The American Way of Death Revisited - Jessica Mitford [39]
The only “authoritative” voice the industry has been able to produce in rebuttal belongs to one John Kroshus, identified only as having a connection with the University of Minnesota’s program of mortuary science. Mr. Kroshus is quoted in Funeral Monitor (April 1996) as denouncing “the book” (again a phrase familiar to me) by posing the question: “If embalming is taken out of the funeral, then viewing the body will also be lost. If viewing is lost, then the body itself will not be central to the funeral. If the body is taken out of the funeral, then what does the funeral director have to sell?”
I could not have put it better.
In a curious, perhaps inevitable, reversal, the decades spent persuading the public that embalming is a sound public health measure have come back to haunt the funeral folk. Angrily protesting new Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulations that end the practice of dumping bodily wastes and embalming fluids down drains or in Dumpsters, one mortician, according to Mortuary Management, ridiculed the “illogic of it all.” It seems, he claims, “that waste from dead people is now deemed to be more dangerous than that which comes from the living.” He goes on to protest that not one case of infection has been reported as resulting from the longstanding practice of dumping bodily wastes and embalming fluids down sewers.
If the public health benefits of embalming are elusive, ten times more so is the role of “grief therapy,” which is fast becoming a favorite with the funeral men. Trying to pin down the meaning of this phrase is like trying to pick up quicksilver with a fork, for it apparently has no meaning outside funeral trade circles. Although it sounds like a term picked up from the vocabulary of psychiatry, psychiatrists of whom I inquired were unable to enlighten me because they had never heard of it.
“Grief therapy” is most commonly used by funeral men to describe the mental and emotional solace which, they claim, is achieved for the bereaved family as a result of being able to “view” the embalmed and restored deceased.
The total absence of authoritative sources on the subject does not stop the undertakers and their spokesmen from donning the mantle of the psychiatrist when it suits their purposes. As an embalming textbook says, “In his care of each subject the embalmer has a heavy responsibility, for his skill and interest will largely determine the degree of permanent mental trauma to be suffered by all those closely associated with the deceased.”
Lately, the meaning of “grief therapy” has been expanded to cover not only the Beautiful Memory Picture but any number of aspects of the funeral. Within the trade, it has become a catchall phrase, its meaning conveniently elastic enough to provide justification for all of its dealings and procedures. Phrases like “therapy of mourning” and “grief syndrome” trip readily from industry tongues. The most “therapeutic” funeral, it seems, is the one that conforms to their pattern, that is to say, the one arranged under circumstances guaranteeing a maximum profit.
I had a long discussion with Mr. Raether about “grief therapy,” in which I sought to know what medical or psychiatric backing he could produce to substantiate the funeral industry theory that viewing the restored and embalmed body has psychotherapeutic value. He spoke of grief and ceremony; he mentioned some clergymen of his acquaintance who thought viewing the body was a valuable experience; but no qualified psychiatric reference was forthcoming.
Eventually he referred me to an article by Stanford University professor Edmund H. Volkart which had appeared in Explorations in Social Psychiatry and which allegedly supported the proposition that “viewing” was therapeutically valuable to the bereaved.