Текст книги "The American Way of Death Revisited"
Автор книги: Jessica Mitford
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One such was revealed during a “Keys to Cremation Success” symposium sponsored by the Funeral Service Insiderin the spring of 1997. The scholars were urged to require “identification viewing” prior to cremation, “to avoid any mix-ups.” The title of one presentation, “How to Add $1,400 or More to Each Cremation Call,” reveals the larger motive for this tactic. “Seeing Mom in a cardboard box sometimes prompts a family member to ask if we don’t have something a little nicer,” said the presenter. The ruthlessness of subjecting family members to a forced viewing is something to wonder at until one recalls that it is one of the “keys to cremation success.” In one case, where the mother’s body had been embalmed before they chose cremation, family members became so distraught from the unwanted experience of an “identification viewing” that they have turned to the Funeral and Memorial Societies of America (FAMSA) to seek an opinion from the FTC on whether consumers can decline this procedure. There is no doubt that they may refuse to pay the fee that some mortuaries are charging.
Another key to cremation success? “When families don’t buy an urn, require them to purchase a temporary container to hold the cremains. But make sure you label (or stamp) that box with the words ‘temporary container’ on all four sides. If you usually give cremains to the family in a box from the crematory, stamp that box with the temporary container label. That makes families most likely to upgrade beyond the temporary container,” suggests the Funeral Service Insider.
11. WHAT THE PUBLIC WANTS
The funeral service profession exists only because it has received the approval of the public…. Present methods, facilities and merchandise exist because the public has found in them values it has been willing to pay for in spite of the necessary sacrifice of other things….
Are these values real? Do they spring from higher and finer motives? Do they lift and inspire? Are they worth what they cost? The answer is found in the reactions of the public. If the public accepts these things, prefers these things, the answer is in the affirmative.
—EDWARD A. MARTIN, B.A., MORTICIAN, Psychology of Funeral Service
The theme that the American public, rather than the funeral industry, is responsible for our funeral practices—because it demands “the best” in embalming and merchandise for the dead—is one often expounded by funeral men. “We are merely giving the public what it wants,” they say.
This is an interesting idea. It is a little hard to conceive of how this public demand is expressed and made known in practice to the seller of funeral service. Does the surviving spouse, for example, go into the funeral establishment and say, “I want to be sure my wife is thoroughly disinfected and preserved. Her casket must be both comfortable and eternally durable. And—oh yes, do be sure her burial footwear is really practical”?
Perhaps it does not often happen just like that. Yet it has been known to happen, and in fairness to the undertaking trade, an example should be given of a case in which the funeral buyer, of sound mind and deeply aware of his own desires, wanted and demanded the best.
The case involves Mr. August Chelini, a fifty-seven-year-old mechanic, sometime scrap dealer and garage owner. His monthly earnings averaged $300 to $400. Mr. Chelini, an only child, lived with his aged mother, who died in 1943 at the age of ninety-nine years and seven months. It then became incumbent upon Mr. Chelini to arrange for the funeral, which he did by calling in Mr. Silvio Nieri, an undertaker and family friend.
What developed is best recounted by quoting from the transcript of the case of August Chelini, plaintiff, versus Silvio Nieri, defendant, in the Superior Court of San Mateo County, California.
Mr. August Chelini comes to life for us in the pages of a court reporter’s typescript. We learn his hopes and fears, something of his history, something of his philosophy, his way of life, his motives and methods. He was in some respects an undertaker’s dream person, a materialization of that man of sentiment and true feeling for the dead so often encountered in funeral trade magazines. Only the fact that he was suing an undertaker for $50,000 casts a slight shadow.
The case opens with the arrival of Mr. Nieri at the Chelini home. Mr. Melvin Belli, counsel for the plaintiff, is examining:
Q. [Mr. Belli] When he came to the house, did you have a conversation with him?
A. [Mr. Chelini] Well, he come in and he asked me if he should move the body, and I told him I wanted to talk things over with him first.
Q. Did you have a conversation there?
A. So I talked to him out in the kitchen, and explained to him what I wanted, and the conversation was that I told him what my mother requested.
