1 of 7
One day last January I stopped by to visit my parents and found them in the dining room, sitting across the table from two men in ties and short-sleeve shirts. The table was spread with manila envelopes and ring binders. My father, 81 and unable to hear most conversations, was leaning forward, his hand cupped behind his left ear. My mother, who is 78 and suffers from Parkinson's disease, smiled at me uncertainly. After a moment's hesitation, she introduced the two strangers as representatives of a corporation specializing in "pre-need" funeral arrangements. Though my parents invited me to join them at the table, I excused myself and left.
I knew my mother had been worried for some time about arranging for their funerals. She has had that job on her hands several times in her life and wanted to spare me and my brother the emotional and physical exhaustion that usually attends such a task. So I figured my parents had arranged this meeting, and I didn't want to intrude. As I later learned, however, the salesmen had simply turned up at their door that afternoon.
The next day my parents proudly handed me the packet the salesmen had left with them, which included the contract they had signed with National Prearranged Services.
"It'll all be paid for," my father said with evident satisfaction. "No problem about price increases either. It's all locked in."
I expressed what I hoped was an appropriate amount of gratitude for their concern. But leafing through the packet, I found that most of the information had actually been supplied by my parents, data necessary for filling out their death certificates. The company had provided little besides the amount my parents had paid.
"Didn't they give you a list of services the policy provides?" I asked.
"They told us that would be coming later, from the local funeral home here," my mother said. That was the first time I asked myself why I hadn't taken a seat at the table that afternoon.
If I had read Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death Revisited, a recently updated version of her 1963 bestseller, I wouldn't have hesitated. When the original version appeared in 1963, I had been too preoccupied with diapers and dissertations to actually read it, even though it was a hot bestseller.
It was one of those books like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring that quickly became a cultural phenomenon. The shock waves from its publication alerted even those who didn't read it to the excesses of the funeral trade.
Thus, I assumed that Mitford's expose had brought about significant changes and that Americans could no longer be gulled into paying for a final farewell outrageous both in premise and price. In fact, I harbored the vague impression that prepaid funeral plans had been invented precisely to circumvent impulse buying by grief-stricken families.
If you have been operating with the same blurry hope, forget it. The funeral industry has successfully ridden out the brief tempest of consumer outrage following Mitford's original book. In 1975, after repeated petitions from angry citizens, the Consumer Protection Bureau of the Federal Trade Commission did finally begin work on minimal guidelines for the industry. The unhappy history of that effort is chronicled in this new version.
The original FTC guidelines required that mortuaries itemize their services on billings and allow customers to choose which services they wished (embalming, use of a "slumber room" for viewing the body, renting the establishment's chapel for the funeral service, multiple transportation charges, "grief counseling") instead of accepting a package deal. Mortuary staff would also be required to quote prices over the phone, a practice they had adamantly resisted. Phone inquiries made comparison shopping easier, as well as allowed the bereaved to escape the full force of the industry's highly developed sales techniques. The new rules also required the cheapest caskets (never referred to as coffins by any self-respecting funeral director) be displayed along with the high-end models. And finally, funeral directors were enjoined from outright lying to customers, either about the legal requirements for embalming (nonexistent in many states) or by claiming that their "eternal sealer" caskets could actually preserve an embalmed corpse for more than a brief period.
RSS Feed
