Does This Mean You'll See Me Naked? (17 page)

Not treating families with dignity and respect can spell a huge loss of business. One morning, a woman called the funeral home and asked if it was possible for me to go to a competing funeral home and retrieve her mother's body so that I could complete the funeral arrangements. I questioned her about changing funeral homes. She said that her mother had died in bed on the second floor of her residence. The funeral home was called to the scene, and two gentlemen arrived to make the removal. The daughter stated that the house was full of family members, including small children and a few neighbors who had come over to express their sympathy. The daughter asked one of the funeral home's personnel about the cost of a funeral and was told, “If you have to ask the price, then maybe you should just cremate your mother.”

That comment obviously did not sit well. The mortuary cot would not fit up the narrow staircase, so the funeral home personnel left the cot at the bottom of the stairs and proceeded to the bedroom with a sheet. Instead of wrapping the nude deceased in the available bedding, they merely placed a sheet on her and began to carry her to the cot.

As they made their way down the stairs, one of them accidentally stepped on the sheet and totally exposed the deceased to all who had assembled in the home, small children and neighbors alike. That was the last straw for the daughter. She ordered the funeral home personnel to immediately cover her deceased mother and take her back upstairs and place her back into her bed. They refused and said that, since they were almost out the door, they would take her to the funeral home and call the family later. One of the neighbors knew me and suggested that the family call me and that I would handle the situation with dignity and respect. I did just that.

Of course, dignity and respect mean nothing if you don't have the right body. A young lady called the funeral home one morning and explained that her twenty-three-year-old sister had tragically died and that the body was located in the county morgue. The young lady further explained that the family was of limited means and requested the best possible price I could offer.

After supplying her many service options, we agreed on a suitable arrangement. I assured the woman that I would ask the county morgue about her late sister's release time and meet with her family within the hour. I called the coroner's office to arrange for the proper time to remove the deceased from the facility and was told that no one by that name was there, that perhaps another funeral home had already made the removal.

I replied that the family of the deceased was in my presence, and that they hadn't called another funeral home. “She must be lost,” said the representative, in an attempt at some humor. I was assured that the coroner's office would “keep looking.” The family left, not knowing where their deceased sister might be and left me wondering the same.

In the meantime, a woman in her fifties was being disinterred from a cemetery only hours after she had been buried that same day. A man who lived next door to the cemetery, and coincidentally had just attended the woman's burial service, noticed the disinterment process, walked over to the grave site, and questioned the cemetery personnel. The gravedigger informed the neighbor that they had buried the wrong person and were digging that person up so the coroner's office could come to the scene and take the body back to their facility. How such news travels so fast, and how the twenty-three-year-old's family heard about the disinterment, I'll never know.

Yet the young woman's sister called me and began to tell me that she knew it was her sister who had been mistakenly buried. I found her story extremely hard to fathom, so I told her I would look into the situation right away. I called the cemetery and was in fact informed that another funeral home had mistakenly retrieved the body of the twenty-three-year-old from the morgue. The other funeral home had been contacted to provide funeral services for the lady in her fifties, but the morgue personnel had mislabeled the pouch that contained the body. The other funeral home did not unzip that pouch to verify identification. So the deceased twenty-three year-old had in fact been mistakenly buried in the cemetery, disinterred, and returned to the morgue.

One of the ways I guard against mistakes is continuity. The funeral process goes like this: the disposition arrangements for a visitation and funeral service or cremation are made; the service takes place, and we head for the cemetery. Myself or my immediate family arranges all the links in this chain. At some of my previous places of employment, the same person didn't even handle certain key events. One person might make the removal, another might arrange services, another might attend the visitation, and yet another might drive the lead car to the cemetery. When several providers attend to events with no continuity, I'm sure the family feels shortchanged and dehumanized. That is why I see to it that either myself or a family member attends personally to all death-care details with any bereaved family.

WHAT IF YOU'RE HIT BY A BUS ON THE WAY HOME?

