So yesterday I went to the funeral home with my brothers, my cousin, my mom, and all my aunts and uncles. If you know anything about funeral arrangements, you know it’s the worst parts of buying a car wrapped up with all the fun and excitement of the death of a loved one. It is every bit as sleazy, scammy, and manipulative as you would imagine it could be.*
I’m glad my brothers and I were there, because had we not been, I think my mom and her siblings could have been suckered into a whole bunch of unnecessary expenses, some of which they were suckered into regardless.
It all started when the funeral home started pressuring us into getting my grandfather embalmed. Actually, it started way before that. The death industry has managed to subtly spread the myth that not only is embalming necessary for a body to be presentable, but that it may even be required by law. In Maryland, it’s not the law. There is a stipulation that “extended viewing” would allow the funeral home to require embalming, but nowhere is “extended viewing” defined. When my family sat down to have a discussion about whether or not embalming was necessary, the misinformation was coming out of the mouths of my relatives. “If he’s not embalmed we can’t have an open casket,” or “If he’s not embalmed he’ll start to stink,” or “If he’s not embalmed we won’t be able to bury him.” From what I can tell, all of these are inaccurate. Embalming is expensive ($1600 in our case), unnecessary where cold storage is available, unnatural, and bad for the environment. Does anyone has experience with a viewing and an non-embalmed body? I’d love to hear it.
The next big ticket item that can be ignored, one that we managed to keep our family from purchasing unnecessarily, is a vault. In Maryland a vault is not required, but a graveliner is (I think). A graveliner essentially keeps the ground from collapsing as the coffin degrades, and it keeps some moisture out of the grave, as well as keeping any degrading material of the body or the coffin out of the ground. It’s essentially a box in the ground that the coffin goes into. A vault is a box that goes inside the graveliner, and then the coffin goes in the vault. They start at about $3000 bucks for plain concrete and then go as high as $20,000 for fancy stuff with copper or bronze linings and embellishments. They try and sell you on the vault by saying that without it “weather” could get into the coffin sooner, essentially forcing you to visualize the deceased rotting in the ground. In our case it would have been an especially bad decision to buy a vault because our grandfather won’t even be buried with us at the graveside. The cemetery only does burials once or twice a month, and all the bodies delivered to the cemetery before that day are buried then, no visitors allowed. We wouldn’t have ever seen the vault even if we purchased it. And I wouldn’t be surprised if numerous families had purchased vaults, only for that money to go into the pockets of funeral salesmen. Don’t let a funeral director tell you that a vault is required unless you’ve read the law and know he’s right. In Maryland, he wouldn’t be.
Eventually we got to the coffins themselves, and that was a horrible process in and of itself. They try to sell you on all this fancy, polished, filigreed nonsense, when all you want is something simple and respectful. My older brother asked for a book of cheaper options once we reached the end of the first book and the cheapest option was $3000. We were told that the book we were looking at was the only book available. Then my mom told a story about when my grandfather was making arrangements for his sister and the funeral director then told him that the option he had picked for his sister was “nice”. “No,” he barked in reply, “Not nice. A necessity.” After that story the funeral director magically found a book of cheaper options. My family eventually settled on something for about $1,400 that looked remarkably like a similar option available for $700, but my mom and her siblings took a vote and opted for the more expensive one. I’m still not sure why. It’s not like you can go to a funeral and remember what the casket looked like, or that you could (or even should) look at a casket and guess how much it cost. Just build me one out of plywood. It’ll be good enough.
But that’s the thing about coffins, everybody wants to think that with a nice enough vault, graveliner, and coffin, the body will stay perfect forever. In fact, the funeral director kept talking about how some coffins had gaskets and how others did not. He was really pushing the gasket thing pretty hard, I think for the same reason as the vault: to scare people into thinking of their loved one decomposing. Well guess what? We all decompose. There’s nothing you can do to prevent it. You’re going to be rotting in the ground regardless, and all this bullshit they try and sell you does nothing but prevent the former husk of your loved one from doing what it does naturally. You’ll never see them like that, so why do you even give a fuck? Are you concerned that they’ll check out the digs you bought for them if they come back in spirit form? Why the fuck would they do that? They could haunt themselves up season tickets for the Ravens and the Orioles. They could haunt themselves up a nice little spot in a strip club. They could haunt themselves up a seat in a movie theater. Why would they want to bother seeing the nonsensical shit you bought for them? They are dead! It doesn’t matter what they liked, or what they hated. They’ll never see any of it.
Finally we came to all the small details nonsense that still managed to cost an arm and a leg. A bouquet to go on top of the coffin? $200. A book for people to sign with their name and address? $40. Prayer cards? $80 for 200. And while I’m on the topic of prayer cards, what the hell are they all about? They’re like funeral trading cards. I really don’t understand why people take these things, and I REALLY don’t understand why they take 3 or 4 at a time. It’s just a card with a name, two dates, and a prayer on it. You can make your own for free, AND you can pick your own prayer! I tried to push for only getting 100, but my uncle insisted we get at least 200. I’m glad they only went that high. I can just imagine a box of 500.
My grandmother is still learning of the loss of her husband, hundreds of times every day. Fuck anyone who would dare spin that into a good thing. Comments are back on.
*Here’s Penn and Teller’s evaluation of the death industry on Bullshit. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
