HW 50 - First Third of The American Way of Death Revisited

Performance is key to marketing. Even in the realm of “selling” the after life it is important to stay in character. By expressing empathy your customer is more likely to confide in you and eventually hire you. In the business of caring for the dead you have to play all the right cards. Using the right tone, the right wording and the right prices for the individual customer. By doing so you trick them into believing you truly care about their loved one, their mother etc. When in reality it’s all just a business deal.

• “Secondly, there is a myth that the American public is only being given what it wants – an opportunity to keep up with the Joneses to the end. “In keeping with our high standard of living, there should be an equally high standard of dying.”” (Page Sixteen)
• “In the funeral home, the man of prudence is completely at sea, without a recognizable landmark or bearing to guide him.” (Page Twenty-Five)
• “A funeral service is a social function at which the deceased is the guest of honor and the center of attraction…A poorly prepared body in a beautiful casket is just as incongruous as a young lady appearing at a party in a costly gown with her hair in curlers.” (Strub & Frederick – Page Fifty-Four)
• “Embalming serves no useful purpose in preventing the transmission of communicable disease.” (Page Sixty-Three)
• “We can make cheaper caskets, certainly. You can make them and so can I. However, each one helps underwrite the failure of funeral directors. Too many “cheapies” will ruin the funeral directors completely.” (Page Seventy-Two)
• “Marketing, as always, is probably one of the touchiest areas in funeral service – given the volatility of the topic and, often, the vulnerability of the client…” (Page One Hundred)

I have only been to one funeral home but after reading the first third of The American Way of Death Revisited, Jessica Mitford has certainly opened my eyes up to see the peculiar way people in this country handle death. Looking back on my Grandmother’s wake I realized how set up the whole thing was. The two funeral directors both wore black and carried around tissue boxes. Since my Grandmother was catholic there was a prayer said at her wake and the funeral directors led this. Their faces were subtly endearing, they seemed as though they truly cared. Yet now it seems as though they both were putting on one big act. Considering my Grandmother was in her eighties when she passed away she had a lot of older friends, friends who came to her wake and witnessed the way the funeral directors were interacting with everyone. It makes me wonder if this technique of putting on a sad face was just a marketing tool. Although Mitford tied together how the whole process goes down, from the casket picking to the wake to the funeral service and to the burial there wasn’t really any mention of an alternative. It makes me wonder if there is or if we are all stuck in this trapped situation. I began to also wonder about how the funeral directors must feel, are they immune to death? I know personally I would not feel comfortable handling dead bodies and I would also feel so guilty about ripping innocent people off. How can we avoid this part of life?