The funeral industry, like all enterprises, definitely has its share of bad apples. Terrible scenarios abound—from cremating the wrong body to cremating more than one body at a time or even cremating a human and a pet in the same retort and clear cases of taking financial advantage of vulnerable elderly.

A close competitor was caught off guard by a local television news team working on an undercover story about price gouging. The team had caught dubious acts on tape, an inadvertent demonstration of how the funeral director intentionally steered consumers toward expensive high-end caskets in his display room.

Some operators write down license-plate numbers of cemetery visitors, then call them later to sell grave spaces, burial vaults, caskets, or markers. Another ploy is to insist that the entire family of the deceased come to the cemetery and sign a form to verify the grave, even if it has already been owned for many years. Once the family arrives, they attempt to hawk additional graves, mausoleum crypts, markers, vaults, and caskets. In cases of immediate or direct cremation, families are often told that they must purchase expensive hardwood versions—which is not true. Some operators introduce high-pressure, commissioned salespeople as grief or family-service counselors in an attempt to sanitize their image. In reality, they are more like used-car salesmen, and their pitches border on the unbelievable: “Since we are all going to die, you had better buy from us today,” or “What if you get hit by a bus on the way home, and you aren't prepared?” Those present might also be encouraged to purchase their own graves right on the spot, so they can “enjoy eternal rest together as a family.” If they meet that suggestion with resistance, the “counselor” then scolds the family and acts surprised that they would want their loved ones “buried next to a bunch of strangers.”

A memorial park operation in my area has put on some memorable sales-generating events, offering a free Butterball frozen turkey to anyone who comes by to view the property or restaurant gift cards to those willing to listen to pitches describing the newest sections. (As with any major purchase, do not go to a cemetery sales conference alone.) Since people are always happy to accept freebies, another ploy that has worked well is to offer a free grave for any veteran whose spouse has paid full price. Of course, after fees and taxes, full price for the second grave is the price of two graves anyway. The most targeted group is senior citizens, who already are hit hard by phone solicitations for replacement windows, credit cards, and new mortgages—and now cold-calling cemeteries.

The mean-spirited news media love to rake the funeral industry over the coals, and many national headlines are sordid enough to justify scrutiny. The recent crematory scandal in Georgia is one example. An operator was found to be leaving bodies to rot in sheds instead of cremating them because the cremation chamber was allegedly inoperable. He kept the scam going by presenting people with containers of dirt rather than the cremains of their loved ones.

BODY SNATCHING AND GRAVE ROBBING

Part of the reason reporters relish such scary stories is our industry's checkered past—coupled with the fact that we deal with people at their most helpless. In the classic movie
House of Wax
, the proprietor of a wax museum (Vincent Price) is horribly disfigured in an accident, so his hands are not as capable as they once were. Since he is no longer able to craft his wax figures, he resorts to stealing bodies from cemeteries. But the bodies, he discovers, are more decomposed than he would like, so he turns to murder and later retrieves his victims from the local morgue. The fresh kills are then covered in wax, making for very realistic museum fixtures. Perfect horror fare—to the average person, it's believable.

Body snatching and grave robbing were once the only ways for medical schools to obtain specimens for study and dissection. In Cincinnati in the 1800s, one man was notorious for supplying prolific corpses. He would take out his wagon nearly every night to frequent not only small cemeteries but also Spring Grove, the second largest in the United States at the time and the burial spot of many famous Cincinnatians. At $25 per body, he developed quite a business.

Although the authorities were aware of his actions, they did little to stop him until he removed a seven-year-old child from her grave and her corpse was spotted lying in the grave robber's wagon. This act was hideous enough to prompt the state to enact legislation to allow hospitals to solicit family members' permission to acquire their loved ones' dead bodies.

