The American Way of Death Revisited (6 page)

Having made this good beginning, the funeral director is to proceed with the arrangement conference, at each stage of which he should “weave in the service story”—in other words, impress upon the family that they will be entitled to all sorts of extras, such as ushers, cars, pallbearers, a lady attendant for hairdressing and cosmetics, and the like—all of which will be included in the price of the casket, which it is now their duty to select. These preliminaries are very important, for “the Arrangement Conference can
make
or
break
the sale.”

The diagram of the selection room in this manual resembles one
of those mazes set up for experiments designed to muddle rats. It is here that we are introduced to the Triangle Plan, under which the buyer is led around in a triangle, or rather in a series of triangles. He is started off at position A, a casket costing $587, which he is told is “in the $500 range”—although, as the manual points out, it is actually $13 short of $600. He is informed that the average family buys in the $500 range—a statement designed to reassure him, explain the authors, because “most of the people believe themselves to be above average.” Suppose the client does not react either way to the $587 casket. He is now led to position B on the diagram—a better casket priced at $647. However, this price is not to be mentioned. Rather, the words “sixty dollars additional” are to be used. Should the prospect still remain silent, this is the cue to continue upward to the most expensive unit.

Conversely, should the client demur at the price of $587, he is to be taken to position C—and told that “he can save a hundred dollars by choosing this one.” Again, the figure of $487 is not to be mentioned. If he now says nothing, he is led to position D. Here he is told that “at sixty dollars additional, we could use this finer type, and all of the services will be just exactly the same.” This is the crux of the Triangle Plan; the recalcitrant buyer has now gone around a triangle to end up unwittingly within forty dollars of the starting point. It will be noted that the prices all end in the number seven, “purposely styled to allow you to quote as ‘sixty dollars additional’ or ‘save a hundred dollars.’ ”

Some grieving families will be spared this tour altogether, for a sales technique of the nineties is to sell caskets by catalogue only. One might not think of a casket as “photogenic,” but morticians exclaim with enthusiasm that families are choosing more expensive caskets when they don’t have to look at the real thing. The buyer is not likely to have caught the significance of this guided tour, whether it be through the catalogue or the display room. As a customer, he finds himself in an unusual situation, trapped in a set of circumstances peculiar to the funeral transaction. His frame of mind will vary, obviously, according to the circumstances which brought him to the funeral establishment. He may be dazed and bewildered, his young wife having just been killed in an accident; he may be rather relieved because a crotchety old relative has finally died after a long and
painful illness. The great majority of funeral buyers, as they are led through their paces at the mortuary—whether shaken and grief-stricken or merely looking forward with pleasurable anticipation to the reading of the will—are assailed by many a nagging question: What’s the
right
thing to do? I am arranging a funeral, but surely this is no time to indulge my own preferences in taste and style; I feel I know what she would have preferred, but what will her family and friends expect? How can I avoid criticism for inadvertently doing the wrong thing? And, above all, it should be a nice, decent funeral—but what is a nice, decent funeral?

Which leads us to the second special aspect of the funeral transaction: the buyer’s almost total ignorance of what to expect when he enters the undertaker’s parlor. What to look for, what to avoid, how much to spend. The funeral industry estimates that the average individual has to arrange for a funeral only once in fifteen years. The cost of the funeral is the third-largest expenditure, after a house and a car, in the life of an ordinary American family. Yet even in the case of the old relative whose death may have been fully expected and even welcomed, it is most unlikely that the buyer will have discussed the funeral with anybody in advance. It just would not seem right to go around saying, “By the way, my uncle is very ill and he’s not expected to live; do you happen to know a good, reliable undertaker?”

Because of the nature of funerals, the buyer is in a quite different position from the one who is, for example, in the market for a car. Visualize the approach. The man of prudence and common sense who is about to buy a car consults a Consumers’ Research bulletin or seeks the advice of friends; he knows in advance the dangers of rushing into a deal blindly.

