Death as an Industry

Death is a rite of passage that touches each of our lives, either through the death of a loved one or our own eventual demise. No one escapes. For that reason alone, we should talk about it more, but we don’t. We don’t value our emotional bodies in this society. Grieving is dirty and uncomfortable for everyone, and we have come to expect that it will happen behind closed doors. We prefer to leave it at the funeral home, as if we are pretending that death doesn’t happen to us all. That we don’t all grieve at some point in our lives.

We let the professionals handle death and it becomes something that happens to us, with little involvement from us but our grieving. Outside assistance with death will always be helpful, but the industry we’ve built around funerals allows for people to stay in denial. It allows for us as individuals to let our grief overwhelm and paralyze us, when the challenge is to claw our way through it. What closure can be found in viewing a corpse we have tried to make appear as lifelike as possible? How does that reinforce the reality of the death of the human body to our rational minds?

Why has it become its own industry? When did we allow outside parties to tell us how to handle the passing of our dead? I’m not dogging funeral home directors or morticians. I want to make that distinction clear. I have met some who were simply stepping into their family business and the legacy of caring for the dead. It is sacred to them. And others have felt a calling and a pull towards helping be in service in that way. We all try to find the place in this world where we best fit in. That’s not the concern for me. What I’m interested in is the way turning death into a third-party industry has affected the way we process it as a culture.

“Americans have lost the desire to be active participants in

funerals so we have very little exposure to the dead. I think that

if we were to witness the peaceful death of a loved one and play

a larger role in their funeral proceedings, Americans would be

less afraid of death and more at peace with themselves.”

 ~Loretta M. Alirangues,

“Funerary Practices in Early and Modern America”

In Judaism and Muslim deaths, when a body dies, it is buried as soon as possible. At death, the family stops to care for the dead before resuming their lives again. There is no need for embalming or refrigeration. They allow the clock of their worlds to stop. The way our culture works, we don’t allow for people to stop their lives at the death of a loved one. We are all part of a larger machine that we have given over power to and it infiltrates every aspect of our lives. When my Grandma died, I did not get bereavement time. I took it but I took the time off of work without pay. I informed my boss that I would be out for a week while I grieved with my family. It could have cost me my job if my boss had decided to be cruel. But I knew then that it was important to be part of it, to be there with my family through the transition. Our entire way of being a family shifted when she died. I knew that it would be a moment I could never reclaim. I chose my family first. We need to get back to putting people first.

I am not a fan of viewings. I do not appreciate the embalming process. I do not enjoy the lifelike tint of the corpse. When my Grandma died, I went to the funeral home to have some alone time with her because I had not gotten home in time to say goodbye. It actually threw me that she did not appear dead. The fact that she appeared to be sleeping made it harder for me to grasp. There was no death pallor, only an orange glow and too-much rouge.

It was putting my hands on her that brought reality home to me. It was feeling the cold of her body that made me understand. I touched her skin and I could not feel her vibrant energy. I could not feel the familiarity of her hugs. Whatever made her who she was, was gone. My Grandma was dead. I had to go to the funeral home to have that moment. I had to go to where her body was, in a strange place.

There are currently about 15,000 funeral homes in operation in the US. According to the National Funeral Directors Association, the average cost of a funeral in 2006 was $6,200, up twenty percent from $5,180 in 2000. I don’t know what costs are covered in their average, but it fits the prices people I know have been quoting me. For a minimal cremation, no frills, including obituaries, it cost a friend $1,600 in 2011. For a funeral with cemetery burial, as cheap as possible, it cost another friend $5,000 in 2012.

You know that death became in industry when they passed the Federal Rule of 1984. It was put in place by the Federal Trade Commission to require all funeral homes to provide consumers with price information over the phone, and, upon request, a written itemized list of their fees. This was done to insure that no funeral home could gouge the mourners in their time of grief. And with this rule came a way for people to learn how to navigate the industry that taking care of the dying had become.

For instance, funeral homes cannot embalm the deceased for a fee without permission from the family unless required by law. In history, homes would do an embalming and then pad the bill with the expense. Some funeral homes have a policy that if you want to hold a viewing, you have to embalm the body, but embalming isn’t legally required. That is the specific funeral home, and many directors and morticians have bought into the belief that embalming bodies saves the living from disease. If you need to delay, refrigeration is another option, where dry ice is used for the viewing. The trouble then may come in finding a place that has the ability to refrigerate.

Funeral homes cannot require you to purchase a casket for cremation. A cardboard box is all that is needed for the body to set in. Some crematoriums do not even require that much. And just because a funeral home doesn’t have any of its catalog’s cheaper caskets on hand does not mean they cannot get you one within 24 hours. You actually don’t have to buy a casket from the funeral home. You can acquire one on your own, and under the Federal Rule of 1984, the home is not allowed to charge you a handling fee for accepting one from an outside source.

