Funeral Fandango
While my medical pieces have heretofore addressed a slew of maladies ranging from acne to zoster, as well as the collective human spirit to preserve life and fight any incursion into our bodies’ inner sanctum, sometimes a final number is called in destiny’s 50-90-year-old bingo game. When taxes no longer disturb the slumber of a hapless victim, the deceased’s family and friends are often left with a reminder of the high cost of dying, in the form of an average funeral bill of $7,323. Then, as the band engages in a badly timed “funeral fandango,” especially in these times of high unemployment, rising medical costs, dashed retirement savings, and freefalling home values, we are left to wrestle with the dilemma of where to find the money to bury loved ones. The Grim Reaper knows no black ink, and the 700 bodies lying unclaimed in the Los Angeles County morgue last July attest to the unsettling reality of sticker shock of the numerous families who can ill-afford to pay runaway funeral costs.
With the price of an average funeral outstripping the cost of living and with funeral directors nonetheless claiming their services a bargain, some good old-fashioned truth is warranted when false prophets, vacillating editorial points of view, and general disbelief in the printed page envisioned by Gutenberg to honestly inform reign. So, let’s call a spade a spade. Here are the facts. In 1984, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued the so-called “funeral rule,” requiring all funeral homes to provide a general price list of all goods and services and permitting consumers to choose individual items instead of a complete package. Notwithstanding this mandate, in 2004 funeral directors continued to argue that the intensive services they provide accounted for their misunderstood prices, and that most people pay far more for weddings, cars, or one year’s college tuition than the average funeral. Obviously, they were steadfast in their convictions when, in 2008, FTC undercover investigators found that a fourth of the funeral homes they visited significantly violated the funeral rule. Hello! We can’t even rest in peace. We feel the pinch even in death!
Aside from a basic services fee, charged by all funeral homes and which there is no getting around, price negotiations can be conducted on a vast assortment of related items ranging from the funeral service and public viewing to embalming and the casket itself. The name of the game is to neither be pressured nor “guilt tripped” by funeral directors who prey on frayed emotions by referring, for example, to less expensive coffins as “welfare caskets” or “morgue boxes.” A little homework goes a long way, and the Funeral Consumers Alliance, which many of us would be hesitant to join as regular card-carrying members (due to the unpleasantness of its connotation), advises family discussion of funeral plans in advance, in much the same way that weddings, vacations, home purchases, and college tuition are hashed and rehashed in the living room or around the dinner table. Who knows, perhaps participants can arrive at alternatives to the traditional funeral home experience.
Unpleasant, you say, and how dare that man broach such melancholia at this joyous time of Thanksgiving and Christmas merriment! Perhaps you’re right, but death is a constant companion that gets no vacation time or annual leave for the holidays. Death of a loved one, while never acceptable, can at least be defused financially if cremation and services at $1,350, do-it-yourself home funerals at $250, or “green” funerals are opted for, instead of the simplest of funeral rites at $5,000 and a grave marker of $3,000, not to mention the cost of a funeral plot. The facts bear this out. While fifty years ago, cremation accounted for only about 4 percent of funerals, that figure rose to 35 percent in 2007 and is projected to increase to 59 percent in 2025, if we live that long to see it.
No one is implying that family members of the deceased, with the help of a death midwife, should bathe, dress, lay out the body, and preserve it with dry ice in the home for three days, in order to save a few bucks and defray the costs of chemical embalming and a traditional funeral service. That possibility does exist, however. Nor is anyone advocating “green” funerals, with burials in open fields, grave markers made from local rock, and even employment of GPS coordinates instead of the markers themselves. Nevertheless, a failure to reel in funeral costs can turn a funeral fandango into a dance with the devil.
ã 2009, Albert M. Balesh, M.D. All rights reserved.
posted by Dr. Al at
11/29/2009 10:26:00 AM
2 Comments:
Thank you , Doctor, for your excellent explanation of the felonious vagaries of the funeral industry! For a self proclaimed "christian nation," we are seriously spooked and superstitious about death, aren't we? I encourage all your readers to go to www.funerals.org for the best information on the topic you have opened.
Thanks, Marie Lorz
lorzma@gmail.com
By
Anonymous, at Monday, November 30, 2009 10:41:00 AM
Thank you so much for responding to the piece, Ms. Lorz, as well as for being a reader. We are no longer "living by the sword and dying by the sword." Rather, and I would like to interject here, in my humble opinion, that we live by the sword, only to have our loved lones suffer economically via ruthless financial funeral practices, when we die of natural causes. Dr. Al
By
Dr. Al, at Sunday, December 13, 2009 11:30:00 AM
Post a Comment
<< Home