A California medical school was in the news recently for allegedly conducting a scheme to sell human body parts. They removed hearts, lungs, kidneys, and even eyes from donated bodies and retained them in formalin-filled jars for future study. It was discovered, however, that many parts were being shipped elsewhere, still in their preservative states. Other medical schools and even some peculiar individuals were buying human organs.

Someone close to the case reportedly said that private purchasers were displaying the parts on bookshelves as macabre conversation pieces. Someone from New Jersey even requested a complete pristine human brain. It was to be sealed and shipped in a preservative-filled container. But it was packed improperly, and the odor was detected in the shipping service's warehouse. With the return address marked clearly on the label and a small amount of detective work, the jig was up.

Since vital organs for transplantation must be removed before death and under sterile conditions, the organ snatchers were clearly profiting by operating a human chop shop—sort of like stripping stolen cars and selling off the parts. Some local coroners' offices have been admonished for removing the corneas of decedents without the relatives' permission. And in Cincinnati, a photographer was charged with abuse when he visited a morgue to shoot pictures of corpses holding such objects as keys and musical sheets and then calling it “art.” Family members were repulsed—and very angry.

In the early 1980s, I was a member of a committee that coordinated the disposition of mass casualties after natural and human-error disasters. In the three years I served, no such disaster occurred, so I never used my training. But we were shown videos from two separate airline crashes that shocked me—not because of the utter destruction but because of the actions of the first responders.

Some were firefighters and police officers; others were merely gawkers who happened on the scene and were put to work. They were spotted, plain as day, plucking watches and rings from severed arms and emptying cash from wallets. After they jammed the money into their pockets, they tossed the wallets back on the ground to be discovered later for identification purposes.

A more detailed response is no doubt in force today, as such a disaster would be deemed a crime scene and therefore more vigorously secured. Still, I have witnessed many thefts at accident sites over the years, ranging from a police officer snatching a pack of cigarettes from a victim's shirt pocket to actually removing money. The police pull a wallet from someone's pants pocket to establish identity through a driver's license, so I suppose that makes it incredibly easy to make a “withdrawal.” Bereaved families have complained to me that they know money was stolen, but they lack any way to prove it. That's why I always make sure that a minister or family member is in the chapel with me at a funeral's conclusion, so that when the casket is closed, anything that is to stay with the deceased stays there—keepsakes, photographs, or money. If any item is to be handed back to a family member, it is done so immediately and in the presence of a witness.

When making funeral arrangements, the topic of jewelry is always discussed in detail beforehand to ensure that all desires are carried out. When meeting with the elderly, I have noticed that they emphatically insist that all jewelry worn by the deceased be returned. Many of them assume that the funeral director is planning to abscond with any valuables. Such atrocities must have occurred frequently years ago, because that concern seems to be paramount in their minds.

Only a generation ago funeral directors were notorious for stealing. One director friend told me that a coworker back in the 1950s earned a substantial living on the side by removing gold fillings and inlaid crowns (the real McCoy back then, not the plated material used today) from the teeth of decedents awaiting burial. He even claimed that the families gave him permission to do so!

I once delivered a deceased person to a funeral home in northern Ohio, and upon my arrival, the elderly owner offered to give me a tour of his facility. As we casually trod through the grand old mansion, he pointed out the impressive curved staircase, the stained-glass windows, and the thick carpet that had been delivered by a London manufacturer in 1949. The tour's end found us in a dark, dingy basement that housed the preparation room and a cubicle that contained shelf after shelf of unclaimed boxes of cremated remains. On the opposite wall were several plastic bins full of bloody clothing. On each bin was a typewritten sheet giving a full description of the contents and how they came to be soiled. Why someone would keep bins full of biohazardous material on their premises was beyond me, yet this gentleman seemed proud to show off his collection. He then pointed to a large box full of old hearing aids and another full of chrome-plated heart pacemakers. He told me he planned to sell the medical devices back to the manufacturers someday and net a tidy profit. I left shortly thereafter, thinking that the guy definitely needed to seek qualified psychiatric help.