Ultimate consumerism
I’m reading Final Rights: Reclaiming the American Way of Death by our own dear Joshua Slocum and Lisa Carlson. It’s very good and very infuriating.
The situation is the totally familiar one of an industry straining every nerve and pulling every string to winkle more dollars out of other people’s pockets into its own, but in a context where doing so allows a lot of really nasty forms of manipulation – like creating a bogus “requirement” to view the body and then saying “wouldn’t you prefer to see her in an upgraded” vastly more expensive box?
There’s a weird strain of hilarity behind the whole thing – the basic idea of buying an expensive box that’s going to be buried in the ground. There’s one quoted item of PR-speak that refers to the body “nestling” in whatever it is. Nestling?
One thing I didn’t know is that in most places there are a lot more funeral outfits than are needed, and given that there’s no legitimate way to expand the market, the only way to survive is to inflate the prices. With shoes or hamburgers or phones, you can just market the bejeezis out of them and sell more and more and more, but there’s no way to sell more and more and more burials.
Maybe they should consider that. Reburial every few years, just like getting new appliances and granite counter tops. The living room looks a little dull and drab, time for new curtains and a lick of paint. Same thing with the ancestors.
Your idea of ‘Reburial’ is likely to be picked up in short order. However, ‘re-viewing’ might not catch on, you think?
Re-burial and re-viewing. LOLOLOL! Just wait until you read the extract Ophelia’s going to put up shortly. And people ask how it’s possible to keep the fun in funerals. . .
Thanks so much for the plug, O!
Oh dear, I just caught what you did and it’s busting me up.
What, we can’t dump ’em in the Thames?
The modern burial business is enough to make you want to tie a chain around your ankles and jump into the ocean, and save your loved ones the whole ordeal. Or, at least make you want to convince your loved ones to jump in the ocean and save YOU the ordeal. One or the other.
My wife will understand when I have her cremated in a cardboard box for $900 and take the rest of the cash and buy a new guitar with it. Well… she would if she weren’t already dead, and that’s the point isn’t it? It is a dead body! Who cares what you do with it as long as you’re not leaving it out to rot where kids my step in it?
Man, they can just bury me in the bare, clean earth and plant an apple tree on me. Might as well do someone some good, make sure the biomass gives someone some lunch later on.
i was listening to phone-in callers to RTE Radio 1 only recently, concerning funeral expenses. The callers were giving out yards about extra hidden charges they were being forced to fork out for their deceased ones.
One caller had an extra bill sent to her solicitor for the solo music that was played by the organist in the church, despite being a member of the choir and giving free service to the church for over twenty years. The choir-mistress who expected this payment, was also using the organ and the church free of charge. The caller was utterly disgusted that the church could treat her in such a despicable manner. She stopped her free singing services as a result.
I wish you all the best with your new book, Josh.
Very funny, Ms O
Still, when one is dead, any way to get rid of the useless carcase is okay by me. If the survivors want to throw away $, maybe for show, that’s their business, but it sure seems a waste for a repeat performance. Maybe a gift of parts no longer needed (ASAP) to those who are still in need, instead? A cardboard box is okay, too, or whatever is legal, i.e. the dead won’t know – or care.
Josh: Are ‘eco’ funerals becoming big business there? There is certainly movement in that direction on this side of the pond.
I’d still like to have a dungeon built around my body, with traps and terrible monsters. Then spread rumors that there was tremendous treasure buried with me in order to lure adventurers to my grave. What sort of monster for the boss fight though? Hmmm….
Josh,
:- )
If possible I want to be eaten by pigs. I’ve eaten so many of them (and enjoyed doing so) that I think it only fair that they should get the chance to eat me.
Well “they” won’t get the chance to eat you…
Not that it’s not a sweet thought!
:- D
clod – there’s a “green burial” chapter, never fear.
I hate the thought of funeral directors taking advantage of people’s grief and guilt.
It’s crackle crackle for me. Then the ashes scattered over, oh, I don’t know, the town dump, maybe? I don’t care, I’ll be dead. Whatever the spousal unit needs for closure, assuming I go first.
Nesting!? Why am I tempted to write a zombie short story titled “Empty Nest Syndrome” all of the sudden?
Josh is far too modest and well-mannered to point this out, but his organization, the Funeral Consumers Association, sells some “Before You Go” planning kits (with Gorey illustrations!) that look very handy. I just ordered two.