Don’t be afraid to shop around and compare prices. Even better, do it now, before you need to. Obviously prices will increase, but you’ll get the feel for who you’d want to give your business to. Better still, not all states require the use of a funeral director or funeral homes for viewings. Unfortunately (for me) New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Louisiana, Nebraska, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan are some of the ones that do. In other states, it’s legal to plan and organize your own funeral. Right now you’re thinking, why would I want to? But maybe death is supposed to be hard. Maybe preparing the way for others is the spiritual-yet-not-religious thing missing from our lives that would naturally help us greet our own end more peacefully.

Standard funeral costs are made up of the services of the funeral director, the use of the funeral home facilities, embalming, the casket including linings and pillows, burial vault, obituaries, the disposition of the body including the cost of the grave site, the opening and closing of the grave, the cremation, transportation of the body, flowers, clergy, grave markers or plaques, and various other incidentals. Often in our grief we worry about being seen as cheap, as if the amount of money we spend displays how we felt about them. That myth is a by-product of our death services becoming its own industry, like how Hallmark Cards make a mint off of perpetuating Hallmark as the brand that says you care the most.

In this current economy, it is foolish to fall into that trap. We should do for our dead to the best of our abilities, but the dead would not want the living to bankrupt themselves on memorialization. When a person dies, their spirit moves on and only the body remains. Do for that body, as it was the sacred vessel of your loved one, but remember them in your actions. Speak their names to the winds and tell their stories. Truly the best way to honor the loss is to remember them by living.

A Funeral in 2004

I have attended a lot of funerals in my lifetime, which has not been nearly as long as should warrant that statement. But I tend to see that fact more as the result of all the people I have known whose lives have touched mine. Each funeral is double-edged. There is grief in the loss of a loved one and simultaneous gratitude for the friendship that created the grief.

My first experience with attending to the details of the dead came with my Grandparents, who died three years apart. I admit that the detail-planning was a lot to take in amidst the thickness of the grief. When my Grandma died I was more of a spectator, learning the process of death for the first time. With my Grandpa, I was more invested.

My Grandpa died in the hospital at 9:03 at night. The nurses told us to take all the time we needed, and asked who we wanted them to call. My mom gave them the name of the funeral home we were using. When we left, my Grandpa’s body remained at the hospital for the Funeral Director to pick up. My Grandpa and my mom had decided to use the same funeral home as we had used for my Grandma but other than that, little arrangements had been made ahead of time.

My Grandpa had been fighting his cancer. He thought he was winning. But when the doctor told him that the treatments weren’t working, and he was looking at weeks, not months, my Grandpa slipped into unconsciousness that same night. I will always believe it was a choice he made to be done. To stop fighting. He was in a lot of pain. By the next evening, surrounded by loved ones, he was gone. He never regained consciousness.

When we went to meet with the Funeral Director the next morning, he was kind, walking through the checklist of choices we needed to make and information he needed to retrieve. He took down the details for the obituary; names of living relatives, work history, local groups he belonged to, etc. He told us he would send the obituary into the local newspaper for printing.

When asked if we wanted to have a viewing, we said yes. The Funeral Director said that we’d have to have the embalming then, and added it to the sheet on his clipboard and we moved on. We walked into the show room and picked out a casket.

            When we picked out a casket for my Grandma, he said whichever one we wanted for her, and we picked one of Oak. It was pricey, but compared to the caskets in the showroom, not ridiculous. When we entered the same showroom for my Grandpa, money was an object. It’s something I’ve been hearing from a lot of people about the choices they’ve made for their own loved ones. Often finances have to come before what they would want to do for their loved one. Which speaks to the industry that death has become in our culture.

            For my Grandpa, we chose a Pine casket, which looked very much like every other wooden casket in the room. Not that any casket is less than another. All wood is sacred. And it only matters in the moment of purchasing it. No one is going to see it when it’s in the ground. It is kind of set up to make you feel like if-you-loved-them-more-you-would-show-it-by-picking-a-better-casket. It must be hard and overwhelming for those trying to make these choices from a place of extreme grief. We didn’t need the fancy linings or the fancy pillows, or the secret compartment in the casket for belongings and we were all in agreement on that. If you knew my Grandpa, he would have approved of the simple and classic choice we made.

Then we picked out a vault, which can be required when a body is embalmed in some states. I have also learned that some cemeteries will require the use of a vault whether the person is embalmed or not, and whether the state requires it or not. Using a vault assists with the ease of their ground maintenance, as vaults help keep the ground from shifting too much as the casket settles.

