Dear website visitor,
Few things are as common as
death; but even rarer things are often far better understood. We do more research
and take more time when purchasing a car, for example, than we do when making final
arrangements. In truth, they frequently cost about the same.
Through this website and this newsletter, I hope to
provide you with the guidance you need. I look forward to your comments.
Darryl J. Roberts
With the kind permission of Phoenix Magazine, we
are reprinting an article that appears in the current (February 1998) issue:
Grave
Concerns
A local author exposes the darkest side of the mortuary business
by Jana Bommersbach
I'm going to admit that I'd have been happy to live my
entire life and never known EXACTLY how a body is embalmed.
But that's about the only piece of information I didn't
appreciate in a recent insider's book about the funeral industry by Scottsdale resident
Darryl J. Roberts.
Roberts himself comes from a family of
undertakers. (Quick, where did that word come from? Well, he tells us in the
book.) The cover boldly and clearly states his mission: "An insider
exposes the death care industries."
The Profits of Death is a paperback published
by Arizona's Five Star Publications, but don't think it isn't getting national attention,
because in its 200-some pages are some spectacular and startling revelations.
Like this: Never, ever, under any circumstance
whatsoever let anyone talk you into buying a sealed casket or vault. These worthless
items are sold thousands of times a day in funeral homes across America. And it's
real easy to hear the sales pitch: They provide "protection" for your
loved one against insects, vermin and seeping water; they help assure the deceased will be
"as comfortable as possible" during their eternal rest.
First, Roberts asks these blunt questions:
"Sealed with what? Sealed against what? And, pray tell, regardless of
how good the warranty is, who's going to check to see if it leaked?"
And then he tells you what every single undertaker in
the country knows to be true: "There is no casket nor grave vault that will
keep out the elements for all time. All the advertising claims, sales pitches,
implied warranties and innuendoes to the contrary, there is nothing that can prevent the
disintegration of the casket nor stem the flow of water into a vault."
He feels so strongly about this point that when I asked
him to enumerate what he sees as the most valuable information in his entire book, this is
one of the points he stresses.
Besides learning how useless these things are, let me
caution that this book contains a sickening discussion about what can happen inside a
coffin if the seal actually holds while the body completes its decomposition. Like
the step-by-step description of embalming, it's something I'd rather have never known.
So let's talk about embalming. Roberts puts a
warning label on the embalming chapter, clearly telling you that he's about to explain
"what happens after someone dies and...what happens behind the mortuary's closed
doors." I read on anyway, knowing I should and secure in my na•vetˇ that it
couldn't be that bad. (It was that bad, although I learned a lot.)
I have to admit I'd assumed we embalm bodies after death
to keep the body from decomposing. I believed that if you exhumed a body several
years after death, you'd still see the person you viewed at the funeral. I was
totally wrong.
"The truth," Roberts writes, "is that
injecting the body with a formaldehyde solution retards the natural process of
decomposition by only a few days."
Embalming is actually nothing more than a temporary
cosmetic, he notes. It's a good idea if the body is going to be viewed -- a
tradition common in this country but unheard of in Europe -- because the deceased can be
presented in the most pleasant way. But if there is going to be a closed casket,
there's no reason in the world to embalm it -- except to add another charge for the
grieving family and more profits for the undertaker.
So you might wonder why in Arizona, as Roberts notes,
there's a state law that demands if you don't bury a body within 24 hours, it must be
embalmed. He assumes the funeral industry got that piece of pocket changed passed,
just as it has in several other states.
Of course, Roberts stresses what every consumer group in
the nation has been preaching forever: Make prior arrangements for a funeral so the
decisions are made with a cool head, not during the trauma of losing a loved one when
emotions are raw and there's a strong tendency to spend a lot to prove how much the loved
one meant to you.
But he was in the business long enough to know that
pre-arrangements are still too rare. So he has a backup protection idea:
"Always take someone with you who is not emotionally involved." He means a
friend or neighbor who won't be wooed to buy the expensive coffin with the inner-spring
mattress (yes, such follies actually exist); someone who can keep her or his wits about
them while yours are understandably strained.
While Roberts' book is filled with important and
practical information, it isn't a dry tome. Not by any means. The guy has a
bizarre but entertaining sense of humor. He's also very clear-eyed about his
profession.
In the end, he gives 10 clear tips on how to save
yourself a lot of money (and later grief) on a funeral. A couple of those ideas I've
mentioned, but giving them all wouldn't be fair. I'm an author, too, so I have no
hesitation in saying if you want the entire story, you've got to buy Roberts' book.
People in the know already have:
- The foreword of this book is written by The Rev. Henry
Wasielewski, a Catholic priest in Phoenix who has long been in the forefront of ending
abuses in the funeral industry and earning a Social Justice Award from the Diocese of
Phoenix for his efforts. he writes: "Few insiders have tried to effect
reform by publicizing the abuses; Mr. Roberts does just that, providing the kind of book
the public needs -- a book that hundreds of other death care professionals could have
written over the years but did not."
- Karen Leonard, research assistant for Jessica Mitford's The
American Way of Death: "No funeral director I've interviewed...who
promised to 'tell me the real dirt' ever really dug deeper than a spade full, compared to
Darryl. Darryl has dug the grave and exposed the bones. Jessica Mitford would
have loved to have met you."
By the way -- that word undertaker? It literally
means someone who undertakes to prepare a body for burial.
Roberts' tell-all-secrets book undertakes to forever
bury an ignorant public that's conned by the death care industry.