Heck. I’ve already stepped in front of the proverbial bus once. Next time I might not be so lucky. Stuff happens, and it only makes sense to get one’s wishes in order. Not that it’s going to matter to me all that much, but I figure that my recorded wishes are the best defense against any funeral home’s attempt at upselling.
Mostly I just don’t want my survivors to stress out over my remains. But my blue-sky wishes? I like to imagine an all-bicycle jazz funeral clogging the streets as my posthumous “screw you” to car culture, followed by a formaldehyde-free burial of whatever parts can’t be donated. And if I ever get around to a particular art project I’ve been thinking of, I’d love to have part of it buried with me: cast-glass panels with poems, mathematics, and other works of Western civilization, made to be readable a few thousand years from now. What grave goods could be better than that?
Nathan:
Giant Spider. It’s Traditional!
I think Jewish funerals, the rule is a plain, unembellished box.
Me, I want a giant, raptor sized bird–say a condor, or like that, to collect my corpse and deposit me in the canopy of the rain forest.
I meant raptor size in the prehistoric, Jurassic sense. Obviously.
I am told that in this part of rural Virginia it’s not entirely unknown for someone to arrive at the local crematorium with granny’s remains in the bed of the pickup truck. No box,no swaddling clothes just granny’s relict……..can’t get a plainer funeral than that.
Hey, the raptor is an alluring idea. Maybe I’ll leave instructions to have me cut up for the eagles and ospreys.
Well sailor the book informs us that in some places the funeral industry has been able to get laws passed against transporting a body in anything but a hearse.
My husband hasn’t given me any clue to where he wants his remains scattered — it’s the big fire for both of us — so I’ll have to improvise something. I’ve suggested I want my remains scattered in a subduction trench, so they can either become mantle rock or contribute to the magma of a volcano. I want to participate in some BIG geology. :-)
Squee!! It’s such a treat to get featured on B&W!!!!
Just returned from a nightmare of reformatting my hard drive. A couple of things:
1. Yes, “green” burial is becoming a bigger business proposition here. One of my chief concerns is the “boutiquing” of what is, after all, simply a choice not to buy unnecessary embalming, caskets, and vaults. The industry is trying to use the same psychology that gets you to spend twice as much on half as many unbleached coffee filters as bleached ones – jack the price and make the consumer feel virtuous. Don’t be fooled. And yeah, there’s a chapter on it in the book:)
2. For those of you who say – “Just put me under an apple tree,” OK. Fine. But what you don’t know is that your kids/spouses/friends end up on the phone with me at my office every day in tears because you didn’t do any funeral planning. You made glib jokes, but you didn’t commit anything to paper. You said you didn’t want a lot of folderol, but you didn’t lift a finger to learn your legal rights as a funeral shopper. You also didn’t tell your family and friends what they needed to know to navigate the $15-billion-a-year funeral industry without going bankrupt to dispose of your corpse.
Please don’t stop with a toss-off comment. I don’t care if you buy your funeral planning materials from the organization I work for (Funeral Consumers Alliance), or if you use our boatloads of free stuff at funerals.org, or if you do it on your own. Just do it. I nearly died of a Surprise Hearth Attack(TM) last December at the age of 36, so I know what I’m talking about.
Oh also, you should definitely read the extract from the book Ophelia just put up – you’ll giggle:
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2011/not-so-clean-not-so-dry/
At the risk of looking a gift horse in the mouth, might you, Ophelia, do a little update to this N&C pointing people to the extract?
Thanks for the attention, y’all!
OMG. “Hearth Attack.” In which I was overcome by a quaint brick facade.
Few people know it’s perfectly legal to act as your family’s undertaker and do everything yourself without hiring a commercial funeral home (including in Virginia). It baffles me that people would automatically assume they’re legally obliged to hire an undertaker. Are we legally obliged to hire babysitters and registered nurses for our kids with the flu?
Since Ophelia said I could whore my book, Ima whore the hell out of it. Final Rights has a back section with the laws on funerals, DIY funerals, what protections you have, and what to watch out for, written in plain English. It’s part investigative reporting, part consumer manual. If you don’t want to buy the whole book, you can buy your state’s single chapter in .pdf form for $5. Go here:
http://www.funerals.org/bookstore
And no, I’m not getting rich off this:) My author royalties are about a tenth of the profit retailers make from sales (as I’m sure Ophelia can attest). If you buy it from Funeral Consumers Alliance, however, that money goes to support our charitable work monitoring the funeral industry and lobbying for better consumer protections.
