The American Way of Death Revisited

University of Michigan at Ann Arbor have an “urgent need” for body donors; Michigan State University has a moderate need: “We can always use people.”

Once the FTC Funeral Rule was passed in 1984, publicity and protest quieted down. Cremation was more readily obtained, and prices were available over the phone. The spirit of social activism that spurred the memorial societies lost its steam, and membership began to dwindle. In some areas, societies died out altogether. In other areas—where a favorable price had been negotiated with cooperating mortuaries—they flourished quietly.

News stories popped up occasionally when a cemetery or funeral establishment went out of business, the proprietor having absconded with the funds. Lisa Carlson’s Caring for Your Own Dead—a state-by-state manual for those living in one of the forty-two states where it is legal to bypass the funeral industry entirely—was published by a small press and garnered good reviews, but it was not readily available in bookstores. The funeral industry continued to thrive with relatively little attention.

When the Funeral Rule was reopened for amendments in 1988, the media ignored the hearings. No one was there to hear the stories of continued consumer abuse at the hands of an industry that ignored the rule. No one was there to hear the pleas for bringing cemeteries under the rule. All seemed well for the industry.

But in the eighties—with AIDS deaths a near epidemic—a much younger generation was becoming involved with the final arrangements, and many didn’t like what they found.

One of those was Karen Leonard. Her first foray into the realm of death care was as co-owner of a casket- and-urn “gallery” in San Francisco—Ghia—where one could purchase a work of art for the final resting place. Carlson thought that if people were going to purchase their own caskets, they might want a do-it-yourself guide for the rest of the funeral, and rushed off a carton of Caring for Ghia to display.

The gallery struggled and only a few books sold, but Leonard found herself surrounded by people with “new” ideas for the dying. Without exception, each had “horror stories” of unpleasant funeral experiences and were looking for more meaningful ways of “celebrating” a life once lived. It wasn’t long before Leonard was introduced to the memorial society folks and began her funeral education in earnest.

Carlson began passing along the occasional media inquiry to Leonard. One was from a producer for “20/20.” Undercover and with hidden camera, she was able to provide television audiences with a clear look at some of the less-than-ethical practices of the funeral trade.

The industry cried foul, saying that the portrayals were isolated incidents, but it was clearly stung.

The press began to take notice. In 1996 the magazine of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), Modern Maturity—which had avoided anything “downbeat” for years—finally ran a story on funeral planning. Kiplinger’s Personal Finance and Money Magazine followed suit the next year.

The mood in the Dismal Trade grew nervous. The NFDA opened a Washington, D.C., office where its liaison spends time trotting around Capitol Hill—to win friends and influence people, in preparation for a possible reopening of the Funeral Rule.

A June 1997 editorial in The Director might have been written thirty-five years ago but for its let’s-all-buck-up tone; President Maurice Newnam offers this fatherly counsel: “The importance of the memory picture created by the properly embalmed and restored loved one is something we must never lose sight of and never be ashamed to ask permission to do…. Hold your head high, take care in the work you do and be proud to be an embalmer.”

Ron Hast (Mortuary Management, February 1997) is more candid: “Think about how the public must perceive funeral service as we caress our solid copper caskets, and extol the virtues of embalming and extended preservation. Our critics are gaining attention, and more and more client families come to us with skepticism. In fact, some clients seeking death care service don’t come to us at all.”

19. PAY NOW—DIE POORER

“In the Depression years, every community had a form of preneed,” mused North Dakota funeral director Tom Fisher in a poolside chat with the author in 1995. “In my own community we had the Farmers Union Burial Cooperative Society.”

The early funeral and memorial societies—most of them urban—expressed divergent views on the subject of paying for a funeral in advance. Many societies actively promoted “peace of mind by planning ahead,” negotiating for fixed prices with cooperating mortuaries. Not all were willing to part with their money, however. The societies’ Bulletin warned: “It always pays to plan ahead. It rarely pays to pay ahead.”

Today, the need to shelter assets for Medicaid eligibility is another reason people pay for their funeral in advance. There are now no federal guidelines limiting the amount that may be set aside for a funeral. Many states —exercising their options as administrators of Medicaid—have set their own limits. Connecticut has set its limit at $4,800; California, $10,000. In New Jersey, the sky’s the limit, and it need hardly be said that this is well known by the vendors of funeral services in that state. A hidden-camera “20/20” investigation captured an undertaker offering to accept $20,000 for a future funeral, assuring the client that any “extra” would be returned to the family.

Funeral directors have a strong motivation to sell ahead of time. Each funeral they have under wraps is one less that will go to a competitor. “A well-run, aggressive preneed program will increase a firm’s market share,” writes Thomas Barnard in the NFDA journal The Director. Given a nationwide proliferation of funeral homes, market share is a driving concern. According to the Funeral and Memorial Societies of America, “If people died Monday through Friday with two weeks off for the mortician’s vacation, the death rate in the U.S. could support 9,288 full-time funeral homes. Yet there are more than 22,000 mortuaries in this country. Many get only one or two funerals a week.”

Do people spend more or less when they plan ahead? Prearranged funerals tend to be much less expensive than those arranged by sorrowing survivors, according to some reports. Howard C. Raether took note of this fact long ago at a National Funeral Directors Association convention. He was discussing an analysis of funeral sales: “If it were possible to tabulate all the prearranged funeral services on record, how do you suppose the average of all of them would compare with the average adult figure shown here?” (Average adult figure means average price of an adult’s funeral.) “Are you ready, willing and able to become part of a program that is going to lower the quality of the average funeral service selected to the point where you will find it difficult if not impossible to stay in business rendering the service you now give?” He added, “It is good for those who survive to have the right and duty to make the funeral arrangements. Making such arrangements, having such responsibilities, is essential. It is part of the grief syndrome, part of the therapy of mourning. It is a positive hook upon which the hat of funeral service is hung. Why should we tear it down by saying the funeral is for the deceased, therefore he or she should make the arrangements?… If funeral directors insist on soliciting pre-need funerals, they are in fact prearranging the funeral of their profession.”

More recent developments in the techniques of pre-need selling, a matter of prime importance to the trade, have proved Mr. Raether’s dour prediction wrong. According to Ron Hast, that knowledgeable sage of the industry, people tend to be more gullible when seated comfortably in their own living rooms. “Pictures of beautifully displayed caskets are far less intimidating when shown to the prospect while sitting on the sofa than when they are presented in a mortuary’s casket selection room…. They start to think of them as quality furniture. They will spend more, not less, on a prearranged casket.”

In any case, those gloom and doom predictions on the impact of prearrangement have long since fallen on deaf ears. By 1995 no less than $20 billion was, according to Consumers Digest senior editor John Wasik, tied down in prepaid funeral and cemetery plans. That estimate, outsized as it seems, is surely on the low side, because SCI alone today lays claim to holdings of $3.2 billion in prepayments.

Today, it is the corporate chains that are doing some of the most aggressive selling. What do they know that the public does not? And what can be wrong with paying in advance to guarantee prices?

Inflation is the bugbear that is used most effectively by the sellers of prepayment plans. In recent years, however, while inflation has been raising the cost of living generally by 2 to 3 percent annually, funeral costs have been increasing by 6 to 7 percent—which is more than the interest the mortuary is pocketing on your prepaid funeral contract. As the numbers pile up, funeral providers are becoming wary of the trap of the guaranteed price. The Midwestern owner of several funeral homes is quoted in the NFDA organ The