In the funeral home, the man of prudence is completely at sea, without a recognizable landmark or bearing to guide him. It would be an unusual person who would examine the various offerings and then inquire around about the relative advantages of the Keystone casket by York and the Valley Forge by Batesville. In the matter of cost, a like difference is manifest. The funeral buyer is generally not in the mood to compare prices here, examine and appraise quality there. He is anxious to get the whole thing over with—not only is he anxious for this, but the exigencies of the situation demand it.

The third unusual factor which confronts the buyer is the need to
make an on-the-spot decision. Impulse buying, which should, he knows, be avoided in everyday life, is here a built-in necessity. The convenient equivocations of commerce—“I’ll look around a little and let you know,” “Maybe I’ll call you in a couple of weeks if I decide to take it”—simply do not apply in this situation. Unlike most purchases, this one cannot be returned in fifteen days and your money refunded in full if not completely satisfied.

In 1994 the FTC amended the Funeral Rule to prohibit undertakers from charging a special “casket-handling fee” to customers who purchased caskets from the storefront discount outlets that were beginning to make their appearance. In the few years since, there has been an explosion of these outlets, and one may now even shop for a casket on the Internet. But just as most funeral buyers feel barred by circumstances from shopping around for a casket, they are likewise barred by convention from complaining afterwards if they think they were overcharged or otherwise shabbily treated. The reputation of the TV repairman, the lawyer, the plumber is public property, and their shortcomings may be the subject of dinner-party conversation. The reputation of the undertaker is relatively safe in this respect. A friend, knowing I was writing on the subject, reluctantly told me of her experience in arranging the funeral of a brother-in-law. She went to a long-established, “reputable” undertaker. Seeking to save the widow expense, she chose the cheapest redwood casket in the establishment and was quoted a low price. Later, the salesman called her back to say the brother-in-law was too tall to fit into this casket, she would have to take one that cost a hundred dollars more. When my friend objected, the salesman said, “Oh, all right, we’ll use the redwood one, but we’ll have to cut off his feet.” My friend was so shocked and disturbed by the nightmare quality of this conversation that she never mentioned it to anybody for two years.

Popular ignorance about the law as it relates to the disposal of the dead is a factor that sometimes affects the funeral transaction. People are often astonished to learn that in no state is embalming required by law except in certain special circumstances, such as when the body is to be shipped by common carrier.

The funeral men foster these misconceptions, sometimes by coolly misstating the law to the funeral buyer and sometimes by inferentially investing with the authority of law certain trade practices
which they find it convenient or profitable to follow. This free and easy attitude to the law is even to be found in those institutions of higher learning, the colleges of mortuary science, where the fledgling undertaker receives his training. For example, it is the law in most states that when a decedent bequeaths his body for use in medical research, his survivors are bound to carry out his directions. Nonetheless, an embalming textbook,
Modern Mortuary Science
, disposes of the whole distasteful subject in a few misleading words: “Q: Will the provisions in the will of a decedent that his body be given to a medical college for dissection be upheld over his widow? A: No.… No one owns or controls his own body to the extent that he may dispose of the same in a manner which would bring humiliation and grief to the immediate members of his family.”

I had been told so often that funeral men tend to invent the law as they go along (for there is a fat financial reward at stake) that I decided to investigate this situation firsthand. Armed with a copy of the California Code, I telephoned a leading undertaker in my community with a concocted story: my aged aunt, living in my home, was seriously ill—not expected to live more than a few days. Her daughter was coming here directly; but I felt I ought to have some suggestions, some arrangements to propose in the event that … Sympathetic monosyllables from my interlocutor. The family would want something very simple, I went on, just cremation. Of course, we can arrange all that, I was assured. And since we want only cremation and there will be no service, we should prefer not to buy a coffin. The undertaker’s voice at the other end was now alert, although smooth. He told me, calmly and authoritatively, that it would be “illegal” for him to enter into such an arrangement. “You mean, it would be against the law?” I asked. Yes, indeed. “In that case, perhaps we could take a body straight to the crematorium in our station wagon?” A shocked silence, followed by an explosive outburst: “Madam, the average lady has neither the facilities nor the inclination to be hauling dead bodies around!” (Which was actually a good point, I thought.)

