The Death Industry

"It is the task of those in the funeral profession," according to a manual for undertakers titled Psychology of Funeral Service, "to educate the public in the right paths." In the dozen years since Novelist Evelyn Waugh wrote The Loved One, his famed satire on "the funeral profession," the public has been so thoroughly educated that today the undertakers' take-over from clergymen seems almost complete-- and more profitable than ever. So reports the Roman Catholic magazine Jubilee in an article showing that anywhere in the U.S., a family can dispose of its dead in an atmosphere of cheery and costly flimflam, designed to slur over the solemn fact that once brought man into the presence of his God.

Basis of the modern funeral industry is elaborate embalming, featuring "that alive look." This, says Jubilee, "has enabled corpses to look more and more like window-display mannequins, and visitation with them has become quite popular." According to one big-city undertaker, "people generally come in the afternoon and go out for dinner and come back."

Nature's Own Way. To support this party atmosphere for death, reports Jubilee, an up-to-date funeral home must have not only a casket display room and "a closet full of slumber gowns" but also a family room and a lounge equipped with cocktail table and smoking facilities.

There is keen competition among embalming supply houses to help make the dead look healthier than their mourners.

The Frigid Fluid Co. of Chicago advertises: "NEW! NEW! NEW! Lanol-Tex Arterial Fluid . . . Nature's Own Way to Soft Skin Texture," which "restores the same condition to the skin as during life." Boasts the Gold Crest Chemical Corp. of Wilmington, Del.: "Everybody is talking about Rubin-X Jaundice Dual Injection Fluids," which give "a gentle and fast-bleaching action with no spotting." If not satisfactory, "you may return to us for full credit after embalming your first case."

Funeral directors, according to Jubilee, are increasingly substituting for clergymen, "choosing the music (preferably not hymns--too depressing) and thermostatically regulating the level of grief ('empathy is more professional than sympathy'). Sometimes, in their role as priest-substitutes, the more far-out directors run into trouble with the real thing. One we met said, 'Sometimes you run into off-beat ideas from some of these ministers who think that the soul leaves the body and the body is just like a rind that can be thrown away after death.' His reaction to this brush with neo-Platonism was to assert that clergymen like that 'just want to kill sentiment,' an interesting possibility."

Clerical criticism of the undertaking business is growing. Sociologist Robert L. Fulton, writing in The American Funeral Director, attributes some of this to the clergy's loss of income from funerals and to what he calls their general loss of status in the community. The undertakers' magazine, Casket and Sunnyside (there used to be a Shadyside, but it was abandoned as too downbeat), concedes that the minister "has every right to be consulted on the time of the funeral, and that he might have some say about other details, but that the price of the service is not his prerogative and he should not go into the [casket] selection room."

Champagne Finish. Even without going into the selection room, Jubilee reports, 51% of Protestant clergymen and 41% of their Roman Catholic brethren feel, according to a recent poll, that undertakers exploit bereaved families at least part of the time. The grief-stricken, notes Psychology of Funeral Service, "are less capable of reasoning than under normal conditions . . . They want to do the accepted thing . . ." And some people's idea of the accepted thing can run as high as a $19,000 casket with "Ever-Seal air, watertight construction, and Ever-Rite adjustable bed, all in a zestful champagne finish, but a semi-tailored interior of gold tone, savoy crepe."

It is legal in the U.S. to bury the dead, unembalmed, in a plain pine box (though a licensed funeral director must be present), but according to the Department of Commerce an estimated $1.5 billion was spent on burials in the U.S. in 1959, or about $907.83 per death. Writes Jubilee: "Our ancestors lived with death and feared it; we have funeral directors instead, and neither know death nor theoretically fear it. It seems, as Scott Fitzgerald might have said, to be something you do with money."

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