The American Way of Death Revisited - Jessica Mitford [86]
Funeral people are always saying that “funerals are for the living,” yet there is occasional evidence that they have developed an eerie affection, a genuine solicitude, for the dead, in whose company they spend so much time. It is as though they really attribute feelings to these mute remains of humanity, much as a small child attributes feelings to his teddy bear; as though they are actually concerned with the comfort and well-being of the bodies entrusted to their care. A 1921 issue of The Casket describes a chemical which, “when sprayed into the mouth of a cadaver, prevents and stops the development of pyorrhea.” And California is one of several states where it is a penal offense to use “profane, indecent or obscene language” in the presence of a dead human body.
When the funeral practitioner puts pen to paper on his favorite subject, the results are truly dreamy flights of rhapsody. Mr. John H. Eckels says in his textbook Mortuary Science that “the American method of arterial embalming … adds another laurel to the crown of inventiveness, ingenuity, and scientific research which the world universally accords to us.… In fact, there is no profession on record which has made such rapid advancement in this country as embalming.… In summing up this whole situation, the funeral profession today is one of the most vital callings in the cause of humanity. Funeral directors are the advance guards of civilization.…” These vivid metaphors, these laurels, crowns and advance guards, express with peculiar appropriateness the modern undertaker’s fond conception of his work and himself. How to generate equal enthusiasm in the minds of the public for the “funeral profession” is a more difficult problem.
Mr. Edward A. Martin, author of Psychology of Funeral Service, sees undertakers in a role “similar to that of a school teacher who knows and believes in his subject but who must find attractive ways to impress it indelibly upon his pupils. Our class consists of more than 150 million Americans, and the task of educating them is one that cannot be accomplished overnight.” He adds, “Public opinion is based on the education of the public, which believes what it is told.”
There is some evidence that while this great pedagogical process has taken hold most strongly among the funeral men themselves, it has left the public either apathetic or downright hostile. In other words, the funeral men live very largely in a dreamworld of their own making about the “acceptance” of their product in the public mind. They seem to feel that saying something often and loudly enough will somehow make it true. “Sentiment alone is the foundation of our profession,” they cry. “The new funeral director is a Doctor of Grief, or expert in returning abnormal minds to normal in the shortest possible time!”
But the public goes merrily on its way, thinking (when it thinks of the matter at all) that moneymaking is the foundation of the funeral trade, that the matter of returning abnormal minds to normal is best left in the hands of trained psychiatrists, that it has neither been asked for nor voiced its approval of modern funeral practices. There are really two parts to the particular selling job confronting the funeral industry. The first is that of convincing people of the correctness and essential Americanism of the kind of funeral the industry wants to sell; convincing them, too, that in funerary matters there is an obligation to adhere closely to standards and procedures established by the funeral directors—who, after all, should know best about these things. The second is that of projecting an ever more exalted image of the purveyors of funerals.
Funeral men constantly seek to justify the style and cost of their product on the basis of “tradition,