The American Way of Death Revisited (38 page)
Read The American Way of Death Revisited Online
Authors: Jessica Mitford
This is, from the undertaker’s point of view, a particularly vile form of sedition. the
National Funeral Service Journal
(April 1961) denounced funeral society advocates as “the burial beatniks of contemporary America … far more dangerous than the average funeral director realizes, for they are fanatics; they are the paraders for human rights, the picketers of meetings and institutions that displease them, the shouters and hecklers and demonstrators for any number of causes.” Whether the mild-mannered clergymen, professors, and social workers who form the backbone of the funeral societies would recognize themselves in this word picture is uncertain, but it is a fairly typical funeral trade reaction to any suggested deviation from their established procedures.
The funeral society people were not the first critics of American funeral practices, nor are they indeed the harshest; they were merely the first to think in terms of an organization through which an alternative to the “standard funeral” might be made available to the public. It is the organizational aspect that terrifies the undertakers, and that gives rise to purple passages in the trade press:
An atomic attack on our Christian funeral customs …
… hang over our heads like the fabled sword of Damocles.
The Memorial Associations are like all the other selfish interest groups that infest the American way of life like so many weasels sucking away at the life blood of our basic economy.
Those who seek to destroy the very foundation of the American funeral program are making headway.
What do we do about this menace? How do we fight it?
It poses a threat to religion itself.
Those who promote it are in the same class with the demagogue, fadist, and do-gooder who from time to time in history has jumped on his horse and ridden off in different directions.
Some telling blows have been struck directly at the heart of funeral service recently. So far we have been able to roll with the punch. But we must come back championing our heritage. We cannot throw in the towel or fight the way the enemy wants us to. To compromise or do what the opposition does is to lose forever the finest funeral standards in the world.
The very concept of the memorial society is alien to every principle of the American way of life. Therefore, it must be opposed with every ounce of decency we can muster.
What, then, is the “concept of the memorial society” against which these ounces of decency must be mustered? It was originally set forth in a pamphlet issued by the Cooperative League of the USA, entitled
Memorial Associations: What They Are
,
How They Are Organized:
Memorial associations and their members seek modesty, simplicity, and dignity in the final arrangements over which they have control. This concern for spiritual over material values has revealed that a “decent burial” or other arrangement need not be elaborate.… Some families wish to avoid funerals and burials altogether. They prefer cremation and a memorial service later, at which the life of the deceased and the spiritual aspects of death are emphasized, without an open casket and too many flowers.
Still others want to will their bodies to a medical school for teaching and research. They also may offer their eyes to an eye bank so the corneas may be transplanted and the blind may see.
Whether it’s an unostentatious funeral, a simple burial, cremation, a memorial service, or a concern for medical science, these people want dignified and economical final arrangements. Accordingly they have organized several kinds of memorial associations in more than a dozen states and several Canadian provinces.…
Even for the person whose family wants the conventional funeral and burial, membership in a memorial association offers support and counsel in achieving simplicity, dignity, and economy in a service that centers not on public display of the body but on the meaning of death.
Above all, the memorial association provides the opportunity for individuals to have the kind of facilities and services they choose at what is perhaps the most mysterious moment of all.
With these modest objectives, a number of associations flourished by the late fifties. They were organized for the most part by Unitarians, Quakers, and other Protestant church groups; they flourished best in the quiet backwaters of university towns; their recruits came from youngish, middle-income people in the academic and professional world rather than from the lower-income brackets, or, as the
National Funeral Service Journal
put it, “The movement appeals most strongly to the visionary, ivory tower eggheads of the academic fraternity.”
Some of the societies function as educational organizations and limit themselves to advocacy of “rationally pre-planned final arrangements.” Most, however, have gone a step further and through collective bargaining have secured contracts with one or more funeral establishments to supply the “simple funeral” for members at an agreed-on sum. There is some diversity of outlook in the societies: some emphasize cremation; others are more interested in educational programs advocating bequeathal of bodies to medical schools; still others stress freedom of choice in the matter of burials as their main concern.
All operate as nonprofit organizations, open to everybody, and all are run by unpaid boards of directors. Enrollment fees are modest, usually about $20 for a “life membership”; a few groups collect annual dues. The money is used for administrative expenses,
printings, mailings, and the like, and in a few cases for newspaper advertising.
A major objective of all the societies is to smooth the path for the family that prefers to hold a memorial service, without the body present, instead of the “open-casket” funeral—and to guarantee that the family will not have to endure a painful clash with the undertaker in making such arrangements. The memorial service idea is most bitterly fought in the trade. With their usual flair for verbal invective, industry spokesmen have coined a word for the memorial service: “disposal.” “Point out that those who know say the disposal-type service without the body present is not good for those who survive,” said the president of the National Funeral Directors Association.
Casket & Sunnyside’s
expert on proper reverence wrote, “The increasing support which members of the clergy have been giving to the memorial society movement stems in part from a lack of understanding on the clergy’s behalf of what proper reverence for the dead really means to the living. They have little knowledge of the value of sentiment in the therapy of healing.”