Q. What did you tell him in this regard?
A. Well, I told him that my mother wanted to be buried where there was no ants or any bugs could get at her.
Q. Had your mother made that request?
A. She made that request.
Q. By the way, was your mother of sound mentality at the time?
A. Oh, yes, very sound. Pretty bright.
Q. Did you tell him anything else?
A. Well, I told him that she had $1,500 of her own money, and that I intended to put all that into her funeral, and she had other moneys coming, and I wanted a hermetically sealed casket, because—
Q. You told him that, that you wanted—
A. I told him I wanted the best kind of embalming, and I wanted her put in a hermetically sealed casket.
Q. Did you know what a hermetically sealed casket was at that time?
A. Well, I know that it was a casket that no air or no water could get into.
Q. All right, did you tell him anything else?
A. I told him that is what I wanted. I didn’t care what the cost was going to be, but I did have the $1,500 on hand that belonged to her, and these other moneys were coming in that I could put into it later.
Q. All right. Did you tell him anything else at that time?
A. Also told him that I was anticipating making a lead box to eventually put her in, after the war was over; that lead couldn’t be had at that time, and I am a mechanic. I intended to construct a lead box.
Q. You were going to do it yourself?
A. Yes, I have a sample of the box, the design of it, and I told him that I was going to figure to put her in a crypt until the war was over, and so that I could get the necessary things and put her away in accordance with her wishes.
Q. By the way, you lived with your mother all her life?
A. There was times she lived out in South City, but we were with her pretty near every day.
Q. So, after you told him that you were going to make this lead coffin, after the war, did you have any further conversation with him?
A. Well, we talked about the embalming, how long he could preserve it, he says, “Practically forever,” he says. “We got a new method of embalming that we will put on her, and she will keep almost forever.”
Q. Pardon me. Go ahead.
A. I says, “That is a pretty long period, isn’t it?” Well, he says, “They embalmed Caruso, and they embalmed Lincoln, that way, and they have these big candles near Caruso, and we have a new method of embalming. We have a new method of embalming. We can do a first-class job, and she will keep almost forever.”…
Q. Then, the next day, did you have another conversation with him?
A. Then the next day he told me that I would have to come down to his establishment, and pick out a casket….
Q. And you went down there?
A. My wife and I went down there.
Q. And when you got down there, did you have a further conversation with him?
A. Well, yes, he took me down in the basement there where he had all these caskets, and he told me to look them all over, and we picked out what we thought was the best casket in the house…. First I looked around, and my wife looked around. We both decided on the same casket. So, I asked him if that was a hermetically sealed job, he says, “Oh, yes, that is the finest thing there is, that is a bronze casket.” He told me this was a casket, it was a bronze casket, and was a hermetically sealed casket, and he said that that is the finest thing that is made, and he says, “This is pre-war stuff,” and he says, “As a matter of fact, this is—I am going to keep one of these myself, in case anything happens to me, I am going to be buried in one of these myself.” …He quoted me a price, then he says, “Well, that will be $875, that will include everything, everything in connection with the whole funeral,” he says, “That will be completely everything in connection with the whole funeral, $875.” [15]15
Today such a funeral would cost $8,000 or more. Bronze sealers begin at $4,000 and run up to $25,000 for the heavier gauges.
[Закрыть]Q. Yes.
A. So, from what he told me, this casket was the best—it seemed very reasonable, so I told him that we would select that.
(Later that day, Chelini’s mother was brought back to his house.)
Q. Was there any conversation in the house?
A. Well, by the time I got there, she was up there, the wife and I decided to put her in the dining room, originally, and when I got up there, he had her in the living room.
Q. Did you have some conversation with him at that time?
A. So, he said, “Well, I think it will be better to have her here, because there is a window here, she’ll get lots of air.” He said he would have to put this body here in the front room on account of the window was here.
Q. Yes.
A. And he said it would be better to have a breeze, a flow of fresh air come in there.
Q. All right, did you have a conversation about the funeral with him to hurry over this?
A. Let’s see. I don’t think there was very much spoken about the funeral right then. I was feeling pretty bad. He spoke of this new embalming. He picked up her cheeks and skin on her and showed me how nice it was, pliable, it was—
Q. Did he tell you that that was a new method of embalming?
A. Yes, and her cheek was very pliable, her skin was especially.
Q. Is that what he said?
A. Well, that is the way he said that is the way it felt, and he told me that is a new type of embalming that they have, pliable….
