for the dead is far more costly than for the living. The rental cost for the one or two days’ occupancy runs from $600 to $800 a pop, which would pay for an untroubled weekend in a resort hotel.
With such an extravagant return on inventory kept in perpetual use, they are now urging survivors to consider rental units in preference to low-cost cremation containers.
The natural impulse of survivors to scatter ashes or bury them in a garden or other favored spot
Throughout the industry, cremation today remains the poor, ugly stepchild among the modes of final disposition.
scholars were urged to require “identification viewing”
The title of one presentation, “How to Add $1,400 or More to Each Cremation Call,” reveals the larger motive for this tactic.
The ruthlessness of subjecting family members to a forced viewing is something to wonder at until one recalls that it is one of the “keys to cremation success.”
“When families don’t buy an urn, require them to purchase a temporary container to hold the cremains. But make sure you label (or stamp) that box with the words ‘temporary container’ on all four sides.
The theme that the American public, rather than the funeral industry, is responsible for our funeral practices—because it demands “the best” in embalming and merchandise for the dead—is one often expounded by funeral men.
“As long as they make sure I’m dead I don’t care what they do next. A corpse is like a pair of old shoes. It’s ridiculous to put your family in hock over it.”
Oddly enough, the funeral men, long aware that these attitudes are more commonly held than that of Mr. Chelini, are not particularly worried. After all, these people will not be around to arrange their own funerals. When the bell tolls for them, the practical essentials—selection of a casket and all the rest—will be in the hands of close relatives who will, it is statistically certain, express their sense of loss in an appropriately costly funeral.
Franklin D. Roosevelt left extremely detailed and explicit instructions for his funeral
Nobody in the Roosevelt household knew of the existence of this document. It was found in his private safe a few days after his burial.
For the study of prehistory, archaeologists rely heavily on what they can find in and around tombs, graves, monuments;
Inevitably, some go-ahead team of thirtieth-century archaeologists will labor to reconstruct our present-day level of civilization from a study of our burial practices.
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.