We planned the dates for the viewings with a simple service at the funeral home through the use of their retired minister. My Great-Grandparents were Roman Catholic but my Grandpa never claimed any religion as his own. What the funeral home could offer seemed the best option. The funeral home made arrangements with the cemetery for opening and closing the grave site for us, but only because we were using them for our service.

Then we waited until the viewings, sitting in quiet, sharing stories, cleaning to keep hands busy. We called family and friends and received them at my parent’s house. The viewings at the funeral home were a blur. Lots of reunions with people I hadn’t seen since childhood. It was an unfortunate circumstance and yet I thought my Grandpa, who enjoyed his alone time as much as he enjoyed socializing, would have approved at how much laughter filled that cold and somber room.

The morning of the service was a joke. I know the retired minister meant well, but he couldn’t remember my Grandpa’s name and he used the opportunity to throw every Bible story he had ever been fond of into his eulogy- and that is me being kind. I wish I had been a bit older. I wish I had anticipated the end was coming. I wish I could have stood up there and spoken to the awesomeness that my Grandpa had been made of. Still, the comical eulogy served as the source of much laughter during the afternoon.

We divvied up the flower arrangements, deciding what would go to the grave site. The plants we separated up for family to take home to grow and renew. It was touching to see the flowers come in from people we didn’t really know, whose lives my Grandpa had touched. The webs we weave in life are far larger than we can perceive.

It was a warm spring day, just after equinox in the cemetery. Standing graveside was the most natural part of the entire experience for me.  The sun was shining. Birds were singing. The ground sat open in wait. The strangest part of the morning was deciding who would ride in what vehicle with whom to get to the cemetery.

I don’t know how it is in large cities, but in my hometown we still ascribe to the funeral procession. The hearse takes the lead, with family cars behind it, and other cars behind them, safety lights flashing. It’s a slow crawl through red lights and stop signs. Life paused in breathes as we wound through town, picking back up in our wake.

Afterwards we gathered at a family member’s house for food and conversation. When my Grandma died, we gathered together in their house, filling the new void with friends and company. But with the second loss, we let someone else hold that part for us. I think it would have been too much, to see so many people populate a house whose future emptiness we were still coming to terms with. At the same time, I can see how it would have been healing, to bring life back into the house.

And then it was over. We stayed up late and talked. We shared stories and family secrets together at the kitchen table. A few days later my mom and I went back to his house. We walked through an emptiness that suddenly felt massive. The gravity of reality hit us, but now we had time.

We didn’t really know what Grandpa would have liked or would have wanted if he’d been able to choose, but we knew him well enough to make the best choices. And it prompted us to sit around the kitchen table and begin to discuss our own desires after our eventual deaths. It’s important to know what you want, what you don’t want, and what you don’t care about one way or the other. It’s important to share that with the friends and family that may be left to take care of those details. Both because it’s smart and because it’s kind.

What do you want done to best honor the temple that was your body? You might not care, and that’s all right. Don’t feed into the industrial machine death has become, simply because you think that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Question everything. And then call around to your local funeral homes and see how close you can get to what you want. 

The History of Embalming

Embalmed bodies on display for services during the Civil War.

Many funeral homes will require you to embalm the body of your deceased if you want an open casket viewing. And, like many industries, when they ask you if you want a viewing, they just add on the costs to the bill, stating that you will need to have the body embalmed, as if it is a fact. It is true that the funeral home may require it. But with some forethought and research, you may just be able to find one that doesn’t. Refrigeration is a valid alternative.

Western Civilization has lived on this American soil for almost 400 years and embalming has only been widely performed for the last 80 years. The embalming process disinfects the body from the inside out, preserving it, and dyes mixed in with the formaldehyde restore a life-like tint to the skin of the dead. I am going to come clean by saying that after my research, and given my spiritual proclivities, I am against the push of embalming for many reasons. Our bodies are our sacred temples, and I have spent the last two years cleaning out my temple, and ridding it of toxins and illness. I do not want it sewn closed, plugged up, and filled with chemicals after I die.

There is a natural order to the world. Our bodies, if buried, should be allowed to naturally decompose, without the potential of leeching toxic chemicals into the earth. If I am to become food for nature, why should I poison it? And, in my opinion, in a culture where we are already removed from the intimacies of death, making your loved one appear more life-like could potentially remove us more from its reality. For some people, seeing a life-like corpse could make it harder for them to accept the loss.

Embalming does not save the population from diseases associated with death. If that were true, morticians and undertakers themselves would carry a high mortality rate. The truth is morticians are at a greater risk of health threats due to exposure to embalming fluid than they are to all of the bodies that cross through their doors. In just the last ten years, OSHA has lowered the number for low level exposure with side effects from 3 parts per million to 0.1 parts per million of formaldehyde. What was deemed safe before, no longer is. What will we learn in another ten years? We are so keen to push for growth, that we often do so before the consequences can be weighed.

