Free The American Way of Death Revisited by Jessica Mitford Page B

professions, including the work of the cemeteries, newspapers, and, of course, the most important of all, the service of your clergyman. These some 120 hours of labor are the basic value on which the cost of funerals rests.”
    Our informant has lumped a lot of things together here. To start with “the most important of all, the service of your clergyman”: the average religious funeral service lasts no more than twenty-five minutes. Furthermore, it is not, of course, paid for by the funeral director. The “work of the cemeteries” presumably means the opening and closing of a grave. This now mechanized operation, which takes fifteen to twenty minutes, is likewise not billed as part of the funeral director’s costs. The work of “newspapers”? This is a puzzler. Presumably, reference is made here to the publication of an obituary notice on the vital statistics page. It is, incidentally, surprising to learn that newspaper work is considered an “allied profession.”
    Just how insurance, taxes, licenses, and depreciation are figured in as part of the 120 man-hours of service is hard to tell. The writer does mention that his operation features “65 items of service.” In general, the funeral salesman is inclined to chuck in everything he does under the heading of “service.” For example, in a typical list of “services” he will include items like “securing statistical data” (in other words, completing the death certificate and finding out how much insurance was left by the deceased), the “arrangements conference” (in which the sale of the funeral to the survivors is made), and the “keeping of records,” by which he means his own bookkeeping work. Evidently, there is some confusion here between items that properly belong in a cost-accounting system and items of actual service rendered in any given funeral. In all likelihood, the idle time of employees is figured in and prorated as part of the “man-hours.” The up-to-date funeral home operates on a twenty-four-hour basis, and the prepared speech contains this heartening news:
    The funeral service profession of the United States is proud of the fact that there is not a person within the continental limitsof the United States who is more than two hours away from a licensed funeral director and embalmer. That’s one that even the fire-fighting apparatus of our country cannot match.
    While the hit-or-miss rhetoric of the foregoing is fairly typical of the prose style of the funeral trade as a whole, and while the statement that 120 man-hours are devoted to a single funeral may be open to question, there really is a fantastic amount of service accorded the dead body and its survivors.
    Having decreed what sort of funeral is right, proper, and nice, and having gradually appropriated to himself all the functions connected with it, the funeral director has become responsible for a multitude of tasks—beyond the obvious one of “placing corpse in the coffin” recorded in our nineteenth-century funeral bill. His self-imposed duties fall into two main categories: attention to the corpse itself, and the stage-managing of the funeral.
    The drama begins to unfold with the arrival of the corpse at the mortuary.
    Alas, poor Yorick! How surprised he would be to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor and is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged, and neatly dressed—transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture. This process is known in the trade as embalming and restorative art, and is so universally employed in the United States and Canada that for years the funeral director did it routinely, without consulting corpse or kin. He regards as eccentric those few who are hardy enough to suggest that it might be dispensed with. Yet no law requires embalming, no religious doctrine commends it, nor is it dictated by considerations of health, sanitation, or even