Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

Mitford acknowledged that the average person in the market for a car would read Consumer Reports (or, in the twenty-first century, presumably browse the Internet). But to do that kind of research into the death industry, well, “it just would not seem right.” Because John Q. Public does not like to think about the implications of death, “he is anxious to get the whole thing over with.” At no point does Mitford object to this head-in-the-sand approach.

The American Way of Death assures readers that hating death is perfectly normal: Of course you’re anxious to get the whole thing over with and leave the funeral home; of course it would be morbid to go around asking in advance what “reliable undertakers” people use; of course you don’t know what a funeral home looks like or how it runs. Mitford promised us in her soothing prose that our death denial was not only appropriate, it was the natural state of affairs. She was an enabler.

Mitford hated the fact that funeral directors were businesspeople. But for better or worse, that’s what they are. Funeral homes in most developed countries are moneymaking private enterprises. People working in corporate funeral homes have no shortage of stories to tell of the overwhelming pressure to sell and push extra products and services. A former funeral director from one of the major corporate funeral homes told me that when he had a bad month in revenues (perhaps because his clientele that month came from lower-income families or because his clients had chosen cremation), “all of a sudden there was corporate in Texas on the phone asking if something was wrong in your life, asking if you understood you wouldn’t be getting your bonus.”

As a journalist, Mitford was an expert at stirring things up, exposing the hidden wrongs of the world. There is no doubt that the American funeral industry needed a change. What it got, however, was a scorched-earth policy. Mitford lit a match, threw it over her shoulder, and walked away. In her wake, she left a disgruntled public clamoring for cheaper funeral alternatives.

In writing The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford wasn’t trying to improve our relationship with death, she was trying to improve out relationship with the price point. That is where she went wrong. It was death that the public was being cheated out of by the funeral industry, not money. The realistic interaction with death and the chance to face our own mortality. For all of Mitford’s good intentions, direct cremation has only made the situation worse.





UNNATURAL NATURAL





“How dare you try to charge us that?” she screamed in a thick eastern European accent.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Ionescu,” I tried to explain, “but we have to charge you the hundred and seventy-five dollars.”

Ms. Ionescu, daughter of the late Elena Ionescu, sat in front of me at the Westwind Cremation arrangement desk. Her thick brown hair spiraled in corkscrew rings from the side of her head and her hands, loaded down with golden rings, gesticulated wildly.

“You are trying to extort us. I don’t understand why you are doing this, I am just here to see my mother one last time.”

If this had been my first ride at the “one last time” rodeo, I might have caved in to this woman’s demands. As it was, I knew Mike wouldn’t like me dropping the charge just because I hoped to avoid a confrontation. It was common for families to want to “see Mom one last time” before she was cremated or buried. They didn’t want have to pay $175 for the privilege. It was hard to explain why we suggested they did.

Dead people look very, very dead. It is difficult to grasp what that means, since it’s unlikely that any of us will stumble across a roving pack of dead bodies in the wild. We live in a world where people rarely die in their homes, and if they do, they’re carted off to the funeral home the second after taking their last breath. If a North American has seen a dead body, that body has likely been embalmed, made up, and dressed in its Sunday finest by a funeral-home employee.

Televised crime shows rarely help matters. The dead bodies on prime-time TV, discovered by maids, maintenance men, and joggers in Central Park, are laid out as if they have already been prepared for a wake, eyes closed and lips pursed together, glossed over with a whitish-blue-tinted makeup, which we, the viewers, read as “dead.” The victims on these shows are played by young models and actors who are making their rounds on the CSI and Law & Order corpse circuit while waiting to get called for a pilot. They are a far cry from the majority of bodies in a funeral home—old, knotted, and wracked with years of diseases like cancer and cirrhosis of the liver.