Diane Rehm’s new book explores how she mourned her husband’s death and began her new life alone.
Public-radio host Diane Rehm, 79, began writing her new book, “On My Own,” on the last night of her husband’s life. The candid memoir tracks Rehm’s first year of widowhood, starting when her husband, John, decided he was done fighting Parkinson’s disease, which had rendered him nearly immobile. It describes the 10 excruciating days when John starved himself to death (a path he chose, Rehm says, because assisted suicide is illegal in her home state of Maryland).
“On My Own” traces her uncertain steps without John — taking care of finances, taking over his side of the bed — and features reminiscences of their 54-year marriage. Rehm, who is ending her long-running WAMU program “The Diane Rehm Show” after the November election, will talk at Sixth and I on Wednesday.
You wrote that you and your husband were “more together in sickness than in health.” Can you expand on that?
It’s a lovely thought to expand on, because while he was in assisted living, I think he realized how dependent he had become on me, and I think that broke down some of the barriers he had used all his life to shield himself, to be such a private human being. He knew I would do anything for him, and I think we simply had a loving time with each other in those last few months.
What do you hope people get out of reading “On My Own”?
I hope that people will talk with their families and their loved ones about what it is they want at the end of their life. John and I talked a lot about it with our kids, about how neither one of us wanted prolonged dying or to live long in illness or to lose our ability to care for ourselves. People need to talk about death and dying. It’s kind of a taboo subject in families. I can remember my own mother wanting to talk to me about it and me saying, “Oh Mom, let’s not talk about this now.”
You’ve become the de facto face of the “right to die” movement. Do you feel that impairs your ability to be a journalist?
I’m not an activist. I am not out there campaigning for anyone, for any organization. I am simply speaking about my own experience. I’m going to speak about my husband’s death. I’m going to speak about my own hope for myself — that when the times comes, I will have the right to choose how I wish to die. I’m only speaking from the heart and for myself, so I see no conflict journalistically.
You’ve said that working has helped you keep your grief at bay. Are you concerned about retiring after this election cycle?
The fact of the matter is, I’m not retiring. I’m stepping away from the microphone, but I’m going to continue to work — at WAMU in some capacity, on behalf of trying to find a cure for Parkinson’s, trying to find a cure for Alzheimer’s and speaking out personally about what I believe is the right to die.
Will you pick up any hobbies?
Piano. I took lessons for just five years as an adult, and I’m looking forward to trying to get back into that. But I won’t try to be too ambitious because I know it’s hard to play the way you’d like to hear yourself play. You just have to forgive yourself and keep on trying.
Do you have any advice for other people who are grieving or friends of those who have experienced a great loss?
If a friend of yours is grieving, just listen. Just be there and be helpful in any way you can. And don’t push that person to “get over it.” I think there’s part of me that will probably grieve forever. When I’m alone, I miss John so much. I miss talking with him. I miss laughing with him. I’ll miss him forever, and I’ll think about him forever, but that doesn’t mean I will close down my life. I will keep living as long as I am healthy and well and have good thoughts and interesting things to do and interesting people to be with. But I will not push someone else who is grieving to do what I am doing. I’ll just try to be with that person and be that person’s friend.
A push towards alternative, eco-friendly death practices
There’s a quiet revolution under way in the American death industry, moving towards a future in which natural composting, water cremation and even a so-called ‘mushroom death suit’ might be as socially acceptable as conventional coffins and cremation.
Current burial practices pose significant environmental risks. To counter their effects, a group of funeral professionals, artists and academics have started proposing eco-friendly alternatives. But the endeavor requires engaging a normally death-phobic public in a wider discussion about dying as a natural process — something rebel mortician Caitlin Doughtystrives to do. Doughty, a Los Angeles undertaker with a self-confessed “proclivity toward the macabre,” is the founder of the aforementioned group, which she calls The Order of the Good Death.
It’s about trying to lift the “veil of secrecy and shame cloaking death,” she writes in her best-selling book Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory. “A culture that denies death is a barrier to achieving a good death,” she says.
For her next book, Doughty is exploring the idea of eco-friendly death practices because she believes current practices are unsustainable. “This is about the future of the dead body and its disposition,” she says.
For now, traditional burial and cremation still dominate the death industry, each with about half of the market, according to 2015 estimates by the National Funeral Directors Association. Both processes carry environmental risks. Traditional burials, where an embalmed body in a wooden coffin is sometimes placed in a concrete or metal vault, require more than 30 million board feet of hardwood, 90,000 tons of steel, 1.6 million tons of concrete and over 800,000 gallons of carcinogenic formaldehyde embalming fluid every year in the U.S., according to the Funeral Consumers Alliance of Southern California. Cremation requires burning a body in temperatures of up to 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit for three to four hours — a process that requires as much energy as a 500-mile car trip and releases harmful gases into the atmosphere, says Doughty.
Options for eco-friendlier death practices include natural or green burials, in which a body is lowered into the ground wrapped simply in a biodegradable coffin or shroud, allowing it to decompose naturally and quickly. The concept is a simple one and is actually what was widely practiced before the modern funeral industry as we know it took over.
Conventional death practices are not just polluting, Kelly says, but disaffecting because people feel separated from earth and nature. “Green burials are not just about the environment, but also about generating new meanings around death.”
Other experimental burial options gaining momentum include the Urban Death Project, which proposes leaving bodies in the open air to decompose naturally to soil, with the help of microbes and materials such as woodchips. The natural composting of dead bodies would take place in a custom-built, three-story facility that could hold up to 30 bodies at a time, says project founder and director Katrina Spade.
Spade said inspiration struck about five years ago when she was contemplating her own mortality. “The current options we have for our bodies after death are, at the very least, underwhelming and at the most toxic, polluting and not meaningful.”
Natural decomposition will allow people to “contemplate our place in the natural world” because many people feel there’s something important about being connected to nature both before and after we die, says Spade. She and her team are currently beta-testing the composting technology, and they hope to raise around $35,000 to build a prototype in Seattle this April.
Still another offbeat burial method is the Mushroom Death Suit, or Infinity Burial Suit. Created by Jae Rhim Lee, a visual artist and research fellow at Stanford University, the suit is embroidered with mushroom spores that help to decompose the body. The mushroom spores also remove toxins from the body, which normally releases more than 200 environmental toxins into the soil when buried, says Lee. After beta-testing is complete, the suit will go on sale in the middle of this year at a target retail price of $999.
Some alternative options are not so far off. Bio Cremation, also known as alkaline hydrolysis or cremation by water, is now available in seven states, including Florida, Minnesota and Oregon. The process uses water and lye to break down the body into its chemical components, leaving a residue similar to traditional cremation. Bio Cremation, however, uses 90 percent less energy than traditional cremation and is considerably cheaper, says Doughty.
Psychologically, it’s an easier concept to accept as well, Doughty believes. “Many people prefer the idea of a watery grave to a fiery one,” she says.
Spade of the Urban Death Project echoes this view. “I like fire — but only when I’m sitting next to it with a beer,” she says.
While eco-friendly options for the afterlife are gaining traction, they still account for only about 3 percent of burials in the U.S. today, says Doughty. Institutional and legislative barriers are a big reason for their low numbers. Many funeral directors see the American funeral industry as a sacred institution to protect and are very interested in keeping the status quo, she says.
“A huge barrier to greening up our death practices is the stronghold of the trio of chemical embalming, the modern casket and the burial vault,” adds Kelly of the Rhinebeck Cemetery Committee. But she is positive that the green burial movement is gathering momentum. “It’s building steam riding a wave with other alternative death and end of life movements like home funerals, death cafes and hospices,” she says. Death cafes host events where people can meet up and discuss death over tea and cake — something that spread in popularity from Europe.
The American funeral industry isn’t the only one to blame, says Spade. “Ninety percent of what’s holding our society back in terms of having eco-friendly aligned funerals is a cultural denial of death.”
Spade says, “If we talked about death more comfortably, we’d be dying better and also be able think about what we want for our bodies after we die.”
A suit made of mushroom spores helps decompose bodies sustainably.
By Alex Janin
Jae Rhim Lee doing a TED Talk in her mushroom burial suit.
With the rise of electric cars, sustainable architecture, eco-friendly diets, composting, and countless other options, forging a sustainable life is often as easy as it is trendy. Now it’s even easy after death thanks to a bodysuit made from a decidedly old-school material: mushrooms.
The Infinity Burial Suit, a one-piece garment designed to be worn in the afterlife, is sewn with mushroom spore–infused thread. Although researcher Jae Rhim Lee debuted the idea in a 2011 TED Talk, her New York–based company, Coeio, only recently announced that the suit will be available for purchase midway through 2016. The pet option—which is a sack rather than a suit—is projected to go on sale March 1, the cofounder of Coeio, Mike Ma, told TakePart.
The suit also comes with an environmentally friendly embalming fluid and a mineral applicant made of mushroom spores. The two are supposed to be applied directly to the body to work in tandem with the suit to speed up the decomposition process.
Ma believes there are three benefits to this. “This technology speeds the return to earth through decomposition, it remediates toxins we accumulate over a lifetime, and it speeds nutrient delivery back to plants,” he said.
In her 2011 TED Talk, Lee touched on this, pointing out that “our bodies are filters and storehouses for environmental toxins.” Lee and Ma’s goal is to eliminate these toxins in a sustainable way.
Their method may seem a little morbid, but it has environmental advantages. Burial, the most popular choice for Americans, usually involves the use of a casket—which pulls from the earth’s wood and mineral resources—and toxic embalming fluid.
In the U.S. alone, 30 million board feet of casket wood is used annually for burials, according to Scientific American. Similarly, the U.S. uses 800,000 gallons of embalming fluid, traditionally used to preserve a body rather than allow it to decay, each year. The toxic fluid contains a known carcinogen—formaldehyde—that leaches into the soil following burial. Cremations aren’t much better, emitting 246,240 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per year from the U.S., says the Funeral Consumers Alliance.
The mushroom suit takes a load off more than just the environment. It will sell for about $999, said Ma—significantly less than the $7,181 the average funeral cost in 2014 and less than the $6,087 average expense of cremating a body.
Although the mushroom suit provides a cost-effective alternative, the goal is to do so without losing the beauty of the process. The suit itself is a work of art thanks to designers such as Daniel Silverstein, who has designed clothing for Jennifer Hudson and Kristen Bell.
“We still care a lot about the ceremony and fashion, so it can still be beautiful,” said Ma.
Ma, whose grandparents died last year, shared his personal experience with the funeral-planning process. “I was heavily involved in the logistics, and I kept thinking, ‘Oh, my God, I’m making a lot of terrible decisions as a businessperson, and at the same time, I’m so emotionally overwrought with what’s going on,’ ” he said.
Ma hopes the suit will help launch conversations about death and reshape the idea from “scary” to something everyone experiences.
“Our products really help people think about their deaths in congruence with how they live their lives. When people do that, they stand a chance to live life better,” he said.
How much do you think it costs to cremate a dead body? It’s a question you probably don’t think about until tragedy strikes and you’re planning the funeral of a loved one.
One of the last things anyone wants to do when they’ve lost a loved one is make a complicated financial decision. Families want to spend that time celebrating a life, not hunting for the best rate on the memorial service. If a funeral home quotes you a price for a cremation, you’ll probably just assume you’re being treated fairly and accept the price.
So it may come as a surprise that the price of basic services like cremation can vary wildly from home to home. Today the average cost of a standalone cremation — no additional services — is $2,057. And yet, in any given city, some funeral homes will charge you two to three times as much for a cremation. Same service, drastically different price.
Even more troubling, in the Internet age funeral parlors tend to make pricing hard to find. In fact, the Federal Trade Commission allows funeral homes to keep their rates hidden until someone actually writes or calls a funeral home representative — leaning on regulations last updated in 1994 — rather than pushing funeral homes to let the customer compare online. In a survey by the nonprofit Funeral Consumers Alliance, only 25 percent of funeral homes fully disclosed prices on their websites, while 16 percent failed to disclose prices after an email and a phone call.
Tough access to comparison shopping seems to affect pricing. At Parting, we’ve painstakingly built a database of how much funeral homes charge for services so that no one ever gets ripped off in their time of need. Let’s walk through the data.
If recent trends continue, cremations will account for over half of all funerals by 2018, up from about a quarter in 1998.
People have been buried in coffins for centuries, so why the rise in cremations?
The Cremation Association took a look at this question. The group found a correlation between high cremation rates in states with a high proportion of people unaffiliated with organized religions, and the number of unaffiliated individuals is on the rise. The group also attributes the growing cremation rate to the simple fact that it’s cheaper than the coffin, which alone can cost thousands of dollars. And having the ashes portable in an urn (which typically cost in the hundreds of dollars) allows families more creative memorial ceremonies, like at a riverside or on a mountain top, where they don’t pay for a burial plot.
The cremation process itself is relatively straightforward. The body is placed in a large chamber and using mid-thousand-degree heat from oil, gas or propane, the body is incinerated. The process may have minor differences, depending the funeral home, but the end product is the same: ashes, in an urn or container.
Though families get essentially the same product regardless of where the body is cremated, there is surprising variation in cremation costs. Analyzing our data, we found that while there are many locations at which direct cremation, the most basic cremation service, costs less $1,000, there are are also a large number of funeral homes which offer the service for more than $4,000. There are even those that charge over $9,000 for the service.
Comparing direct cremation costs is not always apples to apples. For instance, some funeral homes have their own crematorium while others use a third party, which can mean an extra fee. Still, these fees don’t explain why direct cremation at some facilities costs five times more than others.
John Jung of California Mortuary in Los Angeles points out that cremations are an administratively intensive process. They have to get approval from a doctor and, depending on the state, the various layers of government.
But when we analyzed cremation costs by city, we also found large variations in price within the same location. The following charts shows the range in prices for the forty largest U.S. cities in order of the largest range in price.
The disparity in some cities is glaring. New York tops the list with the highest parlor charging over 18 times the lowest. In Washington DC, the most expensive direct cremation is nearly $7,000 dollars more than the least expensive.
How could there be such a wide range of prices?
Jung believes that any parlor on the very high end of pricing probably doesn’t see the service as essential to their business. They keep cremations on the price list in case someone really wants it and then they turn a hefty profit for the effort. But it’s not core to their revenue.
And the lower range cremation prices are likely to attract additional business. They are loss leaders. “If it’s under $1000, they’re probably losing money. You really don’t make much profit on the direct cremation alone,” Jung says. “They’re just trying to get you into the door.”
The average price for a standalone cremation nation-wide is $2,057 but our data shows a full memorial service costs, on average, $3,650. These bundled services add additional products like the cremation casket, which typically go for around a thousand dollars or just removing and transferring the remains (typically a few hundred), not to mention flowers, embalming services and time spent viewing the body.
Getting a family in the door allows a funeral director to sell these additional services. This can create an awkward situation: It’s hard to say no to an upsell for someone’s last goodbye. Good funeral homes try to keep that balance of selling their own services while respecting the family in a time of need.
“It’s really a service industry,” Jung says of funeral homes. “You have a job to do but at the same time you have to direct them in a gentle manner.”
Not every state is equally shocking in the divergence of cremation prices. California offers some hope that transparency would alleviate such glaring disparities. The state requires that if a funeral parlor has a website, it must post prices.
“California funeral law protects the family a lot,” says Jung, whose family has run their parlor in the Los Angeles area for 17 years. “It’s pretty strict.”
Unfortunately the “death-care” industry, as Bloomberg noted in a 2013 cover story is big business and often ends up preying on grieving families. Publically traded funeral home companies like Service Corporation International (SCI), which run thousands of funeral homes across the country, are worth over $5 billion and — unlike locally-owned homes integrated with a community — answer to Wall Street traders, leading to pressure to upsell consumers.
Cremations are taking the place of casket burials and future generations will expect their prices online for a straightforward albeit serious service. More transparency will go a long way and having cremation costs online puts power into the consumer’s hands when they need it most.
No one wants to shop around for the best prices for a cremation when dealing with a tragic death, and unfortunately some funeral homes take advantage of this fact.
A funeral procession in Monroe, Georgia, for George Dorsey and Dorothey Dorsey Malcolm, who were lynched in 1946.
As many African American-owned funeral homes close, the communities they serve are losing a centuries-old means of grieving—and protest.
As a child, Richard Ables played hide-and-seek with his brother among the caskets. He has spent his entire life in the family business, the Hall Brothers Funeral Home, founded in Washington, D.C., by his uncles in 1938. Along with the funeral parlor down the street, they once buried nearly everyone in LeDroit Park, the historically African American neighborhood in the heart of the nation’s capital.
Now 73, Ables still runs Hall Brothers, though the business isn’t what it once was. Its historic brick row home is aging alongside its proprietor. There’s water damage on the ceiling tiles, and the front parlor’s carpet is matted down to a threadbare pile. The steep stairs out front aren’t accessible for all customers, and the property taxes are high. Ables wants to make improvements, but he says it’s hard to get loans for the space’s upkeep. “I would like for the firm to continue on and on and on,” he says, “but that’s up in the air.”
For more than a century, black funeral directors have been serving black communities in the United States, keeping African American funeral traditions alive. But now those institutions, which withstood segregation and prospered through it, are struggling to survive as market forces change. The largest black trade group in the industry, the National Funeral Directors & Morticians Association, or NFDMA, does not track the number of black-owned funeral homes in the U.S. But the organization’s director, Carol Williams, says its membership is shrinking—today, the NFDMA represents 1,200 members, compared to a reported 2,000 members in 1997. Many, she says, “cannot afford to keep their doors open.”
Black funeral traditions are distinctive from other burial rituals in American culture. Funeral directors have long preserved the African American tradition of homegoings, as these Christian ceremonies are often called: Bodies are typically viewed in an open casket, and a richly adorned one at that, with large floral arrangements and ornate fabrics. There are limousines and nice cars to escort families, which lends a sense of pride and pageantry to the lengthy rituals.
“To give a peaceful, celebratory homegoing, it’s the whole idea of a celebration of life,” says Karla F.C. Holloway, a professor of English, law, and African American studies at Duke University. It’s become part of black burial traditions, she says—even though “it is a contradiction to the ways in which many black bodies come to die.”
Homegoings can offer black Americans the respect in death that they don’t always receive in life. Black funeral spaces also provide refuge for the living: A family in mourning can be comforted and understood within a community institution, away from an often-racist world. Mourners can feel at home during an otherwise disorienting moment, knowing their traditions will be honored without question. “Culture and practice and ritual are known and remembered in a black funeral home,” Holloway says. “And that matters in a time of grief.”
Untimely death and dying marked the African American experience at its beginning—from mortality-plagued transatlantic voyages to the violence of forced labor and the privation of the slave quarters. Surrounded by these unnecessary deaths, funeral ceremonies were an urgent and central rite in slave communities. They also formed the foundation of the black church tradition.
From their earliest incarnations, black funerals were political, subversive—a talking back to the powers that be. Particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries, if slaves were allowed to bury their own dead and craft their own rituals, away from the overseeing eyes of whites, they could plan for their freedom, spiritually and physically.
In Richmond, Virginia, in 1800, a slave named Gabriel plotted an insurrection at an enslaved child’s funeral, according to Suzanne E. Smith, the author of To Serve the Living: Funeral Directors and the African American Way of Death. “Slave masters then cracked down, and they created a lot more rules about slave funerals,” says Smith, a professor at George Mason University. “They often insisted masters had to be present.”
Three decades later, Nat Turner led a slave revolt in Virginia. “It was never shown that Nat Turner had organized anything at a funeral, but there were rumors he had,” Smith says. In response, Virginia passed new legal restrictions on slave activities, including funerals. The fear of rebellions prompted similar laws curtailing unsupervised slave gatherings across the South.
The end of slavery, and the war that brought it about, transformed American funerals across races. It was the massive death toll of the Civil War—the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history—that brought the modern American funeral industry into being. With so many soldiers dying on battlefields far from home, families scrambled to ship bodies home. Until the war, embalming was practiced primarily by doctors and scientists. During the war, undertakers set up shop near battlefields, selling their wares and ensuring embalmed bodies could make the long journey home without decomposing. As for the many soldiers whose bodies remained where they’d fallen, black soldiers were often assigned the lowly task of burying the war’s dead.
Undertakers had once been tradesmen who simply made coffins and buried bodies. After the Civil War, the craft professionalized. More Americans were dying in hospitals, not in homes, and families gladly handed off the job of caring for bodies at life’s end. Owning a funeral home became a profitable business, and one that attracted African Americans looking for economic opportunities. In 1912, the funeral industry’s major trade association began excluding blacks from membership, officially segregating the industry. Black funeral directors worked to serve and retain black customers, who relied on them to give their loved ones respectful burials, as Jim Crow deepened racial divisions.
The funeral industry created a class of African American millionaires, as Smith notes in her book. In 1953, Ebony magazine headlined an article, “Death is Big Business,” declaring that “Negro undertakers gross more than $120 million for 150,000 [black] funerals each year.” The next year the publication ran an essay by a prominent black undertaker called, “How I Made a Million.” With growing clout, funeral directors often went into politics, and served as mayors, pastors, and community leaders.Funeral directors also played a key role in the civil-rights movement. Not only did they care for those who died in lynchings, protests, and other conflicts, but they also staged large-scale funerals—for Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, and others—that galvanized Americans to the civil-rights cause. They provided bail money when activists were jailed, and offered their premises for meetings. Hearses and funeral-home cars became a way to ferry civil-rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr., around the South inconspicuously. On the night that King was assassinated, a funeral-home worker, acting as his chauffeur, was one of the last people to see him alive.
But those in the industry, both black and white, also faced scrutiny for their perceived profiteering. In 1963, the British writer Jessica Mitford published a muckraking volume The American Way of Death, which sharply criticized the excesses of the then-$1.6 billion dollar funeral business. Writing in what was then The Atlantic Monthly, Mitford’s article “The Undertaker’s Racket” called out swindling funeral directors for their unscrupulous sales methods. In shock at the money being taken from the living, ostensibly on behalf of the dead, she wrote, “The cost of a funeral is the third largest expenditure, after a house and a car, in the life an ordinary American family.” The average funeral in 1963, according to Mitford, cost $1,450 (about $11,000 in today’s dollars).
Mitford’s findings prompted an examination of the industry. But black funeral directors reacted somewhat dismissively to the book, according to Smith. She paraphrases their thinking like this: “Nobody is going to tell us we can’t have an elaborate funeral. We are the ones came when the lynching happened and we picked up the bodies off the ground. We have an elaborate funeral because that’s our tradition and that’s our way of honoring people.”
Today, the overall industry is thriving—it takes in about $16 billion per year, according to the latest data from the National Funeral Directors Association (which is different from, and much larger than, the NFDMA). But the model has changed: Chains and corporations have swallowed up much of the business. Since the 1990s, the largest chain—Service Corporation International, along with its Dignity Memorial products—has bought up competitors and small businesses to amass more than 1,500 funeral homes and more than 20,000 employees across North America, with $3 billion in revenues. The Houston-based SCI is often dubbed the Walmart of death-care, but it rarely passes along its cost-savings to consumers, instead charging more than many small companies, according to reporting from Bloomberg Businessweek. American funerals run an average of $7,000, but top-of-the-line caskets can cost more than $10,000.
Many African American homegoings, though, are still handled by small, family-owned businesses, and these continue to be elaborate, sometimes expensive affairs. Although African Americans are typically much more averse to cremation than other Americans, a growing number of people are choosing this option, which avoids the cost of a casket, burial plot, and embalming. Cost-effective cremations cut into the profits for funeral homes—one of many challenges family-owned firms are facing.
Large chains can more easily absorb profit losses because of their size—and because they have capitalized on the cremation industry. SCI, for instance, bought up the largest cremation organization and dozens of crematories. The dominance of chains portends the struggles of many small businesses, which contracted during the recession in 2008. Those issues are compounded for black-owned companies, which are less likely to get loans and comprise only about 7 percent of U.S. small businesses. Black owners often start out with less capital, as the wealthgap between black Americans and white Americans continues to widen. Without money for upkeep, the owners of small funeral homes are finding themselves losing customers to nicer, newer facilities, which are increasingly run by chains.
Richard Ables’s storefront in D.C. is facing these economic issues: Hall Brothers Funeral Home is in a neighborhood whose demographics have shifted. It’s now across from a renovated theater and a row of new restaurants. Ables’s closest competitor, Frazier’s Funeral Home, was shut down in 2008 and its building was converted to luxury apartments. Much of his black clientele has decamped to Maryland or other more affordable places, and his area is now full of new, white residents. In his experience, few whites cross the so-called color line to ask for his services. “Maybe it’s time to move from here to somewhere else,” he says, adding that he will soon need a less expensive location.
His story is not unusual. Where once many black funeral homes catered to black clients across the economic spectrum, some are now located in areas that are increasingly segregated by wealth and race. Low-income residents can’t afford many of their services, and as neighborhoods gentrify and see an influx of white residents, these businesses are left with even fewer patrons. In an effort to broaden their customer base, some black funeral directors are trying to market to whiteclientele or incoming immigrant families.The challenges of the industry may explain why the heirs of funeral home owners are increasingly moving away from the family business. Carol Williams of NFDMA, the black funeral-home trade association, says succession planning is one of the biggest issues facing her members. Historic black funeral homes have typically been passed from generation to generation, but eager successors are hard to find as the lucrative work dries up. “When [owners] don’t have a succession plan, and something happens when they can no longer operate it themselves, they end up closing,” Williams says.
As Smith, the professor at George Mason, says, “When these funeral homes disappear, you lose all that history. It’s just gone.” But their decline is also a cultural loss for the present moment. Black Americans are still eight times more likely than white Americans to die by homicide. They are more likely to die at younger ages. Last year, young black men were five times more likely to be killed by police than white men of the same age. Directors of historic, black funeral homes know this better than anyone: They’ve tended to these bodies, and those of their loved ones. They understand that even if the moment of death is tragic or violent, care for the dead can be different.
This resonates with the personal experience of Holloway, the Duke professor. In 1999, she was working on a book about African American mourning when her own son died. At the time, he was serving 95 years in prison for a string of crimes, including rape and attempted murder, which she traces in part to his unraveling mental state. He was on a work detail in a prison cotton field when he and two other inmates took off running, attempting to escape. A corrections officer fired 19 shots. Holloway is still haunted by an aerial image taken from a helicopter, shown on the news: a white sheet in the middle of the field, and under it, the body of her black son.
The historical resonance of his state-sanctioned death also haunts her. “After all, the pitiful traverse from plantation landscape to prison cotton fields was only the short matter of a century and a few score years,” she wrote in her resulting book Passed On: African American Mourning Stories, a Memorial.
“I don’t mitigate at all the violence and trauma that my son inflicted on his victims,” Holloway says. “But in the end, he was our son and we were left to bury his body.” She and her husband specifically wanted to work with a black funeral home after their son’s death—it was one way of getting assurance that their son’s body would be treated with respect. “We expected them to treat him as a child who was loved,” she says. “I don’t think I could have had that conversation with a white funeral director.”
Brendan McInerney (front, from left), Noah Piou, Emmett Dalton and their fellow students from Roxbury Latin boys’ school carry the casket of a man who was left unclaimed by family to a grave site in Fairview Cemetery on Friday.
On the drive to Fairview Cemetery in the Boston neighborhood of Hyde Park, six seniors from Roxbury Latin boys’ school sit in silent reflection. Mike Pojman, the school’s assistant headmaster and senior adviser, says the trip is a massive contrast to the rest of their school day, and to their lives as a whole right now.
Today the teens have volunteered to be pallbearers for a man who died alone in September, and for whom no next of kin was found. He’s being buried in a grave with no tombstone, in a city cemetery.
“To reflect on the fact that there are people, like this gentleman, who probably knew hundreds or thousands of people through his life, and at the end of it there’s nobody there — I think that gets to all of them,” Pojman says. “Some have said, ‘I just gotta make sure that never happens to me.’ “
The students, dressed in jackets and ties, carry the plain wooden coffin, and take part in a short memorial. They read together, as a group:
“Dear Lord, thank you for opening our hearts and minds to this corporal work of mercy. We are here to bear witness to the life and passing of Nicholas Miller.
“He died alone with no family to comfort him.
“But today we are his family, we are here as his sons
“We are honored to stand together before him now, to commemorate his life, and to remember him in death, as we commend his soul to his eternal rest.”
Each of the young men in turn read a poem, verse of scripture, or passage about death. Emmett Dalton, 18, reads “A Reflection On An Autumn Day,” which ends “death can take away what we have, but it cannot rob us of who we are.”
From left to right, funeral director Rob Lawler; Roxbury Latin students Emmett Dalton, Noah Piou and Chris Rota; Roxbury Latin assistant headmaster Mike Pojman, and Roxbury Latin students Brendan McInerney, Liam McDonough and Esteban Enrique conduct a graveside prayer service for Nicholas Miller on Friday at the Fairview Cemetery.
After the ceremony, the seniors share their thoughts about an experience— in the middle of a school day — that has hit them hard.
“I know I’m going back, and I’m going to go to school and take another quiz,” says 18-year-old Brendan McInerney, “but all that work, you can get caught up in it. … When you kind of get out of that bubble that you can kind of stuck in, you get perspective on what’s really important in life.”
Roxbury Latin seniors Chris Rota, Liam McDonough, Emmett Dalton, Esteban Enrique, Brendan McInerney and Noah Piou, and assistant headmaster Mike Pojman, listen as funeral director Bob Lawler explains the circumstances of the death of Nicholas Mlller, whose body was unclaimed, at the Robert J. Lawler & Crosby Funeral Home.
Mike Pojman was inspired to start bringing students to these funerals by a similar program at his alma mater, St. Ignatius High School in Cleveland. He turned to local funeral home Lawler and Crosby — which, by coincidence, is one of the very few funeral homes in the state that steps in to help with these kind of burials.
“It’s the right thing to do,” says funeral director Robert Lawler. “You know, you can’t leave these poor people lying there forever.”
Funeral director Bob Lawler sits alone in a visitation room with the casket of Nicholas Miller as he waits for students from Roxbury Latin school to arrive and act as pallbearers for the burial.
When there are no family members or volunteers available, it’s just Lawler by himself, saying a prayer at graveside. After doing this for 42 years, he appreciates the effect it has on people like 17-year-old Roxbury Latin senior Noah Piou. Today’s ceremony for Nicholas Miller was the first funeral he’s attended.
