Does This Mean You'll See Me Naked? (11 page)

I'm no detective, but it quickly became obvious that she was covering up for her boyfriend. I was puzzled as to why the two were even allowed on the street, since any child's home death is always suspected as a possible murder. I had to commend the child's father for his restraint. I was tempted to allow my old-school neighborhood justice to kick in; take the boyfriend out to the garage; beat him senseless with a baseball bat; and explain to the investigating authorities, “He must have fallen down on the garage floor.” But the coward was eventually taken into custody, and from what I heard later, he definitely received his fair reward in prison. Inmates have children too, and they usually despise child killers.

A divorced forty-five-year-old woman wailed and sobbed over the death of her twenty-two-year-old daughter, the victim of an auto accident. The girl had been riding with an inebriated male friend who ran the car off the roadway and into a strand of trees. The impact ejected both from the vehicle. The male was thrown clear and landed softly in the confines of a farmer's freshly plowed field. But the girl flipped in midair and was hurled back-first into a century-old tree trunk. The trajectory and speed of impact tore her heart from its moorings and resulted in her death approximately ninety seconds later.

Except for a few minor cuts on her face from the windshield, the twenty-two-year-old was very viewable. After filling the cuts with wax, followed by some Mary Kay cosmetics, she was easily restored to her former appearance. When I escorted her mother into the funeral home chapel, I could feel her knees buckling and her whole body begin to tremble. She asked for a chair so that she might sit in front of her daughter's casket. But after a few moments of silence, she began what sounded like a chant. She recited, “She's gonna get up; she's gonna get up,” over and over, sometimes increasing in volume, as if to summon the Lord above to again breathe life into her reposing daughter.

The National Funeral Directors Association estimates the average funeral bill at nearly $8,000, including funeral services; a steel casket; a burial vault; and certain other items, such as cemetery charges, the obituary, and flowers. Obviously, when limited services are performed or when the customer selects direct cremation, the cost is much lower. But it turns out that a funeral bill is the third largest lump-sum expense a consumer faces in life: you buy a house, you buy a car, and you get stuck with a funeral bill.

Most consumers have a pretty good idea of what they should pay for a home, and most of us purchase cars more often than we arrange for a funeral, so we are fairly knowledgeable about new vehicle prices. So why don't consumers know anything at all about funeral prices? Because we do not want to consider the death of our loved ones. We abhor the thought and attempt to block it out of our minds. “We never discussed death in our family” and “We just never talked about such things”—those are refrains I have heard so many times over the years when I sit down with a family to make funeral arrangements. We are afraid of death and deny it in our society.

After I published my first book, I contacted
AARP: The Magazine
to inquire about running an advertisement to sell my book to their members and readers. The advertising manager told me that the magazine published no advertising relating to death in any manner. I said perhaps “he had his head in the sand” by denying the inevitable. He said the magazine desired advertising that was positive for seniors and that promoting a book about death and end-of-life issues would be too much of a downer for senior readers.

Whether or not it's a downer, at some point we all have to come to terms with what we're going to do with our loved ones.

IT'S NOT A COFFIN

Burying a dead human body deep in the ground has always been the best way to rid society of a potentially serious physical and psychological health hazard. Leaving it outdoors to be ravaged by nature's elements seems repulsive and disrespectful to us. The strong stench, the bloating, the rapid liquefaction, the insect and small animal activity, the rampant bacterial growth, and the possibility of disease have all moved us to dispose of our dead as quickly and efficiently as possible. That usually means depositing the body either several feet beneath the earth's surface or in a tightly sealed, above-ground crypt.

The deceased loved one is the focal point of any funeral, yet much attention is given to the stately steel or wooden container where the deceased is reposing. In most cases, the deceased is nattily attired and posed as if sleeping in a bedlike box designed to look attractive and comfortable. That bedlike box is a casket,
not
a coffin.

In the death-care field, we distinguish between the terms
coffin
and
casket
. To us, a coffin is a wooden box that is wide at the shoulders and narrow at the hips, a style last used in the 1930s. Count Dracula slept in a coffin, and cabinetmakers in the Wild West made coffins. To a funeral director, the term
coffin
is as outdated and inappropriate as referring to an automobile as a horseless carriage.