Actually, my wife informs me that her remains have already been promised to a university for medical studies. So… I guess unless I want to deal with too much nonsense, we’ll have to make sure she dies at or near the university so that I don’t have to arrange transportation through a funeral home?
You should call the medical school today and ask whether they provide (or reimburse for) transportation, or whether you’re on the hook to hire a funeral home (a pricey proposition, trust me). If you live in all but eight states (Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York) you can transport a body yourself after getting the death certificate from the doctor and going to the health dept. for a transit permit. But, you should also ask the medical school if they’re set up to accept cadavers directly from the family. For some reason many of them freak out at the thought that the donor’s closest kin would deliver the body instead of some black-suited mortician.
In a traditional Chinese burial, the body is first buried for seven to ten years in a more-or-less anonymous grave. It is then exhumed, the bones are cleaned, and the properly arranged bones are placed in an urn or (for prominent and wealthy people) a more spectacular horseshoe-shaped grave. (See page 120 of this PDF article, or the discussion and photo in Day 2 of this web site.)
There is still probably little or no nestling going on, however.
On reading the excerpt… “Patients”? The bodies are patients now?! And I thought “cremains” was bad.
Go ahead and whore the hell out of it Josh. We can strut around saying “We hang out with Josh Slocum.”
And yes, I can confirm that royalties are a joke.
Denmark is one such place. I think you can rent a hears if you wanna DIY. Once cremation have taken place, there are no restrictions on how you transport them.
A coupla years back a man was charged with improper handling of a corpse. He’d promised his dad a ride on his motorcycle, but he never got a chance to make good on it, before ol’ pa croaked. So he tied the corpse to his back and went for a tour.
Oh. This is that Josh?!
Now the Comic Sans sounds even less appropriate.
1. Sili – I’m me. What’s this about Comic Sans?
2. Don’t trust anyone to properly interpret funeral law. If Denmark’s legal community/funeral biz is even remotely like the US, it’s highly likely someone “creatively interpreted” a regulation that applies only to commercial undertakers, and then inappropriately applied it to a private citizen. Never, ever believe anyone who tells you what “the law” is when it comes to funerals.
Except me.
I was thinking that I’d quite like to be buried deep in a peat bog, somewhere there was a chance of my skeleton fossilising for future archaeologists to find and ponder over. But now my mischievious side also wants my body to be posed locked in a ‘fight to the death’ scenario with a dinosaur fossil, just to really mess with their minds.
Here in China, they have a problem with just too damn many people being here and, hence, dying. And everybody wants to buried in one of those giant concrete tombs, which take up a lot of space. However, like most laws, and like the one child policy, this law only slightly curbs peoples’ behavior, so you still see a lot of giant concrete tombs painted with big red 福 and 寿 (the latter means “Longevity”, which seems like an odd thing to paint on a tomb). It’s not really inconspicuous, but pay enough people off here and it becomes no big deal to have giant illegal tombs dotting the hills. It’s a really wierd mix of totalitarianism and lawlessness.
On the subject of Comic Sans: “Is there a way to gently break one’s email correspondents of bad email habits?”
And you’re right about transport. That’s what I get for going by memory, instead of checking first.
If I could die in a ditch somewhere and then aliens come and lay eggs in me which hatch into unbelievably powerful monsters which devastate half the world, (despite everything Chuck Norris can do), but then, just as everyone gives up, the aliens all start to die horribly because they didn’t check out that I was a catholic muslim convert who’d had a 30 x homeopathic dose of Agrimonia eupatoria and a half our session with a Reiki master a week before death and that all my Aquarian friends had been surrounding me with Invisible Pink Nurturing Energy (TM – someone else) so that Gaia would welcome me back into her loving arms once more for ever and ever are men.
That would be swell. Josh?
NB: The death of the aliens and saving of mankind is contingent on exactly that set of circumstances. You cannot, for example, substitute Cranio facial massage for the Reiki session or Keanu Reeves for Chuck Norris – mores the pity.
Christopher Hitchens, via Hitch-22, recently brought to my attention The Loved One, by Evelyn Waugh (1948) and The American Way of Death, by Jessica Mitford (1963); while I haven’t read these yet, it sounds like the more things change, the more they stay the same.
If your raptor-sized birds are anything like these, they’ll have a challenging job. http://xkcd.com/758/
I can’t think of a reason not to have a green burial.
As for me – I’d be quite happy for lammergeiers (spelling?) to feast on my bones.
Didn’t Penn & Teller do a show about the exploding caskets?