So why do we do it? Where did it start?

The ancient Egyptians perfected the art of embalming and mummifying the dead over 5,000 years ago, an art which was later lost to time. But the idea of embalming saw itself through many cultures, with varying degrees of success. During the Crusades, there are scattered reports of the alchemical process performed on fallen knights in order to return their bodies home for proper Christian burials. Many of the attempts to embalm during the Crusades were unsuccessful. My ancestor Saher de Quincey was not embalmed, but was buried in Palestine. His heart was returned home and interred there. We know the Egyptians practiced mummification as did the indigenous peoples of Peru and Chile. But many archaeologists believe that the reason they were so successful in preservation had more to do with the harsh and severe drying climates than the process itself.

In America, it was a war that divided our country that changed the funeral process. Embalming was developed during the Civil War as a means of preserving the bodies for transportation back home for burial, and was a practice only known to have been applied to Northern soldiers. Dr. Thomas Holmes experimented with preservative chemicals in his job as a coroner’s assistant in New York. He received a commission as a captain in the Army Medical Corps in Washington, D.C. during the War. He embalmed over 4,000 soldiers and officers for return home to the North.

A crop of “embalming surgeons” sprouted up in the battlefield. Some of these men embalmed unclaimed bodies to put on display in order to show off their work, which other soldiers found disgraceful. It was an expensive process and only families with wealth could afford to pay. Those who could afford it would then hope the surgeons could find their loved one among the dead on the battlefield. Along with good surgeons like Holmes, charlatans gauging grieving families for money emerged, too.

After the War, Holmes offered his services to the public for $100 a body, but eventually embalming fell into disuse due to both a lack of demand for its expense, and too few people able to perform the procedure. The classes for studying embalming consisted of a couple of days and the purchase of a gallon of formula. Embalming was originally a process of alcohol, arsenic, creosote, mercury, and turpentine, until the German chemist August Wilhelm von Hoffmann and Russian chemist Alexander Butlerov discovered formaldehyde in 1866.

In the 1920s, the funeral industry became highly profitable due to the physical losses of WWI. The industry began to involve the sale of caskets, embalming, grave vaults, funeral clothing, and other various paraphernalia. Embalming licenses were not universally distributed until the 1930s.

Embalmers are required to wear a respirator and full-body covering by OSHA while they work for their own safety. Yet, often in funeral homes, waste is flushed out into the sewer system or septic tank. Where does it go then? Shouldn’t that matter? Refrigeration is a valid alternative to embalming if a wait is required, even if the funeral home tries to deny it. Not all funeral homes have facilities for refrigeration, but many hospitals do. Other options are out there.

Embalming does not preserve the body forever. Embalming allows the body to decompose via dissolution and oxidation, as opposed to putrefaction and rot. The blood is replaced with a disinfectant and preservative solution, fixing the body from the inside out. After embalming, the body can only be attacked by airborne bacteria and molds. What it does do is allow for people to take some time in the planning of the funeral.

The main three purposes of embalming are disinfection, preservation, and restoration. In my mind, the last two steps remove us from the reality of what the death of our loved ones mean. Muslims and Jews consider embalming to be a desecration of the body. Hindus and Buddhists choose cremation instead of burial. Embalming is only a common practice in Canada and the United States.

Many funeral directors will not allow a public viewing without embalming, but a private viewing by family and close friends without it can be arranged. Modern funeral homes are forbidden by law from embalming your loved ones without your permission. There is absolutely no legal requirement for embalming. Some cemeteries have special requirements for the bodies interred there, but there are no universal legal laws.

Just for a bit more information, here are the ecological costs of burying embalmed bodies in the States. According to the website for Greensprings Natural Cemetery Preserve, a green burial cemetery in Ithaca, NY, each year 22,500 cemeteries in the U.S. bury about:

• 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid
• 30-plus million feet of hard woods for caskets
• 90,272 tons of steel for caskets
• 1,636,000 tons of reinforced concrete for vaults
• 14,000 tons of steel for vaults
• 2,700 tons of copper and bronze for caskets
• On average, one cemetery buries 1,000 gallons of embalming fluid, 97.5 tons of steel, 2,028 tons of concrete, and 56,250 board feet of high quality tropical hardwood in just one acre of greenery.

One of the reasons we bury sealed caskets in concrete vaults is so that the chemicals of the embalming process cannot leak into the soil and water tables. The way we dispose of our dead requires us to waste more resources. The numbers are staggering to me. If it is our future we are concerned for, I cannot help but see the resources we would be saving if we returned to simpler burials of untouched bodies in simple wooden boxes, if boxes are used at all.