Today's caskets are mostly the same design as in the l930s, but they are usually constructed of sheet metal and designed to emulate the look of costly, handcrafted hardwood caskets. An abundance of steel forging and automobile manufacturing techniques have made their way into casket making. Current innovations include more ornate interiors, pinstripes, and special corner applications for the exterior, but the rectangular box of steel, copper, bronze, or hardwood we are familiar with today has not changed very drastically over the past seventy years.

The casket, then, can be constructed of the most rustic materials or the most expensive metals—and anything in between. Just like cars, casket offerings start out as basic squares with few frills and can become elaborately crafted units with velvet interiors and leather-wrapped carrying handles.

TYPICAL RETAIL PRICE RANGES OF CASKETS

Cloth-covered wood $300–$500

20-gauge steel (non-sealer) $500–$995

18-gauge steel (sealer) $1,200–$3,800

16-gauge steel (sealer) $3,900–$6,500

Stainless steel (sealer) $3,500–$7,000

Solid copper (sealer) $4,400–$9,500

Solid bronze (sealer) $4,500–$17,000

Solid bronze with 14-carat gold plating $29,000–$35,000

TYPICAL RETAIL PRICE RANGES OF WOOD CASKETS

Selected hardwood veneers $1,600–$3,400

Solid pecan $3,200–$3,800

Solid maple $3,200–$5,000

Solid oak $2,900–$5,000

Solid cherry $3,500–$7,500

Solid mahogany $7,500–$9,500

The cheapest caskets are made of thick cardboard or particleboard and covered with doeskin. Their interiors are fitted with low-grade crepe and cotton wadding, with correspondingly inexpensive pillows. Such caskets are used for both in-ground burials and pre-cremation viewings. They are sometimes referred to as paupers' caskets, as some funeral homes also use them for indigent decedents when they expect little or no payment.

Cloth-covered wood is the next step up, with particleboard covered in blue-, gray-, or burgundy-embossed cloth. The interiors of these are also inexpensive, and sometimes they have a filler of wood shavings in lieu of bedding, which is covered by the interior material. Still featured in funeral homes' display rooms, they serve a useful purpose—they are readily burnable when cremation follows a visitation and they look so cheap that families turn away in horror and instantly upgrade to more expensive models.

The next category of caskets is twenty-gauge steel. Gauges range from twenty, the thinnest, to eighteen and sixteen, the thickest and therefore the most expensive. All twenty-gauge caskets are virtually shaped the same but are available in a variety of exterior and interior colors. As prices rise, trim options increase as well—two-tone color schemes, better interior materials, and even swing bar handles on the outside.

The most basic twenty-gauge is a non-sealer, in which the lid has a small metal catch that attaches to a corresponding hole in the front when closed. In contrast, a sealer casket features a seamless rubber gasket attached to the upper portion of the box. When the lid is closed, a crank is inserted into a hole at the right-side foot of the casket and the lid is closed via an internal gear system that forces the lid against the rubber gasket, thus rendering the casket permanently closed. Some twenty-gauge caskets; most all eighteen- and sixteen-gauge steel caskets; and all stainless steel, copper, and bronze caskets are “sealers.” Customers choose sealers more often because funeral directors tell them that the casket becomes air- and watertight, thus forestalling the process of decay.

I have often questioned whether this system accomplishes an actual seal—and the Federal Trade Commission has asked itself the same thing. The FTC now instructs funeral directors to inform families that a sealer casket equipped with a rubber gasket is
resistant
to air and water. At far too many mausoleums in mid-July, I've experienced a pungent bouquet emanating from those sealers. What's more, a sealer casket isn't that important, since nearly all cemeteries require that the casket be placed into a burial vault (more on that a bit later).

The next level of casket, and the most popular one, is eighteen-gauge steel. Most casket sales from the 1970s to the present have been eighteen-gauge-steel selections. Most grieving families do not want to appear cheap, and this medium-priced model fits the bill nicely. I have probably heard the following a thousand times: “We don't want the best, but we don't want the cheapest either. Show us something priced in the middle.”

