The deaths of loved ones are probably the biggest traumas most of us will ever face – those of us, at least, who know how to love and who are loved. I think that is why mankind has always believed in an afterlife, because we can’t cope with knowing we’ll never see people again.
The funeral industry exists largely because of this, to help us cope with death. Some of this strikes me as healthy, such as the custom of bringing people together to talk about and remember the deceased; and displaying photographs and, more recently, videos of their lives.
The psychologically minded might say that we need closure. I don’t like that term very much; it makes our relationship with the deceased sound like a loan we want to get off the books.
Rather, we need to cherish the memories of those who have helped make our lives, and try to put them in a proper and nurturing place. Finding a way to do that is essential.
But spending thousands of dollars on an expensive casket that will be put in the ground in a leaky stone box strikes me as wrong on all sorts of levels. Twenty-some years ago, I helped supervise a newspaper series on funeral abuses in Michigan. Among other things, one funeral director gleefully told a reporter that all he had to do was tack up a picture of the Virgin Mary in a casket, and Mexican-Americans would pay maybe three hundred dollars more.
Not long after that, I stopped by a funeral home where a retired factory worker from my old neighborhood had been “laid out,” as they say.
His widow had virtually nothing in terms of assets, but she was burying her husband, who loved to fish, in an elaborate coffin with ceramic fish on each corner. I don’t want to know what she paid for it, but I am sure it could have bought her granddaughter, then in college, a car. I do know that this casket, after being visible to the public for a day and a half, is now sitting underground, probably in a few inches of muddy rainwater, in a stone box known as a “vault.”
When I last saw his body, it was wearing what looked to be an expensive suit, and his face was covered with cosmetics in an attempt to make him look, as they say, “lifelike.”
For the last few decades, that sort of treatment has been typical of millions of American funerals. Well, that is rapidly changing, for a number of reasons. Cost is a major one; cremations, relatively rare a generation ago, now follow half of all American deaths.
Within a dozen years, the National Funeral Directors Association predicts cremations will outnumber burials three to one. Yet there are other even cheaper and still dignified alternatives, including body donation and green burials that people ought to know about.
That’s why we need more chapters of the Funeral Consumers’ Alliance and the Funeral Consumers Information Society. We are least apt to make good decisions, especially snap decisions, when we’ve suffered the psychological trauma of a death.
And yet, that’s what we are often forced to do with a loved one dies, especially suddenly. There are many very good and conscientious funeral directors out there.
Yet in this, perhaps even more than in most things, planning ahead is essential. But not everybody can, or does, and so we also need to consider whether we need more regulations to protect consumers at what will be, for most, the most vulnerable times of their lives.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
