The American Way of Death Revisited - Jessica Mitford [69]
The specter of all those uncoffined bodies going into the retort most directly threatens the casket manufacturers, who as a result have thrown their own considerable resources into the fray. The Batesville Casket Company, “the world’s largest,” has produced a widely distributed four-color Cremation Options brochure. The “options” narrowly defined are two in number: a funeral service to be followed by cremation, or a funeral service after the cremation. Your choice: salad before or salad after the entrée. Casket manufacturers—who recently had regarded the urn business as no more than a sideline—have now gone into it whole hog. Batesville offers a dazzling array of products topped by an “art-urn” line featuring elaborately sculpted pieces such as a seascape with leaping dolphins. Also available are urns crafted in bronze, wood, “semi-precious metals,” glass, and “true marble.”
A “scattering urn” is offered for those who might wish to, yes, scatter some of the ash as from a saltshaker and preserve the rest for display on the mantelpiece. The wholesale price range for Batesville’s art-urn line is $70 to $575, which translates to $450 to $1,695 for the customer making his or her selection in the undertaking parlor.
Funeral directors, facing cruel necessity, are also learning to adapt. Some of the more go-ahead mortuaries will provide a “rental casket” for the temporary display of the embalmed body during visiting hours. According to the CANA Special Report of the cremations performed in 1995 which were preceded by a service with the body on display, no less than 28 percent involved the use of a rented casket. As might be expected, accommodation for the dead is far more costly than for the living. The rental cost for the one or two days’ occupancy runs from $600 to $800 a pop, which would pay for an untroubled weekend in a resort hotel.
Since rental caskets are indefinitely reusable—the inert occupant causing no wear and tear, it’s in the funeral director’s interest to provide merchandise of good quality for the display of the corpse; finished hardwood is a favorite. The removable interiors cost the funeral director less than $100, and—doubling his investment on the very first rental—he can rent the casket again and again.
When in 1995 Massachusetts passed a law permitting rentals, there was an outcry from the trade that the practice might spread disease, “especially where body fluids are spilled in casket containers.” Not to worry, said health officials, because rentals can be fitted with new cloth and cardboard liners each time they are used. Some Massachusetts funeral directors quickly got the picture. With such an extravagant return on inventory kept in perpetual use, they are now urging survivors to consider rental units in preference to low-cost cremation containers.
Not only is cremation discouraged, even hampered, by the funeral industry, but once all impediments have been overcome, the ghouls who had formerly pursued the corpse now lust for the ashes. The natural impulse of survivors to scatter ashes or bury them in a garden or other favored spot has for years been frustrated in California, if not elsewhere, by laws that prohibit the disposition of cremated remains on private or public property. The widespread impact of this cruel restriction is illustrated in a recent (1997) instance where 5,200 boxes of cremated remains, entrusted to a pilot hired to scatter them at sea, were discovered in a storage locker and an airplane hangar.
If you can’t sell an urn, why not turn the ashes over to a flying service for sea scattering? Seems fair. But is it? Here again, the byword is follow the money. The dozens of mortuaries that collected $100 to $200 from the survivors for the service paid the poor wretch who was to do the scattering an average of $30 to $60. None of them took the trouble to ascertain whether their instructions were actually carried out. Using median numbers, it will be seen that the mortuaries realized, among