I’ve told my partners that my wishes are “donate all usable organs, and then anything that comforts you,” which is likely to translate to the plain pine box of Jewish tradition. But it sounds as though another conversation or three is in order, about that versus possible cremation and about whether/where to buy a plot ahead of time. (Given that the not-so-extended family has experienced one case of “took the money in advance, but there was no burial plot when the time came,” that has less appeal than it otherwise might.)
The organ donation is taken care of, though. We’ve discussed that (and found we were strongly in agreement), and I’ve signed the appropriate forms, and by New York law that’s sufficient: if they look in my pocket and find that on my ID, they don’t need to wait for next-of-kin consent.
Maybe the undertakers should jump on the anti-vaccine and alternative medicine buses? The market would expand…
Ophelia et al
There is a Buddhist post-life practice called “sky burial” that meets your wishes exactly. The loved one is made into raptor-bite-sized chunks and tossed to them. There’s a small religious group in India that follows the same practice but their name escapes me right now.
Of course there is another legendary Buddhist practice where a very holy person becomes rainbow colored rays of light. That one appeals, too.
Ummm for raptors in my comment substitute vultures. . .
Claire – oh hey, I kind of knew that, though I’d forgotten it…even though I started knowing it only recently, from having read it somewhere. I wonder where…Of course can’t remember…
I think you’re thinking of the Zoroastrian Towers of Silence.
Oh yes Not-Bruce, I was thinking of the Parsi. Didn’t know about the Towers of Silence. Thanks for the tip.
I read in New Scientist a while ago about a funeral process being piloted to save on land and greenhouse gases. It involved immersing The Departed in liquid nitrogen, then reducing him or her to tiny fragments using a high volume, high frequency sound wave. Then vacuum drying the lot.
The result is a sort of odourless soft powder which can be dug straight into a garden, fed to animals; whatever.
Whatever floats your boat…………………………………………………into eternity.
Huh, I thought I had posted here. Hmm, then what site have I misplaced this time?
Ah, found it.
I just a few minutes ago put a comment on to an article by Frank Brennan entitled Oregon on the euthanasia slippery slope. It’s at Eureka Street, a Catholic website.
If they don’t publish it, can I post the comment here? It relates also to this thread.
http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=26939
Omar: sure.
Thanks, Ophelia.
I’m pleased to see that they put it on. No responses as yet.
For those who would prefer not to follow the URL, I am posting it below anyway. Readers are asked to remember that it is a contribution to a discussion of voluntary euthanasia presently taking place on a Catholic website, where comments are restricted normally to 250 words:
O. Puhleez 02 Jul 2011
“But you don’t have to be Catholic to think that doctors should do no harm, that patients are free to forego futile or burdensome treatment, and that palliative care be utilised to relieve pain. Suicide will occur from time to time, but why the need to enact laws conferring medical legitimation on it and increasing its likelihood?”
Because “increasing its likelihood” is what it’s all about.
My brother-in-law was a very religious (Presbyterian) man. I understand that the modern Catholic view is that he was not automatically damned for eternity for his non-Catholicism. But be that as it may.
He had very painful, incurable and terminal cancer, which had invaded many of his internal organs. At one stage towards the end of his long drawn out death (ie over two painful years) he begged his sister (my wife) to bring his shotgun, loaded. By that stage, he was bedridden. He wanted to blow his own brains out. Suicide: he wanted to “increase its likelihood.”
My wife, horrified, refused. Whereupon the pallitaive care nurse was called. She went to him and said “Bill, [not his real name] would you like me to increase your morphine dosage: so that you remain unconscious for the rest of your life?”
He immediately agreed. So he spent the rest of his life in morphiated oblivion.
The law (which is an ass) was observed. Formalities were observed. He was never given a fatal dose, he was just kept unconscious. So he had nothing one could describe as ‘life’ between the time he asked his sister for the shotgun and the minute of the hour of the day he finally died: wishing all along to be finally out of it.
The Holy Catholic Church, whose hierarchy from the paedophile priests right up to the Holy Father in Rome has believed in covering the paedophilia scandal up, and thereby living and perpetrating a massive lie, is one of the obstacles that continues to stand between people like Bill and the end to their suffering under any number of God-created diseases, such as cancer.
The killing of people, persuading the old and the infirm to no longer be a burden is a furphy, easily got around. But it is used as an excuse and a device to prevent people like Bill from having the choice on ending their suffering.
The issue of euthanasia is fundamentally a power struggle. Slippery slope be damned.
(You won’t publish this because it is 415 words long. Too bad.)