Q. All right, then you had a discussion with him at that time about paying him the money?
A. I asked him how much it was. He says, “it was $875.” So I says, “Well, I want mother’s ring put back on her finger,” I says, “when she is removed from the crypt to her final resting place. I want that ring put back on her finger,” and I says, “I want some little slippers put on her that I can’t get at this time,” I says, “I want her all straightened up, and cleaned off nice,” and I says, “I will add another $25 for that service, for doing that,” so he says, “All right,” he says, “if that is the way you want it, we will do it, I would have done it for nothing,” so I gave him that extra check for $25…. Oh, I also reminded him to be sure that when they put her finally into the cemetery, to see that she was properly secured, and he says, “Don’t worry about it,” he says, “I will see that everything is done properly.” So, he took the check, and I asked him if he would go out and have a little drink with me, which he consented to, and which we did, in the kitchen.
(Probably, a little drink was seldom needed more than at that moment and by these principals. The scene now shifts to Cypress Lawn Cemetery.)
Q. Did you go out there when your mother was taken out there?
A. Yes, I went out to the funeral, and she had the services there. Why, she left here on one of those little roller affairs, and we all walked out. Mr. Nieri—I came out to the car and asked him if he would go in there and see that she was properly adjusted from any shifting, or anything, and make sure that she was well sealed in, so he went in there, and he come out, and I asked him, I says, “Did you get her all sealed in nice? Did you straighten her all up nice?” He says, “Don’t be worrying about that, Gus,” he says, “I will take care of everything.”
Mr. Chelini was, it appears, the exceptional—nay, perfect—funeral customer. Not only did he gladly and freely choose the most expensive funeral available in the Nieri establishment; he also contracted for a $1,100 crypt in the Cypress Lawn mausoleum. He appreciated and endorsed every aspect of the funeral industry’s concept of the sort of care that should be accorded the dead. An ardent admirer of the embalmer’s art, he insisted on the finest receptacle in which to display it; indeed, he thought $875 a very reasonable price and repeatedly intimated his willingness to go higher.
At first glance, it seems like a frightful stroke of bad luck that Mr. Chelini, of all people, should be in court charging negligence and fraud against his erstwhile friend the undertaker, asserting that “the remains of the said Caroline Chelini were permitted to and did develop into a rotted, decomposed and insect and worm infested mess.” Yet the inner logic of the situation is perhaps such that onlya person of Mr. Chelini’s persuasion in these matters would ever find himself in a position to make such a charge; for who else would be interested in ascertaining the condition of a human body after its interment?
It was not until two months after the funeral that Mr. Chelini was first assailed by doubts as to whether all was well within the bronze casket.
Mr. Chelini was in the habit of making frequent trips to his mother’s crypt—he was out at the cemetery as many as three, four, or even five times a week. Sometimes he went to pay what he referred to as his vaultage; more often, merely to visit his mother. On one of these visits, he noticed a lot of ants “kind of walking around the crypt.” He complained to the cemetery attendants, who promised to use some insect spray; he complained to Mr. Nieri, who assured him there was nothing to worry about.
Over the next year and a half, the ant situation worsened considerably, in spite of the spraying: “I could see more ants than ever, and there is a lot of little hideous black bugs jumping around there. Well, I had seen these hideous black bugs before, like little gnats, instead of flying they seemed to jump like that.”
This time, he had a long, heart-to-heart talk with Mr. Nieri. The latter insisted that the body would still be just as perfect as the day it was buried, except for perhaps a little mold on the hands. Ants would never “tackle” an embalmed body, Mr. Nieri said. To prove his point, he produced a bottle of formaldehyde; he averred that he could take a piece of fresh horsemeat of the best kind, or steak, or anything, saturate it with formaldehyde, and “nothing will tackle it.”
The idea had evidently been growing in Mr. Chelini’s mind that he must investigate the situation at first hand. With his wife, his family doctor, and an embalmer from Nieri’s establishment, he went out to Cypress Lawn Cemetery and there caused the casket to be opened; upon which the doctor exclaimed, “Well, this is a hell of a mess, and a hell of a poor job of embalming, in my opinion.”
