The daughter repeated her important request again. She told me that the funeral director raised his voice and bellowed that he would not put the dentures in her father’s mouth. She went home to collect her thoughts and she saw my commercial when she turned on the television.
I called the funeral home to say that I was on the way to pick up the deceased. The funeral director who had met with the daughter was greatly enraged at the thought of losing her family’s business. He told me not to come, that he would call the daughter immediately and place the dentures in her father’s mouth.
I agreed to hold off until I heard from the daughter—she called shortly thereafter and informed me that the original funeral director had missed his chance to serve her family’s needs. She wanted me to take care of her father’s services. I removed her father’s body from the original funeral home and complied with the daughter’s wishes—I carefully placed her father’s dentures into his mouth with no problem at all.
Not treating families with dignity and respect can spell a huge loss of business. One morning, a woman called the funeral home and asked if it was possible for me to go to a competing funeral home and retrieve her mother’s body so that I could complete the funeral arrangements. I questioned her about changing funeral homes. She said that her mother had died in bed on the second floor of her residence. The funeral home was called to the scene, and two gentlemen arrived to make the removal. The daughter stated that the house was full of family members, including small children and a few neighbors who had come over to express their sympathy. The daughter asked one of the funeral home’s personnel about the cost of a funeral and was told, “If you have to ask the price, then maybe you should just cremate your mother.”
That comment obviously did not sit well. The mortuary cot would not fit up the narrow staircase, so the funeral home personnel left the cot at the bottom of the stairs and proceeded to the bedroom with a sheet. Instead of wrapping the nude deceased in the available bedding, they merely placed a sheet on her and began to carry her to the cot.
As they made their way down the stairs, one of them accidentally stepped on the sheet and totally exposed the deceased to all who had assembled in the home, small children and neighbors alike. That was the last straw for the daughter. She ordered the funeral home personnel to immediately cover her deceased mother and take her back upstairs and place her back into her bed. They refused and said that, since they were almost out the door, they would take her to the funeral home and call the family later. One of the neighbors knew me and suggested that the family call me and that I would handle the situation with dignity and respect. I did just that.
Of course, dignity and respect mean nothing if you don’t have the right body. A young lady called the funeral home one morning and explained that her twenty-three-year-old sister had tragically died and that the body was located in the county morgue. The young lady further explained that the family was of limited means and requested the best possible price I could offer.
After supplying her many service options, we agreed on a suitable arrangement. I assured the woman that I would ask the county morgue about her late sister’s release time and meet with her family within the hour. I called the coroner’s office to arrange for the proper time to remove the deceased from the facility and was told that no one by that name was there, that perhaps another funeral home had already made the removal.
I replied that the family of the deceased was in my presence, and that they hadn’t called another funeral home. “She must be lost,” said the representative, in an attempt at some humor. I was assured that the coroner’s office would “keep looking.” The family left, not knowing where their deceased sister might be and left me wondering the same.
In the meantime, a woman in her fifties was being disinterred from a cemetery only hours after she had been buried that same day. A man who lived next door to the cemetery, and coincidentally had just attended the woman’s burial service, noticed the disinterment process, walked over to the grave site, and questioned the cemetery personnel. The gravedigger informed the neighbor that they had buried the wrong person and were digging that person up so the coroner’s office could come to the scene and take the body back to their facility. How such news travels so fast, and how the twenty-three-year-old’s family heard about the disinterment, I’ll never know.
Yet the young woman’s sister called me and began to tell me that she knew it was her sister who had been mistakenly buried. I found her story extremely hard to fathom, so I told her I would look into the situation right away. I called the cemetery and was in fact informed that another funeral home had mistakenly retrieved the body of the twenty-three-year-old from the morgue. The other funeral home had been contacted to provide funeral services for the lady in her fifties, but the morgue personnel had mislabeled the pouch that contained the body. The other funeral home did not unzip that pouch to verify identification. So the deceased twenty-three year-old had in fact been mistakenly buried in the cemetery, disinterred, and returned to the morgue.
One of the ways I guard against mistakes is continuity. The funeral process goes like this: the disposition arrangements for a visitation and funeral service or cremation are made; the service takes place, and we head for the cemetery. Myself or my immediate family arranges all the links in this chain. At some of my previous places of employment, the same person didn’t even handle certain key events. One person might make the removal, another might arrange services, another might attend the visitation, and yet another might drive the lead car to the cemetery. When several providers attend to events with no continuity, I’m sure the family feels shortchanged and dehumanized. That is why I see to it that either myself or a family member attends personally to all death-care details with any bereaved family.
The funeral industry, like all enterprises, definitely has its share of bad apples. Terrible scenarios abound—from cremating the wrong body to cremating more than one body at a time or even cremating a human and a pet in the same retort and clear cases of taking financial advantage of vulnerable elderly.
A close competitor was caught off guard by a local television news team working on an undercover story about price gouging. The team had caught dubious acts on tape, an inadvertent demonstration of how the funeral director intentionally steered consumers toward expensive high-end caskets in his display room.
Some operators write down license-plate numbers of cemetery visitors, then call them later to sell grave spaces, burial vaults, caskets, or markers. Another ploy is to insist that the entire family of the deceased come to the cemetery and sign a form to verify the grave, even if it has already been owned for many years. Once the family arrives, they attempt to hawk additional graves, mausoleum crypts, markers, vaults, and caskets. In cases of immediate or direct cremation, families are often told that they must purchase expensive hardwood versions—which is not true. Some operators introduce high-pressure, commissioned salespeople as grief or family-service counselors in an attempt to sanitize their image. In reality, they are more like used-car salesmen, and their pitches border on the unbelievable: “Since we are all going to die, you had better buy from us today,” or “What if you get hit by a bus on the way home, and you aren’t prepared?” Those present might also be encouraged to purchase their own graves right on the spot, so they can “enjoy eternal rest together as a family.” If they meet that suggestion with resistance, the “counselor” then scolds the family and acts surprised that they would want their loved ones “buried next to a bunch of strangers.”