The American Way of Death Revisited (26 page)

Or one may get a diploma in funeral service in just forty weeks at the National Education Institute of New England; among the sixteen ten-week courses one must take there are “Issues and Concerns for Modern Professionals,” “Marketing and Merchandising in Funeral Service,” and “Restorative Art.”

But the educational requirements vary from state to state. The qualifications for licensing an embalmer—who is, after all, usually an underling, an employee of the funeral establishment—are generally more stringent than those for the funeral director who employs him. Wyoming has no educational requirements for a funeral director’s license. Six states require only a high school diploma and a year or two of apprenticeship. Just what meaning the term “profession” can have when applied to this calling is hard to conceive.

The NFDA itself sets no educational, moral, or ethical standards for membership. In fact, the only qualifications appear to be the payment of dues and a state license.

A major reason for the existence of most professional organizations is the maintenance of standards of ethical practice among its members, and the disciplining of members who deviate from these standards. Here the NFDA is in some difficulty, because the practices that have led to the severest public criticism—tricky selling methods and overcharging—are nowhere condemned in its official policy pronouncements.
Mortuary Management
commented on this difficulty: “[The NFDA] has little or no control over who belongs. It has to
accept any member of an affiliated state association, and that includes everyone from the desk and telephone curbstoner to the 5,000 case a year corporation.… True, NFDA has a Code of Ethics. But there are no minimum standards for membership.… There is no restriction whatever on the curbstoner.”

The NFDA, not to be deterred by a little thing like the realities of a situation, in 1961 issued a ringing cry for professional status: “Before this decade is completed, professionalism will be a standard for funeral service.” There was more behind this yearning than just the desire for gentility and recognition. The achievement by undertakers of professional status would, it was hoped, be a convenient way to secure legal sanction for a ban on price advertising, long an objective of the NFDA. Restrictions on advertising by professions as well as by businesses have long since gone by the boards, invalidated by the courts on constitutional grounds. Members of the learned professions, on the other hand, have codes of ethics, at one time enforced by law, which prohibit advertising.

Possibly the vast gap between desire and reality on this question of professionalism—the contradiction between the high-flown talk of Ethical Values and vexatious commercial necessities—accounts in good measure for the painful sensitivity to criticism evidenced by the funeral men. The slightest suggestion of opposition to any part of their operation, the slightest questioning of their sincerity, virtue, and general uprightness, produces howls of anguish and brings them running like so many Brave Little Dutch Boys to plug the holes in the dike.

It is as though generations of music-hall jokes, ribald cartoons, literary bons mots of which the undertaker is the butt had produced a deep-seated persecution complex, sometimes bordering on an industry-wide paranoia. The very titles of their speeches reveal this uneasy state of mind. Topics for addresses at one convention were: “What Are They Doing to Us?” and “You Are Probably Being Talked About Right Now.”

In their relations with the community as a whole, the funeral men carry on a sort of weird shadowboxing, frequently wildly off the mark. There is an old act—possibly originated by W. C. Fields?—in which a bartender is trying to get rid of a bothersome fly. He goes after it with his bar towel, knocking down bottles as he swings; soon
the bar is a shambles. Finally the fly settles on his nose and the bartender takes a last swipe, this time with a full bottle, and succeeds in knocking himself out while the fly unconcernedly buzzes off. The funeral industry’s approach to public relations is frequently reminiscent of that bartender.

Enemies seem to lurk everywhere—among competitors, of course, but also among the clergy, the medical profession, the tissue banks, the cemetery people, the press. There is hardly an issue of the many funeral trade publications that does not reflect some aspect of this sense of bitter persecution, of being deeply misunderstood and cruelly maligned.

“
T
o the avaricious churchman there must be provided proof that a funeral investment does not deprive either the church or its pastor of revenue.” This extraordinary statement appeared in the
National Funeral Service Journal
for April 1961, together with the opinion that the three most important reasons for the mounting rash of criticism of funeral service are “religion, avarice, and a burning desire for social reform.”

The same idea is expressed a little more fully in another issue of the same magazine: “The minister is perhaps our most serious problem, but the one most easily solved. Most religious leaders avoid interference. There are some, however … who feel that they must protect their parishioners’ financial resources and direct them to a more ‘worthy’ cause. Some of these men, after finding more dimes than dollars in the collection plate, reach the point of frustration where they vent their unholy anger on the supposedly affluent funeral director.”

These are salvos fired in a rather one-sided battle which rages from time to time between some of the clergy and some sections of the funeral industry—one-sided because, while the funeral men are always ready with dukes up to go on the offensive, the average minister is generally unaware that war has been declared.

