The American Way of Death Revisited - Jessica Mitford [11]
Enclosed in the seminar program was a sheet in which participants were asked to rate the speakers, with a space for comments on each. Avid to hear how I had scored, a few days later I rang up Ron Hast. Enoch Glascock came in first of the seven speakers, he said, but I was No. 2. The comments on my talk ranged from “very complimentary” to “very adverse.” He read out a few examples. Under complimentary: “A true brush with history, a wonderful perspective.” “Delightful, but she appeared to irritate many in the audience.” Adverse: “She’s still a cancer—how easily we forget all the damage she did, making a mockery of funeral service.” “Most unnecessary to provide a platform for a critic of our profession.” There had also been some phone calls, Mr. Hast told me: “One was somebody from Michigan State Funeral Directors Association, a pompous numskull, I couldn’t repeat his language!”
In a subsequent Mortuary Management editorial entitled “Tuning In or Out,” Ron Hast made some of the same points as Tom Fisher had in his poolside chat. He stoutly defended his decision to invite me; as to those who threatened to stop their subscriptions to Mortuary Management, he would “encourage them to call us at our expense to cancel their subscriptions—then go and put their heads back in the sand.”
“We may or may not agree with the beliefs or expressions of Jessica Mitford,” he wrote. “… Statistics now demonstrate throughout North America that simplicity or funeral avoidance is now the tradition in many regions. The American funeral-buying public has changed, and continues to change.… Ms. Mitford asked questions and listened to the answers more than thirty years ago, and produced something the public wanted to hear. Is it not time for us to do the same?…
“Can we expect to receive bouquets and laudatory cheers from Jessica Mitford in her new book? I think not. In fact, it is sensible to anticipate volatile criticism of current practices and agendas targeting death-care providers.”
Reflecting on what I had gleaned from the Tiburon experience, I have concluded that not much has changed over the years in the way undertakers see their world. They would still “vastly prefer” to be looked on as “trained professional men with high standards of ethical conduct,” but the exigencies of their trade still force them into the role of “merchants of a rather grubby order.” Enoch Glascock’s exposition of how to manipulate a family bent on a simple cremation into buying a full-fledged funeral was for me a high point of the seminar—I agreed with the No. 1 rating accorded him by his colleagues. But how does that fit in with Ron Hast’s perception that “simplicity or funeral avoidance is now the tradition in many regions”? Or with the general tone of his and Tom Fisher’s remarks about the impact of The American Way of Death?
Possibly it was the split personality of the calling, arising out of its inherent contradictions, that led to my invitation in the first place.
2
The American Way of Death
How long, I would ask, are we to be subjected to the tyranny of custom and undertakers? Truly, it is all vanity and vexation of spirit—a mere mockery of woe, costly to all, far, far beyond its value; and ruinous to many; hateful, and an abomination to all; yet submitted to by all, because none have the moral courage to speak against it and act in defiance of it.
—LORD ESSEX
O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? Where, indeed. Many a badly stung survivor, faced with the aftermath of some relative’s funeral, has ruefully concluded that the victory has been won hands down by a funeral establishment—in a disastrously unequal battle.
Much fun has been poked at some of the irrational “status symbols” set out like golden snares to trap the unwary consumer at every turn. Until recently, little has been said about the most irrational and weirdest of the lot, lying in ambush for all of us at the end of the road—the modern American funeral.
If the Dismal Traders (as an eighteenth-century English writer calls them) have traditionally