The American Way of Death Revisited

disposition. Existing state laws, regrettably, serve only to help the industry play havoc with the consumer’s desire for a simple, cheap funeral. Funeral people are forever declaiming that cremation is legally more challengeable than burial. They argue that the reason they so often feel obliged to overrule a decedent’s expressed wish for a cheap exit is their desire to avoid being sued by family members who would find such disposition “emotionally damaging.” Research, however, has turned up only one case in which such an action was filed, and it was thrown out by the judge on the grounds that the primary right of disposition lies with the decedent if expressed in writing during his lifetime.

After Words

A recent report from CANA issued in December 1996 has spurred cremationists to seek ever more Creative Concepts for the extraction of maximum profitability. According to CANA’s projections, 26 percent of Americans who die in the year 2000 will be cremated, and of those who die in 2010, 39.9 percent—three times the number of those who were cremated in 1985—will make their exit in like manner. But not necessarily in the same way. The funeral folk are already looking ahead and have other plans for them.

One such was revealed during a “Keys to Cremation Success” symposium sponsored by the Funeral Service Insider in the spring of 1997. The scholars were urged to require “identification viewing” prior to cremation, “to avoid any mix-ups.” The title of one presentation, “How to Add $1,400 or More to Each Cremation Call,” reveals the larger motive for this tactic. “Seeing Mom in a cardboard box sometimes prompts a family member to ask if we don’t have something a little nicer,” said the presenter. 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.” In one case, where the mother’s body had been embalmed before they chose cremation, family members became so distraught from the unwanted experience of an “identification viewing” that they have turned to the Funeral and Memorial Societies of America (FAMSA) to seek an opinion from the FTC on whether consumers can decline this procedure. There is no doubt that they may refuse to pay the fee that some mortuaries are charging.

Another key 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. If you usually give cremains to the family in a box from the crematory, stamp that box with the temporary container label. That makes families most likely to upgrade beyond the temporary container,” suggests the Funeral Service Insider.

11. WHAT THE PUBLIC WANTS

The funeral service profession exists only because it has received the approval of the public…. Present methods, facilities and merchandise exist because the public has found in them values it has been willing to pay for in spite of the necessary sacrifice of other things….

Are these values real? Do they spring from higher and finer motives? Do they lift and inspire? Are they worth what they cost? The answer is found in the reactions of the public. If the public accepts these things, prefers these things, the answer is in the affirmative.

—EDWARD A. MARTIN, B.A., MORTICIAN, Psychology of Funeral Service

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

This is an interesting idea. It is a little hard to conceive of how this public demand is expressed and made known in practice to the seller of funeral service. Does the surviving spouse, for example, go into the funeral establishment and say, “I want to be sure my wife is thoroughly disinfected and preserved. Her casket must be both comfortable and eternally durable. And—oh yes, do be sure her burial footwear is really practical”?

Perhaps it does not often happen just like that. Yet it has been known to happen, and in fairness to the undertaking trade, an example should be given of a case in which the funeral buyer, of sound mind and deeply aware of his own desires, wanted and demanded the best.

The case involves Mr. August Chelini, a fifty-seven-year-old mechanic, sometime scrap dealer and garage owner. His monthly earnings averaged $300 to $400. Mr. Chelini, an only child, lived with his aged mother, who died in 1943 at the age of ninety-nine years and seven months. It then became incumbent upon Mr. Chelini to arrange for the funeral, which he did by calling in Mr. Silvio Nieri, an undertaker and family friend.

What developed is best recounted by quoting from the transcript of the case of August Chelini, plaintiff, versus Silvio Nieri, defendant, in the Superior Court of San Mateo County, California.

Mr. August Chelini comes to life for us in the pages of a court reporter’s typescript. We learn his hopes and fears, something of his history, something of his philosophy, his way of life, his motives and methods. He was in some respects an undertaker’s dream person, a materialization of that man of sentiment and true feeling for the dead so often encountered in funeral trade magazines. Only the fact that he was suing an undertaker for $50,000 casts a slight shadow.

The case opens with the arrival of Mr. Nieri at the Chelini home. Mr. Melvin Belli, counsel for the plaintiff, is examining:

Q. [Mr. Belli] When he came to the house, did you have a conversation with him?

A. [Mr. Chelini] Well, he come in and he asked me if he should move the body, and I told him I wanted to talk things over with him first.

Q. Did you have a conversation there?

A. So I talked to him out in the kitchen, and explained to him what I wanted, and the conversation was that I told him what my mother requested.

Q. What did you tell him in this regard?

A. Well, I told him that my mother wanted to be buried where there was no ants or any bugs could get at her.

Q. Had your mother made that request?

A. She made that request.

Q. By the way, was your mother of sound mentality at the time?

A. Oh, yes, very sound. Pretty bright.

Q. Did you tell him anything else?

A. Well, I told him that she had $1,500 of her own money, and that I intended to put all that into her funeral, and she had other moneys coming, and I wanted a hermetically sealed casket, because—

Q. You told him that, that you wanted—

A. I told him I wanted the best kind of embalming, and I wanted her put in a hermetically sealed casket.

Q. Did you know what a hermetically sealed casket was at that time?

A. Well, I know that it was a casket that no air or no water could get into.

Q. All right, did you tell him anything else?

A. I told him that is what I wanted. I didn’t care what the cost was going to be, but I did have the $1,500 on hand that belonged to her, and these other moneys were coming in that I could put into it later.

Q. All right. Did you tell him anything else at that time?

A. Also told him that I was anticipating making a lead box to eventually put her in, after the war was over; that lead couldn’t be had at that time, and I am a mechanic. I intended to construct a lead box.

Q. You were going to do it yourself?

A. Yes, I have a sample of the box, the design of it, and I told him that I was going to figure to put her in a crypt until the war was over, and so that I could get the necessary things and put her away in accordance with her wishes.