5 Ways to Make Good Choices About a Funeral

Last month I looked at how important it is to consider what kind of care we want to receive near the end of our lives. The next stage, after you or a loved one dies, is often even more fraught with anxiety and stress, making it even harder for survivors to act as smart consumers. Which means there’s no time like the present to learn how to hold a funeral.

Death will always be a difficult business to navigate. Grief-stricken mourners are typically overcome with confusion, regret and guilt, making them vulnerable to predators. Of course, funeral home owners work amid delicate family, financial and legal situations all the time, which is often stressful and never easy. My wife’s Uncle Eddie is one of the good guys, a scrupulous businessman who shows up to summer barbecues in a black suit just in case he gets a call from work—and there are countless others like him.

But government oversight of death care is often haphazard and weak. Some states don’t regulate cemeteries at all; others don’t license or inspect crematoriums. Almost all states regulate funeral homes, but some of the agencies that oversee mortuaries are dominated by insiders. For example, four of the seven members of Arizona’s state board regulating funeral homes are funeral home directors, raising the question of whether its leadership could be sympathetic to mortuary owners. “We have funeral directors who are just as conscious of consumer rights as consumers are themselves,” says Rodolfo “Rudy” Thomas, executive director of the Arizona State Board of Funeral Directors and Embalmers. “But you can do everything correctly and still get a complaint.” The overall result: Many states lurch from neglect to supervision only once a horrible abuse goes public. In Connecticut, for example, when five decomposed bodies turned up in a New Haven mortuary garage in 2001, the state Department of Public Health admitted publicly it had no funeral home investigators and hadn’t conducted the required inspections for nearly a dozen years. Afterward, the state quickly relaunched its oversight program. For its part, the Federal Trade Commission’s Funeral Rule, adopted in 1984, does little more than require funeral homes to give itemized price lists to customers who ask for them; it has not curtailed opaque fees or huge markups.

Moreover, the rise of a funeral-home-and-cemetery complex has made things tougher for consumers. In the 1990s, anticipating the aging of the boomer generation, death-care companies went on spending sprees. They bought funeral homes, driving many independents out of business and compelling others to replicate their sales and marketing practices, which critics deride as “McDeath.” One example: “third-unit target merchandising”—hiking prices for customers who (as people tend to) avoid the two cheapest caskets in a showroom. They bought cemeteries. Several made business deals with religious leaders. Under a controversial agreement with the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, for instance, Stewart Enterprises was allowed to build and operate mortuaries on the grounds of church cemeteries.

Consolidation drove up funeral prices far faster than inflation. In one example, a woman in Swanton, Vt., reported to Lisa Carlson, author of Caring for the Dead: Your Final Act of Love, that it cost $2,900 to bury her mother in 1993 and $7,100 for exactly the same funeral for her father in 1995. And critics say the corporate cost-cutting has left the death-care business more prone to scandal than ever. Most recently, in April, four grandchildren of deceased Army Col. Andrew DeGraff filed lawsuits totaling $60 million against industry leader Service Corporation International (SCI). They allege that National Funeral Home, an SCI affiliate in Falls Church, Va., left DeGraff’s body to rot in an unrefrigerated space last year, echoing public claims by employees that National Funeral Home improperly stashed hundreds of corpses. “We have begun an investigation, and we will make any changes we need to,” says SCI spokesperson Lisa Marshall. “More broadly, we would argue our size is actually of great benefit to our customers because we provide services like grief counseling and help with travel arrangements.”

Fortunately, there are ways to make good choices even in a time of maximum grief. First, preplan, but don’t prepay. Tell your loved ones exactly how and where you would like to be memorialized and buried or cremated. But decline any offers to pay in advance for a casket or funeral services. In many states there is no requirement for funeral homes to deposit all your money in safe investments or to refund it if you switch venues. And there’s often no guarantee that your investments will pay in full for the casket you choose.

Second, with mortuaries as with anything else in life, shop around. Prices for funerals as well as caskets can vary by thousands of dollars within the same metropolitan area, so don’t go to a particular funeral home just because it’s familiar or nearby. To find an independent funeral home, consult the Funeral Consumers Alliance (800-765-0107; www.funerals.org) or Selected Independent Funeral Homes (800-323-4219; www.selectedfuneralhomes.org). “Funeral providers should work with your family to do whatever you want, and if you’ve got one who’s not comfortable with that, you should move on,” says Selected CEO Rob Paterkiewicz. “But you have to ask.”

Third, know your rights. The FTC’s Funeral Rule does guarantee some basic consumer protections, though almost nobody understands what they are. For example, only 5.2 percent of people in a 2007 Journal of Consumer Affairs survey knew that it’s illegal for a funeral home to refuse to handle a casket bought from an outside vendor. The FTC offers a solid rundown on its Web site.

Fourth, avoid sales pitches for “protective” seals on caskets. Typically, these consist of an inch-thick rubber seal around the opening of a casket and can cost hundreds of dollars. But sealing a body in an airless container leads anaerobic bacteria to multiply rapidly, causing a corpse not only to putrefy but also bloat with gas.

Finally, consider holding a wake as well as a funeral service at your place of worship. Doing so shifts the focus of the memorial from how a body is prepared to more eternal thoughts, reducing the pressure to spend heavily on funeral services.

I can’t tell you what will happen to you when you die. But I can assure you that planning with rationality and confidence, rather than anxiety or guilt, is the best way to pass saved money and good habits to your loved ones.