The mortuary process is orthogonal to funerals. My father was embalmed. My mother was cremated. Both parents had church funerals. Other funerals have been “Chapel”, or at the rooms of the Agricultural Society. Jewish people have shiva. Muslims have janaza.
Yeah. Body handling pre-interment, interment, and religious / ceremonial aspects are all disaggregated.
You can buy all, one, or none. Each from a different supplier or do one-stop shopping. And yes, there are elements of rip-offery in each.
By “mortuary process” I mean the entire process of dying, from death (and hospital bills) to the post-disposal social practices. My theory is that every step of the process has become so expensive in the U.S., that many people are disposing of their loved ones’ remains not according to anyone’s beliefs and traditions, but based on what they can afford.
There is a YouTube channel, hosted by Caitlin Doughty (just Google “Youtube Caitlin Doughty”), that explains a lot. She is a mortician based in Los Angeles, and in many ways, she is not a fan of the overly elaborate and expensive funeral. If that is what you want, she can supply it, of course; but if you don’t, she has a number of alternatives that are less expensive and that are acceptable to all faiths.
Her channel is not advertising for her business. She tries to demystify death, and what happens afterwards, scientifically-speaking: embalming, cremation, caskets, how a human body decomposes, burials and so on. Disinterment, if it is necessary, moving remains from place to place when a deceased dies in one place, say on vacation, but the body has to get home for burial/cremation. Especially, when it comes to dealing with funeral homes, she has a few harsh words for the ones that put on the hard sell for you to do what they want you to do at a time when you are vulnerable.
She has an interesting channel. I’ve certainly learned a lot that I wish I’d known before.
I’m not going to say it can’t be expensive - it absolutely can be. But it also depends on what exactly you mean by “traditions and beliefs” and like anything else , it’s going to depend on what a family can afford and what they want. Does “traditions and beliefs” refer to religious requirements or does it refer to an individual family’s traditions and beliefs? Because just like a wedding, those can be very different and a lot depends on the person or people arranging it. If I had made the arrangements when my father died , they would have been very different from the ones my mother actually made ( and even more different than the ones she would have wanted- do they make gold-plated caskets? if so, that’s what she would have wanted) Cremation is allowed in our religion, but she went crazy when she heard my ex-brother-in-law was being cremated.
I’m not sure how I found them, but there are at least two others on YT- Lauren the Mortician and I think the other one is named Victor.
IMO this is exactly it. The cheapest plain pine casket costs around $1,000.00. Cremation costs about the same if you choose to go that way. With a casket/burial, you are usually required by law to be embalmed, which has to be done by a funeral home. Add another couple thousand at least for that and the most basic service and burial. Americans are increasingly living paycheck to paycheck. When you aren’t (or can’t) even save for retirement, saving for funeral expenses is way down the list. Hence, the huge increase in the number of GoFundMe pages whenever someone dies. On top of that, we are more widely dispersed than we used to be, and it’s difficult to find the time and money to travel and attend someone’s funeral - in the past, families were much more likely to still live in the same city.
Cremation and some vague promise of a “celebration of life” in the future, which no one expects to actually happen, is really the only thing many can afford to do.
If the person is going to be cremated, even a pine box isn’t necessary. I think cardboard containers are available for much less than a thousand dollars.
Yes, it’s usually done with a cardboard box, but cremation itself costs about $1K.
Not true, that is a money grabbing myth perpetrated by the funeral industry. There are NO states with laws that require embalming and only 3 or 4 that require embalming for a few exceptions like transport across state lines or on a common carrier like an airplane.
…. Crucial Rights & Facts
- FTC Funeral Rule: Funeral homes must inform you that embalming is not legally required (except in special cases).
- Open Casket: While funeral homes often demand it for public viewings, it is not legally mandated for private, short-term viewings.
- Direct Cremation: Embalming is never required for direct cremation….
[google]
When is embalming required?
Embalming is rarely required by law. In fact, the Federal Trade Commission and many state regulators require that funeral directors inform consumers that embalming is not required except in certain special cases. Embalming is mandated when a body crosses state lines from Alabama, Arkansas, and New Jersey, and several others require it if public transportation is used.
Does embalming protect community health?
Embalming provides no public health benefit, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Canadian health authorities. One state, Hawaii, even forbids embalming even if the person died of certain contagious diseases. Many morticians have been taught, however, that embalming protects the public health, and they continue to perpetuate this myth. [from funerals.org]
I was at a funeral some years ago, and, as is often the case with funerals with a religious service, a hymn was sung. Twice during the hymn, the minister leading the funeral started babbling. My wife asked me, “What’s he doing?” I told her that he’s “speaking in tongues.” She grew up in a Methodist church, and I in a Presbyterian, so babbling was never a partof a service, and she didn’t even know it was a thing in some churches. It was my first experience with it, too. Well, sorta. One time a relative left me a prayer message where she babbled in tongues.
BTW, regardless of your religious beliefs, most non-babbling Christian groups regard the ‘speaking in tongues’ as 'speaking in [known] foreign languages.
Depends whether there’s a Ralph’s nearby.
I stand corrected on the embalming laws (or non-laws). But As you said, it’s still pushed as part of the funeral home services , and if you decline it, there’s still plenty of other things, each with a fee. Most people are still looking at thousands of dollars even for the most basic body handling + funeral/wake + repast. Unless the newly deceased planned ahead of time and saved $$ for these expenses, it’s very often an expense that the surviving family has not planned for and either cannot afford without fundraising or suck it up and pay for it and deal with the financial strain that incurs.
Even people who have the money for an open casket may just not want to have their dead body put on display. It can be a disconcerting thing to look at. If it’s there, it’s polite to suck it up and go have a look. There was also the time when I wasn’t quite sure who it was. It was a friend of my wife’s.
Skipping that part can also relieve the time pressure to find ministers and for family to fly in from out of state for the service. Dead meat tends to spoil after a few weeks after all.
Oh, man! This is going to sound silly, but the only direct experience I have with this is paying the funerary expenses for my dog. In this case it was pretty much just cremation and a little memorial box we keep him in, but I was not in a good emotional state of mind when I was making those decisions. I think it cost me about $400 (not including vet fees for putting him down), and I didn’t price check, negotiate, or otherwise see what my options were because I just wanted it done. I imagine a lot of people are in a similar situation when a person they love has died.
That’s a big reason why planning one’s funeral arrangements in advance is a good idea, rather than leaving it for your loved ones to do so while in a difficult state emotionally.
My parents funerals were free. The church they were members of (and had financially supported for years), provided the funeral.
You can observe that mortuary practices are expensive, but from where I stand that has almost nothing to do with funerals going out of fashion. Funerals are going out of fashion because church is going out of fashion, because people are dying old, because people retire to Florida or Arizona, because just ‘fashion’. For churched people, who live in the same place, and still have friends when they die, "having a funeral’ has nothing to do with the cost of getting buried.