In court, the undertaking fraternity rushed to the defense of their embattled colleague. Defense expert witnesses included several practicing funeral directors and Mr. Donald Ashworth, then dean of the San Francisco College of Mortuary Science. They were in an undeniably difficult position, for in order to build a case for Mr. Nieri they were forced to reveal some truths ordinarily concealed from the public. The defense theory—perhaps the only possible one under the circumstances—was that there is no such thing as “eternal preservation”; that the results of embalming are always unpredictable; that, therefore, Mr. Nieri could not have entered into the alleged agreement with Mr. Chelini. Before the case was over, the theory of “everlasting security for your loved one,” an advertising slogan gleefully flung at them by Mr. Belli, was thoroughly exploded by the reluctant experts. They also conceded that the expensive metal “sealer type” caskets, if anything, hasten the process of decomposition. The jury awarded damages to Mr. Chelini in the sum of $10,900.
For another view of what the public wants, let us turn to a man-in-the-street survey conducted by the San Francisco Chroniclein 1961. The method of interviewing could hardly claim to be scientific, for it consisted merely of stopping the first eight people to come along the street and posing the question “What kind of funeral for you?” The answers are, however, interesting. All eight spoke up for the minimum: “A very cheap one …” “Just a plain Catholic service …” “I would like a quiet funeral …” “I don’t care for pomp and circumstance …” were typical responses. One man said, “They can heave me in the Bay and feed the fishes for all I care,” and another, “As long as they make sure I’m dead I don’t care what they do next. A corpse is like a pair of old shoes. It’s ridiculous to put your family in hock over it.”
Oddly enough, the funeral men, long aware that these attitudes are more commonly held than that of Mr. Chelini, are not particularly worried. After all, these people will not be around to arrange their own funerals. When the bell tolls for them, the practical essentials—selection of a casket and all the rest—will be in the hands of close relatives who will, it is statistically certain, express their sense of loss in an appropriately costly funeral.
This point was made rather forcefully by a funeral director in the course of a radio interview. The interviewer remarked that it is the law in some states that the express wishes of the deceased as to the mode of his funeral must be observed. What happens then, he then asked, if the deceased has left instructions for a very simple funeral, but the survivors insist on something more elaborate? The funeral director answered with rare candor, “Well, at a time like that, who are you going to listen to?”
Odds are that the undertaker will be the arbiter of what is a “suitable” funeral, that a decedent’s own wishes in this regard may not be the final word. Even if he is the President of the United States.
Franklin D. Roosevelt left extremely detailed and explicit instructions for his funeral “in the event of my death in office as President of the United States.” The instructions were contained in a four-page penciled document dated December 26, 1937, early in his second term, and were addressed to his eldest son, James.
The instructions included these directions:
• That a service of the utmost simplicity be held in the East Room of the White House.
• That there be no lying in state anywhere.
• That a gun-carriage and not a hearse be used throughout.
• That the casket be of absolute simplicity, dark wood, that the body be not embalmed or hermetically sealed, and
• That the grave be not lined with brick, cement, or stones.
Regarding the latter instruction, James Roosevelt writes, “So far as we can learn, he never had discussed this with anyone. Knowing Father, we can only speculate that he regarded the embalming procedure as a distasteful invasion of privacy, and that perhaps he had an inner yearning to follow the traditional funeral liturgy, ‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection.’”
Nobody in the Roosevelt household knew of the existence of this document. It was found in his private safe a few days after his burial. It is a common occurrence that when death comes unexpectedly to the ordinary home, burial instructions are found too late tucked away in a safe-deposit box or contained in a will which is not read until after the funeral; it seems ironic that the same mischance could occur in the White House itself. Furthermore, White House aides charged with arranging details of the funeral seem to have been as much at a loss, and as tractable in the hands of the undertaker, as any average citizen faced with the same situation.
News of Roosevelt’s death, flashed around the world on April 12, 1945, meant many things to many people. To millions of Americans it signified the sudden and disastrous loss of the most commanding figure of the century and with him the disappearance of an era. To Mr. Fred W. Patterson, Atlanta undertaker, at home enjoying an after-dinner pipe that evening when his phone rang, it was (in the words of the Southern Funeral Director) “THE CALL—probably the biggest and most important ever experienced by a contemporary funeral director.”