Virtually every color (and combination of colors) is available in the eighteen-gauge selection, as well as interior upgrades, such as velvet, tailoring, and head cap panels (the interior lid panel at the head of the casket), custom-designed with any theme imaginable. Funeral homes generally employ a 150 percent markup to arrive at that retail figure—but I've heard tales of some funeral homes charging four or even five times their wholesale price. The majority of funeral homes nationwide offer reasonably priced, affordable eighteen-gauge steel caskets, and such caskets have become the benchmarks of successful sales.

Today's shaky economy has had a tremendous impact on casket sales. In the 1970s and l980s, employers used to provide company-paid life insurance, which included coverage for funeral expenses. But today most employers have dropped that benefit. The salad days of the funeral business are gone. Before customers didn't have to worry about how much to spend at the funeral home, and I can recall many occasions when folks stopped by to pay the funeral bill riding in their new car, courtesy of life insurance proceeds. Consumers are obviously more cost conscious today, and a growing majority have to pay funeral costs out of their own pockets. This trend has spawned a great push in marketing lower-cost, twenty-gauge-steel caskets, the thinnest gauge available. The major casket manufacturers are introducing a vast array of choices in the inexpensive line to capture sales of any kind. Extravagant and expensive funerals are on the decline even in traditional Bible Belt strongholds, and many more families are considering what would have been unthinkable to them a generation ago: cremation.

The high-end casket market still exists, though, and it includes stainless steel, copper, and bronze. In the 1970s, the major casket manufacturers, Batesville Casket Company and Aurora Casket Company, encouraged funeral directors to aggressively market the high-end units. They devised ingenious marketing tools and materials for funeral home owners, to demonstrate the durability of high-end caskets to customers.

Stainless-steel caskets, the next step upward, indicate quality, and the eye appeal often more than justifies the price increase. Stainless-steel caskets were touted as the obvious choice of material to wise housewives back in the day—they knew that the same stainless steel was used to make long-lasting knives, forks, and spoons in the kitchen at home. A framed advertising featuring a beautiful apron-clad homemaker was placed in stainless-steel caskets to appeal to women venturing into the casket-selection room. The beautiful homemaker was shown holding a wooden, velvet-lined utensil case to demonstrate that stainless steel was the ultimate material for durability.

Copper and bronze caskets, the most expensive and most profitable sales for funeral homes, have received a great deal more marketing attention than stainless-steel ones. Copper and bronze do not rust. Casket companies emphasize that point in their promotional materials in hopes that intelligent and progressive funeral directors will impart such information to families and push on them the belief that the body contained therein would be unaffected. Casket companies used to provide funeral directors with small copper and bronze samples to display inside caskets so that consumers could touch them and imagine how genuinely protected their deceased loved ones would be. The Statue of Liberty, constructed of copper, was a popular lithograph displayed in caskets to tout copper's durability, as were photos of copper gutters on expensive homes.

Casket companies also advise funeral directors to strategically position an expensive unit right inside the selection-room door. Casket makers recommend that the first casket the consumer notice be a copper or bronze model, because 75 percent of the time, men select the first casket they see. It's assumed that men do this because they like to seem decisive and in control. In reality, though, I think that men walk into the selection room and point to the first casket that catches their eye just so they can get out of the room. Women, however, tend to shop for caskets with a greater degree of deliberation: they compare prices, feel the interior material, ask questions, even lay the burial garments of the deceased inside a casket to make sure the color combination is just right. Mom's periwinkle suit must pick up the navy of the casket's interior; Dad's camel sports coat must match the tan pillow. Yet it's still a man's world at the funeral home; the majority of male-headed households leave the casket choice to the man of the house.

A solid copper casket has been the holy grail sale for funeral directors since the 1950s. I recall as a fifteen-year-old hearing tales of that elusive but finally consummated copper sale. The successful funeral director would be beside himself with pride, relating to his wide-eyed peers just how he'd accomplished his feat: “They were looking real hard at the eighteen-gauge bronze tone, but then they turned around and told me they liked the copper, because it would never rust!”

My supervisor many years ago was a classy, white-haired gentleman, a sharp dresser, and a genuinely nice person. He sold more copper caskets in a single year than anyone I have ever known, and when he did, he would announce, “I sold a copper—again.” That pause before
again
was probably a motivational tool to encourage us peons to hawk something better than eighteen gauges.