|
||||||
Additional/Back Issues Dear website visitor, Again it is our pleasure to bring you an article written exclusively for our newsletter by Karen J. Leonard, the research assistant for the best-selling book -- The American Way of Death -- authored by the late Jessica Mitford. The revised version of this landmark book, The American Way of Death Revisited is due to be released shortly.Darryl J. RobertsThe Blind Spot by Karen J. Leonard The international death industry conglomerates are popular on Wall Street. Stockbrokers advertise their high yields and speculate on the profits to be made during harsh winters and epidemics. They love to point out to would-be buyers that the high cost of medical care is causing the medical establishment to be more sympathetic to "pulling the plug" on their patients. With the graying of America, things are indeed looking rosy for the death conglomerate stockholders. Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission states that funeral purchasing is the third highest cost in life. According to Consumers Union, funeral purchasing is one of the ten top abuses of the elderly. The U.S. Commerce Department says that mortuaries have the lowest bankruptcy rate of all businesses in America. From little over two million deaths each year, the industry’s net profit is over $17 billion. The National Funeral Director’s Association unabashedly announces that the average funeral today is over $5,000. This does not include cemetery costs (add another $5,000 to the bill if you want to get underground). Clearly there is a great imbalance in this marketplace of after-death services and goods. There is a clash between grief and greed, between emotions and economics. A Cornered Market Death services and goods is a cornered market. Everyone dies. Unlike other purchases, no one wants to buy these products. No one enjoys dealing with the reality of the death of those they love, much less contemplating their own demise. The outcome of this very human trait is a customer who is ill-prepared and ill-informed to make what could easily be one of the most expensive financial transactions of their lives. AARP says that the average length of time between the purchasing of funerals is 14 years – hardly a frequency that would lend itself to expertise. Much has been written concerning before- and after-death needs. Like a blind spot, however, the issue of dealing with the event of death itself is missing from any medical or psychology journals. Even an expected death leaves the survivors often numb and in shock. Grief counselors (not to be confused with pre-need cemetery sellers) often hear their clients say that they have no memory of those first few days, that everything was a blur. The need to help the dying and the needs of the bereaved have our compassion and our attention. Alas, the only professional that survivors are likely to encounter after the hospice workers and doctors leave the scene, is a person whose job is the selling of services and goods. His job is to make a profit and he has so many tools to ensure that this happens. First, there is the psychological loss to play on. We are so helpless to change the fact of death. The need to express and to act in the face of such irreversible fate is easily made into a financial transaction. After all, almost everything we do in life calls for spending money. "You get what you pay for" is a mantra in this consumer society. The fact that monetary worth is not equal to human worth just becomes so many words when you are making an undesirable and emotionally charged purchase. With no real consumer information available in a seller-controlled marketplace, the average consumer is an easy mark. Add grief, guilt and fear to this mixture and getting ripped off becomes the norm, not the exception, to the American way of death. Empty Hearts, Empty Pockets Let’s examine one of the business practices that go a long way to emptying pockets but thwart the emotional needs of the bereaved. Many mortuaries refuse to allow families the right to see the body of their son, daughter, mother, father, etc., unless it is embalmed and put on display. This is often because the mortuary being used is owned by a corporation and the corpse goes to a central holding/embalming facility. This facility may be many miles away. But the funeral director does not tell the family that the body is not there at the mortuary. He tells them that for health and safety reasons, the family cannot come in contact with an "unsanitized" body. Most people in America have an unreasoning fear of dead bodies, generally because they have no real contact in dealing with them. Motion pictures and television (about the only place our children see death) depict decomposing corpses rising up to cause widespread terror. Obviously, a breathing and living body is far more dangerous as far as communicable diseases are concerned, and the handling of contagious patients only requires wearing latex gloves. Because embalming requires the withdrawal of large amounts of body fluids (thus exposing the public to blood-borne pathogens) and the introduction of toxic fluids, the EPA has a textbook full of safety requirements on this procedure. And yet this industry goes unchallenged in its presentation of embalming as a public health measure. The family’s emotional need to see the body is thus denied unless they can afford to have it embalmed. Healthcare workers are in the best position to help counter these fears. The common practice of swiftly removing bodies from the place of death needs to be changed. Convalescent and nursing homes are particularly guilty of demanding immediate removal even during the middle of the night. Funeral directors give seminars on how to tactfully bribe nursing homes, emergency facilities and coroners’ offices and to make sure that, when death occurs and the family stands unprepared, staff remember the mortuary’s name. Although according to California’s business codes and regulations, funeral directors must embalm, cremate, bury, or refrigerate bodies within 24 hours (a law created to protect families from funeral directors leaving bodies to decay until being paid). This law does not apply to the public, namely because it is not a public health issue. Caring for Their Own Dead The Natural Health Care Project in Sonoma County is a non-profit that teaches people the procedures needed to care for their own dead. The average time people who do home funerals have a body on hand before final disposition is two to three days. One family had a body laying in state for five days. Families’ reaction to taking control of their own death rites has been dramatic. The difference in the ability to express their own emotional needs and create unique settings and artifacts for the funerals of their loved ones has helped them deal with their grief in a non-monetary setting where a check could never substitute for the real experience. One family had T-shirts printed up saying "Friends Don’t Let Friends Use Funeral Directors." The success of the group (which, by the way, does no advertising ) shows in the county’s public health records. The years before the group was established, the average self-directed funeral was one a year. In the three years since their formation, they have helped over 300 families "do their own thing." In the late 1930s, a group of people in Seattle Washington observed that death care was no longer being dealt with by families and churches. They believed that when controlled by a profit-driven market, funeral purchasing would be easily abused. The rights of those seeking simplicity and economy in death would be in peril. And the loss of firsthand knowledge of the actual mechanics of death care would create a dependency and artificial helplessness that would be costly. Adding little to the emotional needs of the survivors, mass-manufactured rituals and goods could instead add to the pain with the additional burden of financial loss during a time when it would have the hardest impact. This group started the first nonprofit organization commonly referred to today as a "funeral" and/or "memorial" society. Presently, the national organization consists of over 140 of these consumer groups. The societies are volunteer consumer organizations, not mortuaries. Their goal is to help others find simplicity in arranging, dignity in expressing individual death rites and economical fairness in funeral purchasing. It is difficult for the general public to organize and represent itself concerning issues that have great impact on their lives. Although death is an issue that touches every human being, there is such public aversion to this topic that the ability to prevent the industry from dominating regulatory agencies is nearly impossible. In nearly 60 years of existence, the societies remain grass root organizations. Word-of-mouth "advertising" is the major source of referrals for these consumer groups. The American Way of Death Revisited We hope to change this. The national organization is tackling the FTC to pursue anti-trust issues in the death care industry. This month, Jessica Mitford’s rewrite of her 1968 best selling classic The American Way of Death Revisited will be released. It’s witty and scathing investigations of the death industry will also bring great attention to the funeral and memorial societies. (For an in-depth look at Ms. Mitford’s life and works, a memorial site has been created for at www.mitford.org.) Darryl Roberts’ book, The Profits of Death, is an important insider’s telling of the funeral industry’s tricks of the trade. Possibly because he was a successful funeral director and cemetery owner himself, SCI (the world’s largest death conglomerate) fears his exposŽs more than Mitford’s, or perhaps he is simply an easier target for their intimidation. The fact that the conglomerates have begun to react to the charges made by critics is a sign that we are being heard and that their fear of loss of profits is becoming a reality. |
||||||
| press | | Q&A | links | e-mail |
© 1998-2006/Darryl J. Roberts
All rights reserved