The Call was placed by Mr. William D. Hassett, a White House aide who was with Roosevelt in Warm Springs, Georgia, at the time of his death. He was charged by Mrs. Roosevelt with the task of buying a coffin; being entirely without experience in such matters, he consulted Miss Grace Tully, FDR’s secretary, and Dr. Howard G. Bruenn, who had attended the President in his last moments. Both were sure that Mr. Roosevelt would have wanted something simple and dignified, possibly a solid mahogany casket with copper lining similar to the one used for the President’s mother.
From accounts of the placing of the order for the solid mahogany casket, it appears there was more than one telephone conversation between Patterson, the undertaker, and the harassed presidential assistants. The following account of Hassett’s conversation is given by Bernard Asbell: “Hassett said he wanted a solid mahogany casket with a copper lining. Patterson told him that copper linings had disappeared early in the war. He did have, however, a plain mahogany one, but—Hassett broke in to ask if it were at least six feet four inches long. Patterson said it was—but it was already sold. It was to be shipped the next day to New Jersey to accommodate another undertaker. He added that he had a fine bronze-colored copper model that would—Hassett, in his gentle but most firm Vermont manner, said he wanted the mahogany brought at once to Warm Springs. Patterson asked if he could bring both. Perhaps, on reconsideration, they would choose the bronze-colored copper one. Hassett said he could.”
Patterson, writing in the Southern Funeral Director, describes a further conversation about the coffin, this time with Dr. Bruenn: “After he [Dr. Bruenn] consulted with William D. Hassett,… he requested that only the mahogany be brought; but on my request, in the event a change was desired, we were allowed to bring, in addition, the copper deposit.”
Mr. Patterson’s very understandable desire to acquit himself creditably and with honor in this situation comes through strongly between the lines. There he was, caught in the spotlight, before his colleagues and before the nation. He must have suffered a nasty moment before permission was granted to bring both caskets to the Little White House.
Patterson and his assistants drove to Warm Springs with two hearses, one containing the plain mahogany casket, the other the “fine bronze-colored copper model,” a National Seamless Copper Deposit No. 21200. Patterson relates how the question of which casket to use was finally resolved: “After Mrs. Roosevelt arrived at 11:25 and had seen the President’s remains, a conference was held as to funeral arrangements. Dr. Bruenn was asked what they wished to do about the casket. He consulted Admiral McIntire who came with Mrs. Roosevelt. In the conversation, the Admiral was heard to use the word ‘bronze’ and as the copper deposit had a bronze finish, of course that was the casket to be used.”
Did the presidential aides feel that one had been put over on them, albeit discreetly? We do not know.
In one important respect, Mr. Roosevelt’s instructions were observed: there was no lying in state. Mrs. Roosevelt felt sure that he would not have wished it. She said, “We have talked often, when there had been a funeral at the Capitol in which a man had lain in state and the crowds had gone by the open coffin, of how much we disliked the practice; and we had made up our minds that we would never allow it.”
Failure to carry out certain of his other instructions can only be laid to the unlucky circumstance that they were found too late. It is, however, interesting to compare President Roosevelt’s words with accounts given by participants in the funeral:
MR. ROOSEVELT: That the body be not embalmed.
MR. FRED PATTERSON: All three assistants worked incessantly five hours to give the President the proper appearance, and to be certain of proper preservation…. We had a difficult case, did our best and believe that we pleased everyone in every respect…. Saturday morning Mr. William Gawler (a Washington undertaker) phoned me stating that the tissues were firm, complexion was fine and those who saw him remarked, “He looks like his old self again and much younger.”
MR. ROOSEVELT: That the body be not… hermetically sealed.
MR. WILLIAM GAWLER: The casket was closed and the inner top bolted down at 8:30 p.m. Saturday night. The outer top was sealed with cement.
MR. ROOSEVELT: That the grave be not lined with brick, cement, or stones.
MR. JAMES ROOSEVELT: The casket was placed in a cement vault.
MR. ROOSEVELT: That a gun-carriage and not a hearse be used throughout.
MR. PATTERSON: As the caisson did not arrive at the last minute the casket was taken in our Sayers and Scoville Cadillac hearse.
In November 1963, three months after the first edition of this book was published, it became once more the unhappy task of presidential aides to supervise the obsequies of a president. Two writers give particulars of negotiations with undertakers in Dallas and Washington over arrangements for John F. Kennedy’s funeral.
