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Recently, I called up a Methodist minister I've known for some years. I was in his area for a few weeks, and I hoped to find a time when he and I could squeeze in lunch. "Tuesday's out," he said. "I have a funeral. And on Wednesday I have two funerals; Thursday I am booked with counseling; and on Friday I have to attend an unveiling at the Jewish ceremony. Saturday?"

A lot of death, I thought, and when we met at a coffee bar on Saturday, I asked him how he got through a week where he was bombarded with so much bereavement and loss. "Well, I've been doing this for 20 years," he said, "and it comes and goes in cycles. I may go through the next three or four weeks and not have a single funeral."

We got to talking about what a funeral entailed from the minister's perspective. Did he go with the family to pick out the casket? I asked. Did he hang around the funeral parlor during the viewing of the body? "I do usually go with them to pick the casket out," he told me. "I guess I've been down to Bob's funeral parlor three times in the last week. That's where I always send people, of course; Bob and I worked out an agreement a long time ago that he'd give me a little cut of whatever profit he made selling caskets to the folks I sent his way. Like at summer camp, you know, where your kids get 10 percent off their tuition if they manage to sell some other family on the same camp."

Call me daft, but I failed to see the parallel between a camp's offering a financial incentive to satisfied families who might pass along the camp's brochure to another family, and a minister who directed his parishioners to a particular funeral parlor because he got a percentage of the profits. It seemed at the very least like a conflict of interest, but I figured that if my friend saw it that way, he wouldn't have been so cavalier about mentioning it to me over chai latte and biscotti. And when it turned out that he had two funerals the next week, I dug out a navy dress and heels and slipped in discreetly to the funeral of an elderly lady who had died in her sleep. I was not surprised to notice that the casket was one of the most gussied-up monstrosities I'd ever seen—all pastel and shiny, satiny, and lacquered looking. It looked like a giant Easter egg had met the interior of a luxury automobile. "I bet that cost a mint," I thought. I couldn't help wondering if my friend were knocking off his parishioners: maybe he, Bob, and the local arsenic dealer had a three-way deal.

The American Way of Death Revisited,
by Jessica Mitford, Alfred A. Knopf,
296 pp.; $25.

In Roughing It, Mark Twain tells the story of Jacops the coffin maker, who "used to go roosting around where people was sick, waiting for 'em," towing with him a coffin that he imagined would "fit the can'idate." Robbins, an elderly man, took sick and for almost a month, "in frosty weather," Jacops loitered around the Robbins place, coffin in hand, waiting for the old man to kick off. Much to Jacops's disappointment, Robbins got well; the next time he got sick, Jacops gave the old man a bargain. "He bought the coffin for ten dollars and Jacops was to pay it back with twenty-five more besides if Robbins didn't like the coffin after he'd tried it." During the funeral, Robbins, who hadn't been dead after all, climbed out of the coffin and collected his $35.

When Jessica Mitford published The American Way of Death, her muckraking expose of the American funeral industry in 1963, she revealed that twentieth-century coffin makers—and undertakers, vault manufacturers, florists, and monument makers (she's pretty nice to clergy)—had no more scruples than their nineteenth-century predecessor Jacops. The American Way of Death, which was a bestseller for months, portrayed an industry of bloodsuckers who were out to squeeze every possible penny from grieving families. Before her death in 1996, Mitford had all but put the finishing touches on an updated account of the funeral industry, which has now been published. The original version sent shock waves through the professional funeral community in the 1960s—the author became known as "the notorious Jessica Mitford," and Mortuary Management began referring to her simply as Jessica, a la Jackie or Malcolm. But has her book had any lasting impact? Has the funeral industry been forced to shape up in response to the outrage elicited by Mitford's book?

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April 26 1999, Vol. 43, No. 5