I tried two more funeral establishments and was told substantially the same thing: cremation of an uncoffined body is prohibited under California law. This was said, in all three cases, with such a ring of conviction that I began to doubt the evidence before my eyes in the
State code. I reread the sections on cremation, on health requirements; finally I read the whole thing from cover to cover. Finding nothing, I checked with an officer of the Board of Health, who told me there is no law in California requiring that a coffin be used when a body is cremated. He added that indigents are cremated by some county welfare agencies without benefit of coffin.

It was just this sort of tactic described above that moved the FTC to rule in 1984 that morticians may no longer lie to the public. Anecdotal reports, however, indicate that honesty is still an elusive quality in the trade. One family that wanted to carry the ashes to the cemetery for burial was told, “You used to be able to do that. But it’s against the law now.”

Cemetery salesmen are also prone to confuse fact with fiction to their own advantage in discussing the law. Cemeteries derive a substantial income from the sale of “vaults.” The vault, a cement enclosure for the casket, is not only a moneymaker; it facilitates upkeep of the cemetery by preventing the eventual subsidence of the grave as the casket disintegrates. In response to my inquiry, a cemetery salesman (identified on his card as a “Memorial Counselor”) called at my house to sell me what he was pleased to call a “pre-need memorial estate,” in other words, a grave for future occupancy. After he quoted the prices of the various graves, the salesman explained that a minimum of $520 must be added for a vault, which, he said, is “required by law.”

“Why is it required by law?”

“To prevent the ground from caving in.”

“But suppose I should be buried in one of those Eternal caskets made of solid bronze?”

“Those things are not as solid as they look. You’d be surprised how soon they fall apart.”

“Are you
sure
it is required by law?”

“I’ve been in this business fifteen years; I should know.”

“Then would you be willing to sign this?” (I had been writing on a sheet of paper, “California state law requires a vault for ground burial.”)

The Memorial Counselor gathered up his color photographs of memorial estates and walked out of the house.

The fifth unusual factor present in the funeral transaction is the
availability to the buyer of relatively large sums of cash. The family accustomed to buying every major item on time—car, television set, furniture—and spending to the limit of the weekly paycheck, suddenly finds itself in possession of insurance funds and death-benefit payments, often from a number of sources. It is usually unnecessary for the undertaker to resort to crude means to ascertain the extent of insurance coverage; a few simple and perfectly natural questions put to the family while he is completing the vital statistics forms will serve to elicit all he needs to know. For example, “Occupation of the deceased?” “Shall we bill the insurance company directly?”

The undertaker knows, better than a schoolboy knows the standings of the major-league baseball teams, the death-benefit payments of every trade union in the community, the Social Security and workmen’s compensation scale of death benefits: Social Security payment, $255; if the deceased was a veteran, $300 more and free burial in a national cemetery; an additional funeral allowance of up to $5,000 under some state workers’ compensation laws if the death was occupationally connected; and so on and so on.

The undertaker has all the information he needs to proceed with the sale. The widow, for the first time in possession of a large amount of ready cash, is likely to welcome his suggestions. He is, after all, the expert, the one who knows how these things should be arranged, who will steer her through the unfamiliar routines and ceremonies ahead, who will see that all goes as it should.

At the lowest end of the scale is the old-age pensioner, most of whose savings have long since been spent. He is among the poorest of the poor. Nevertheless, most state and county welfare agencies permit him to have up to $2,500 in cash; in some states he may own a modest home as well, without jeopardizing his pension. The funeral director knows that under the law of virtually every state, the funeral bill is entitled to preference in payment as the first charge against the estate. There is every likelihood that the poor old chap will be sent out in high style unless his widow is a very, very cool customer indeed.