The Death Care Industry in the United States is a fascinating topic for many people. And most of the curiosity with the profession comes about because of its well-known profitability. How can an entire industry command such large sums from grieving families (the average final expenses in today’s world is quickly approaching $15,000, and that is likely to double before the year 2020 many industry analysts say) and not be riddled with guilt (not to mention charges of extortion and other nefarious acts)?
The question is an interesting one, apparently. And it involves more than just the water-cooler chat of co-workers wanting to find a way to console a colleague who has recently lost a loved one and is struggling with a way to pay the outrageous bills associated with the final expenses. No, the dialog has gone much deeper than that in recent decades. In fact, it has inspired its own mini-industry of books, articles and other written works (the most famous of which are books, of course) devoted to the question of potentially abusive and certainly controversial practices common to the death care industry. Here is a synopsis of what all this writing is about.
American Way of Death
The book that can probably best be said to have started this trend of writing about questionable practices in the death care industry was the famous book The American Way of Death by the legendary journalist, Jessica Mittford. Though Mittford wrote about many other topics in her life, this book is probably the one that she is best remembered for. In it, she exposes the many tricks of the trade that had long been used by owners of funeral homes and cemeteries across the United States to artificially inflate prices for their services , including items such as custom memorial headstones and grave markers that families often purchase during funeral arrangements. and take advantage of the weakened emotional state of the families they served in order to sell products and services that were not always in their best interest. Because of this, many families today prefer purchasing memorial items such as urns, keepsakes, or remembrance products online before meeting with a funeral home. American Way of Death caught the attention of lawmakers across the land who used it as a basis of establishing legislation aimed at curbing the long-held abusive practices in the death care industry. As a result, today’s funeral homes are subject to federal rules under The Funeral Rule that require them to openly discuss prices, and to list their prices in a menu-style format, with their customers and even prospective customers. This rule makes a “General Price List” a requirement for all funeral homes and it is to be made available, almost as if it were a formal public record issued by the government itself, to anyone who asks for it and, most certainly, to all who inquire about doing business with a particular funeral home.
Mittford’s book spawned an entire “funeral industry reform” movement that has kept close watch on the implementation of The Funeral Rule – usually noting that its enforcement has not quite achieved the intended goals – and produced many other well-read books and articles about the industry.
Other Books Written by Funeral Directors
Books written on the topic of funeral home and cemetery abuses have been very plentiful since about the middle 1980’s, and almost all of them somehow acknowledge that they have been inspired at least in part by American Way of Death. Each of them tell stories of how questionable sales practices and business policies have somehow caused emotional or financial trouble for families who have lost a loved one. Most of the books, likewise, give detailed advice about how consumers can best avoid these pitfalls for themselves, including understanding the process of arranging services and expenses through guides like How To Plan A Funeral: A Step-By-Step Guide To Planning A Funeral. Among the relatively new practices that these books have helped to bring to growing prominence in the United States is “home funerals,” the practice in which families conduct funeral and burial rights for their deceased loved ones in private residences without the involvement of a funeral director any any other “professional” of the death care industry. Many of these books go into great detail about the legalities of home funerals, and they offer very helpful tips for how to carry out these rituals in very meaningful ways.
Because major national publishers have not yet seen that books about the death care industry have sufficient marketability across the United States – despite the fact that Mittford’s book was a national best seller, death care is still considered a “niche” market of which interest is limited – there has not been another nationally successful book written and published since American Way of Death. Though such books are plentiful, they are mostly available via websites and often from individual death care industry activists themselves. It is rare that even a public library will have more than the one great book written by Mittford – actually, her book is two in one. After the commercial success of her first edition, she write a follow-up version just before her death in 1996 which noted that many of the problems she mentioned decades before still remained. This second book ended up translating into a better enforcement, for the most part, of the Funeral Rule – though its certain that Mittford would still be upset with many of the abusive practices still regularly in force in the death care industry.
As a result of no major publisher seeing fit to take on another book critical of the death care industry, the newer books on the topic are too numerous to name (that is an ironic consequence, admittedly, but it is nevertheless what tends to happen when a large company is not allowed to dominate a market) and we suggest a quick search of the internet using the topic “death care books” to find a list of dozens that are available. Many of these are available even for free – at least by electronic download – as a public service of groups that help funeral and cemetery consumers navigate the treacherous course of their negotiations with death care companies.
Many of the newer books are written by insiders in the business who saw, and participated in, the practices while they worked in the death care industry. These insider accounts provide a credible perspective and they give readers hope that, if they happen to run across a dubious policy in their own dealings with a cemetery or funeral home, at least one of the perpetrators may end up eventually coming clean in a book.