The issue boils down to this: The morticians resent the intrusion into their business of clergy who take it upon themselves to steer parishioners in the direction of moderation in choice of casket and other matters pertaining to the production of the funeral. Many of the clergy, for their part, deplore what they regard as the growing usurpation of their role as counselors in a time of grief and need, and
the growing distortion of what they view as an extremely important, solemn religious rite.

Not infrequently, the controversy spills over into print. There is a considerable body of church literature on the subject: pamphlets, booklets, and ecclesiastical-magazine articles which explain the religious significance of the funeral as an expression of faith. These stress the importance of ministerial counsel at the time of death, the spiritual nature of the funeral service, the need to face realistically the facts of life and death, the advisability of giving some thought to the type of funeral desired before the need arises.

Sometimes the advice is taken a step further: “Consider the cost in the context of your stewardship. Thoughts of preservation of a body, coupled with the inflationary pressures of our time, have led some people to excessive expenditures for burial vaults and caskets. Yet, we know that the body shall return to the elements from which it came.… This means that we will be conservative in the purchase of casket, burial, and additional services, conserving frequently limited funds to meet the needs of the living. Let us recognize that ordinarily this would also be the desire of the deceased.…”

From the funeral director’s point of view, these are fighting words; bad enough on paper, but when followed up by the corporeal presence of a clergyman with the family at the crucial moment of the selection of a casket, they constitute a call to arms. “The man who has the clergyman making the selection for his families does have a nasty problem,” wrote an undertaker.

The posing of this nasty problem in the pages of
Mortuary Management
produced some very down-to-earth advice, best relayed by quoting from the correspondence of the funeral directors who participated in the discussion:

The scheme of separating the minister from the selecting group by “invit[ing him] to join you in your office” is discussed more explicitly by the next writer:

Just in case the point has not been thoroughly clarified, a third writer describes in further detail how best to lure the unsuspecting man of God from the side of his parishioners:

A fourth writer throws in the sponge:

Compared with these views, those expressed by most clergy themselves are moderate and even tolerant. Their occasional criticism is mild and reserved. Some of the clergymen with whom I discussed the matter confessed to having been sorely tried from time to time in their dealings with the funeral people. Most of them—including the most outspoken foes of high-priced, showy funerals—made a sharp differentiation between the funeral price-gouger and the “honest, ethical mortician.” Others felt that the funeral director is in a sense the prisoner of his own wall-to-wall carpeting; that, having installed all the expensive gadgetry and luxurious fittings, he is obliged to charge high prices in order to pay for the upkeep of his fancy establishment.

I sought to learn from a number of churchmen of different faiths something of ecclesiastic attitudes towards the funeral service. What are the actual ritualistic requirements; what is the status of the dead body; what is the position on “viewing the remains,” on the willing of the body for medical research? How closely does the sort of funeral generally provided today conform with the traditions of the church? What, if any, criticisms are there of today’s typical funeral service? Should the clergyman participate with the family in making the actual arrangements for the funeral—should he go with them into the selection room? These were some of the questions I had.

The Right Reverend James A. Pike, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of California at the time, came out foursquare in favor of the “nosy” clergy. He urged that the pastor be called in
first
—that is, before the funeral director is consulted—when death occurs. The clergyman should accompany the family to the funeral parlor for the specific purpose of helping them to resist the pressures towards overspending. In any event, the casket, whether pine box or magnificent solid bronze, is, in the Episcopal Church, covered with a funeral pall during the service—“the point being to minimize the showpiece aspects. We feel that earthly remains are not to be made that much of.” Although the clergy strongly favor moderation in funeral expense and simplicity of decor, individual freedom in the choice of a
coffin is respected: “If people insist on doing something foolish in the matter of funeral expense, that’s up to them, of course. What’s sometimes wrong is the element of pride, apparently fostered in the advertising approach of some funeral directors. In terms of a remedy, a lot of teaching in advance is needed—the use and purpose of the funeral pall, and why it is our position that the casket should be closed during the service.”

What about the practice of displaying the body in a slumber room at the mortuary before the funeral? “This might bring some comfort and peace to the relatives; one can see that the widow might wish a final glance at the deceased. This is a private affair, up to the family to decide.” While Bishop Pike was neutral on the matter of the “open casket” beforehand, he was definitely opposed to it during and after the service. “This is not merely my personal view,” he said. “Our tradition does not favor the ‘viewing of the remains’ after the service by those who have come. In other words, when the casket is closed after the preliminary period, it remains closed.”