The American Way of Death Revisited - Jessica Mitford [54]
Later, when I went to see the cemetery, I could see why the counselor was not too anxious to have prospects go out there. It was merely an expanse of dusty, dried-out California hillside, with a fine view of the factories and warehouses of the industrial section below. The Lifetime Green artificial grass mats stacked near the office offered a lurid contrast to the vistas of brown land on either side; the mausoleum was a stunted dwarf compared with the massive structure of the “Artist’s Conception.” The “features” were apparently also in the future, except for a rather forlorn-looking huge tin Bible at the entrance. A small slope, about the size of a town dweller’s back garden, was already converted into graves; I counted seventeen of them, and six occupied crypts in the mausoleum. The Memorial Counselor had accurately told me that of fifteen hundred burial places sold, only twenty-three were actually in use.
The profit potential of a cemetery does not by any means end with the sale of burial space. Adjuncts of cemetery operation, such as the digging, planting, trimming, and general maintenance of graves, which fifty years ago (before the advent of the commercial cemetery) were looked upon simply as chores to be handled by the groundskeeper or the sexton, are today systematically turned to good account. And there are today many extra profit items for the cemetery owner which played no part in cemetery operation or finance in the days before Forest Lawn became the arbiter of fashion in the burial world—the sale of vaults, bronze grave markers, flowers, postcards, and statuary, and the collection, control, and management of huge “perpetual care” funds.
A generation ago, gravedigging and markers were provided by cemeteries at a nominal cost. Park and Cemetery (a fuddy-duddy forerunner of Concept) reported in 1921 that cemeteries in Seattle were charging $7 for opening and closing a grave. Now a mechanized operation, opening and closing a grave can be completed in about fifteen minutes. Today, cemeteries are charging $600 to $900 for this service, even more on Sundays and holidays. Opening a mausoleum vault, which means simply removing the 25-by-32-inch faceplate, will cost a comparable amount. Zestiest of all for the cemetery are the charges made for opening niches to contain urns in the columbarium. The faceplate of a small niche measures 14 by 14 inches; the charge for opening it in the Neptune Society’s San Francisco columbarium is $300. What needs to be done to open it? I asked an undertaker. “It’s all in the wrist,” he replied. The cost of a niche runs upward from $3,500, but this, I was assured, includes all charges for care “in perpetuity.”
Other profit items which the commercial cemetery tries to preempt for itself are the sale of vaults, grave liners, and markers.
The cement marker, once a threat to bronze sales, is no longer a problem. The commercial cemeteries, authorized by law to make their own rules, simply prohibit their use. The cemetery’s specifications for. the size, shape, and installation of the bronze, granite, or granite-and-bronze markers which they now require are likely to be so stringent as to make it inconvenient to buy this commodity elsewhere, or to have it installed by an outside supplier. The ordinary bronze marker, inscribed with the name of the deceased and his dates of birth and demise, sells for about $350 for a single grave. The standard cemetery markup is 100 to 200 percent.
In areas already saturated with grave and mausoleum sales, a second pressing of the vintage, so to speak, can be harvested by selling bronze markers “in advance of need” to people who have already purchased interment space. Although I find it hard to picture the customer placing the order for his own memorial ahead of time (“How shall I order the inscription? ‘To My Dearly Beloved Self,’ perhaps, or just simply ‘Dear Me’?”), such sales are being made in substantial volume.