In Robert Kennedy and His Times(Houghton Mifflin, 1978), Arthur Schlesinger describes RFK’s arrival at Bethesda Hospital:
There were so many details. The funeral home wanted to know how grand the coffin should be. “I was influenced by… that girl’s book on (burial) expenses… Jessica Mitford ( The American Way of Death)…. I remember making the decision based on Jessica Mitford’s book…. I remember thinking about it afterward, about whether I was cheap or what I was, and I remembered thinking about how difficult it must be for everybody making that kind of decision.”
While Yours Truly was, needless to say, most gratified to learn that her message had been absorbed in high places, further exploration reveals that—much as in the case of FDR’s funeral—the best-laid schemes of Robert Kennedy and his assistants went agley. The undertakers prevailed after all.
William Manchester in The Death of a President(Harper & Row, 1967) goes into far greater detail when discussing this situation. Of the Dallas undertaker who supplied the coffin in which JFK’s body was transported to Washington, he writes:
Vernon B. Oneal of Oak Lawn funeral home is an interesting figure in the story of John Kennedy. Squat, hairy and professionally doleful, with a thick Texas accent and gray hair parted precisely in the middle and slicked back, he was the proprietor of an establishment which might have been invented by Waugh or Huxley. It had a wall-to-wall carpeted Slumber Room. There was piped religious music, and a coffee bar for hungry relatives of loved ones…. (p. 291)
Instructed by a member of JFK’s entourage to bring a coffin to Dallas’s Parkland Memorial Hospital, Oneal ran into his selection room and
chose his most expensive coffin, the Elgin Casket Company’s “Britannia” model, eight hundred pounds of double-walled, hermetically sealed solid bronze.
The scene now shifts to Washington. Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh told Robert Kennedy that the solid bronze casket had been badly damaged in transit: “It’s really shabby. One handle is off, and the ornaments are in bad shape.” RFK decided that “he could scarcely permit a state funeral to proceed with a battered casket.” Four aides were dispatched to Gawler’s, the selfsame old, established Washington firm that had supervised President Roosevelt’s funeral. They reported their findings to RFK.
Manchester’s description of the casket-price negotiations roughly parallels Schlesinger’s, but with elaboration:
Robert Kennedy had read Miss Mitford’s carefully documented exposé of the gouging of bereaved relatives, and so had Dr. Joseph English, the Peace Corps psychiatrist who stood at Sargent Shriver’s elbow Friday afternoon. Robert Kennedy… believes he spoke to O’Donnell… (special assistant to the President) about price… and he has a clear memory of a girl who told him… “You can get one for $500, one for $1,400, or one for $2,000.” She went on about water-proofing and optional equipment. Influenced by the Mitford book, he shied away from the high figure. He asked for the $1,400 coffin, and afterward he wondered whether he had been cheap; he thought how difficult such choices must be for everyone…. (p. 432)
This, as Manchester points out, was already almost twice the average bill for “casket and services” only two years earlier… $708 in 1961. But there was worse to come, as he discovered on further investigation.
In the end, Gawler put one over on the White House staff members. He sold them a “Marsellus No. 710, constructed of hand-rubbed, five-hundred-year-old solid African mahogany,” for which he charged $2,400. He then slipped in the most expensive vault in the establishment, for a total bill, rendered and paid, of $3,160.
And what about Oneal? His bill to the Kennedy family was finally settled, after some haggling over “services rendered”—spotted by a sharp-eyed CPA—for $3,495. Thus, despite Robert Kennedy’s laudable efforts to avoid a price-gouging, he was outmaneuvered; the family ended up paying a total of $6,655 into the coffers of undertakers.
His curiosity piqued by these nefarious transactions, Manchester pursued the subject further, visiting Vernon Oneal in his Dallas establishment:
Actually, as he conceded to this writer, he was hoping for a return of the coffin. He made two trips to Washington in the hope of retrieving it. Word of this reached the right quarters, and to avoid an exhibition he was paid. The wholesale prices of coffins are a closely guarded trade secret, but at the request of the author a licensed funeral director and a cemetery manager made discreet inquiries at the Elgin Casket Company about its Britannia model. Both were quoted an identical figure: $1,150. Thus Oneal’s fee represents a markup of $2,345.
Lastly, William Manchester records some reactions to the embalmer’s art as practiced by Gawler’s:
