The American Way of Death Revisited - Jessica Mitford [64]
All in all, Eaton’s commercial companies seem to come off astonishingly well in their dealings with the friendly Memorial-Park company. In a stupendous display of Christ-in-businessmanship, his land company in 1959 sold the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather and two other churches to the nonprofit company for eighteen times their depreciated cost, thereby realizing a bonnie profit of over $1 million. To ease the pain of the capital gains tax on this transaction, the Memorial-Park is paying the purchase price, plus 4 percent interest, in installments of $100,000 per year.
As Mrs. St. Johns says of Dr. Hubert Eaton, “He was a businessman-idealist with an inspiration, whose plan’s greatness lay in its simplicity.”
The Dreamer is not through yet. In 1954 he announced his discovery of the Memorial Impulse. He says he might have called this force of nature the Memorial Instinct, but preferred to defer to “psychologists and scientists” who feel the term “instinct” is imprecise. The Memorial Impulse is a primary urge founded in man’s biological nature, and it gives rise to the desire to build (as one might have already guessed) memorials. It is also an indispensable factor in the growth of any civilization.
There are a number of ways to turn the Memorial Impulse, “as old as love and just as deathless,” to cash account. “Let every salesman’s motto be: Accent the spiritual!” says the Dreamer, and, “It is the salesman’s duty to measure the force of the Memorial Impulse in his client and to persuade him to live up to that noble urge in accordance with his means.… Most important of all, every salesman should understand that if properly inspired the Memorial Impulse will do more for him than he ever did for himself, but let your financial desire be tempered with the morality of the Memorial Impulse.”
The Memorial Impulse can also be channeled to remedy what was perhaps a tactical error in the early days of the Dream: insistence upon the use of small, uniform bronze grave markers.
Eaton mused that while there was universal agreement that the elimination of tombstones was a good thing, nevertheless the tombstones did serve a purpose: they were a “great assist” to the Memorial Impulse. The “great assist” that was unwittingly discarded, we learn, is the good old epitaph. There just isn’t room for it on the 12-by-24-inch bronze tablets currently in fashion. True, the little markers permit of vast, almost unbroken areas of grass—the “sweeping lawns” of the original Builder’s Creed—but since bronze markers are priced by the square inch, more or less, their size also limits the amount that can be charged for them. Now that the Impulse has been discovered, this can be corrected, and the epitaph was slated for a comeback that may radically alter the appearance of the memorial park, transforming its sweeping green lawns into seas of bronze. Eaton suggests that cemetery owners should be thinking in terms of “ever-larger” bronze tablets, big enough, in fact, to contain complete epitaphs and historical data—big enough to cover the entire grave! This, he says, would be a most “convenient outlet” for the client’s Memorial Impulse.
10
Cremation
Cremation is not an end in itself, but the process which prepares the human remains for inurnment in a beautiful and everlasting memorial.
—CREMATION ASSOCIATION OF NORTH AMERICA
Nationwide, there has been a phenomenal growth in cremation since The American Way of Death was first published. In 1961, 3.75 percent of the American dead were cremated; by 1995, 21 percent and rising.
Preference for cremation varies greatly from region to region. In 1993 (the last date for which a state-by-state breakdown is available) Mississippi had the lowest cremation rate, 2.6 percent; and Nevada the highest, with 58 percent. In general, all the Southern states with the exception of Florida (40 percent) have very low cremation figures. Midwest are medium low; New England, fairly high, West Coast, high.
While national and state statistics