“That’s my first real moment presented with some form of death before me, and I was kind of at a loss for words at the time,” he says. “I’ve never met Mr. Miller before, but even within that I kind of had a connection with him, and I could feel that.”
After the brief ceremony the students laid flowers. Then they piled back into the van, driving back to school in time for their next lesson.
Funeral director Bob Lawler walks back into the Robert J. Lawler & Crosby Funeral Home after the burial at the Fairview Cemetery on Friday.
During the early 19th century, it was not uncommon for the mortal remains of a beloved pet cat to be buried in the family garden. By the Victorian era, however, the formality of cat funerals had increased substantially. Bereaved pet owners commissioned undertakers to build elaborate cat caskets. Clergymen performed cat burial services. And stone masons chiseled cat names on cat headstones. Many in society viewed these types of ceremonies as no more than an amusing eccentricity of the wealthy or as yet another odd quirk of the elderly spinster. Others were deeply offended that an animal of any kind should receive a Christian burial.
In March of 1894, several British newspapers reported the story of a Kensington lady “of distinction” who held a funeral for her cat, Paul. An article on the subject in the Cheltenham Chronicle states:
“Except that the Church did not lend its sanction, the function was conducted quite as if it had been the interment of a human person of some importance. A respectable undertaker was called in, and instructed to conduct the funeral in the ordinary way; the body was to be enclosed in a shell which would go inside a fine oak coffin. There were the usual trappings, including a plate on which was inscribed the statement that ‘Paul’ had for seventeen years been the beloved and faithful cat of Miss —, who now mourned his loss in suitable terms. The coffin, with a lovely wreath on it, was displayed in the undertaker’s shop, where it was an object of intense interest and not a little amusement.”
Though Paul’s burial service was not sanctioned by the Church, this did not stop other cat funerals from adopting a religious tone. An 1897 edition of the Hull Daily Mail reports the story of a clergyman who held a funeral for his cat. This particular cat is described as an obese, black and white female who was known to go for walks with her master. Upon her death, the clergyman and his household were “thrown into mourning.” The Hull Daily Mail reports:
“For three days pussy, whose remains were placed with loving care in a beautiful brass-bound oaken coffin, with inner linings of silk and wool, lay in state in the drawing-room. At the termination of this period, the rev. gentleman hired a cab, drove to the station, and took a train for the North, bearing with him the oak coffin and the precious remains. Where the funeral took place seems to be somewhat of a mystery – at least there are conflicting accounts – but of one thing people seem to be certain. The ceremonial respect which had been accorded to the deceased was maintained to the last, and the burial service, or part thereof, was recited at pussy’s grave.”
The majority of historical reports on cat funerals from the Victorian era are recounted with humor. Others show a darker response to pet burials. A September 1885 article in the Edinburgh Evening News relates the story of an “old old woman” in Abercromby Street intent on giving her deceased cat, Tom, a “decent burial.” She applied to the local undertaker to build Tom a suitable coffin and employed a gravedigger, by the name of Jamie, to dig a grave for Tom in the local burying ground. As the article states:
“…the funeral, which took place in the afternoon yesterday, was largely attended. Miss — carried the coffin, and on the way to the graveyard the crowd of youngsters who followed became exceedingly noisy, and being apprehensive that the affair would end in a row, ‘Jamie’ closed the iron gate with the view of preventing any but a select few from entering. The crowd, however, became even more excited, scaled the wall, hooting and yelling vociferously, crying that it was a shame and a disgrace to bury a cat like a Christian.”
Sorrow by Émile Friant, 1898
Whether this uproar was truly a result of outrage over Tom being buried “like a Christian” or simply an excuse for rowdy youths to misbehave is unclear. Regardless, the results of the riot that ensued were exceedingly unpleasant for Tom’s elderly, bereaved owner. The Edinburgh Evening News reports:
“The coffin was afterwards smashed, and the body of the cat taken out, and ultimately the uproar became so great that the police had to be called to protect the gravedigger and the old lady. The latter managed to get hold of the dead body of Tom, and with the assistance of Constables Johnston and Smith escaped into a house in the neighborhood, where she remained for some time. In Abercromby Street, where she resides, a number of policemen had to be kept on duty till a late hour in order to protect her from the violence of the crowd.”
Perhaps the main cause of outrage lies in the fact that Tom’s owner was attempting to bury a cat in the human graveyard. This was not an uncommon complaint. Many graveyards did not allow pets to be buried in consecrated ground. As a result, pet cemeteries were established. One of the most well-known was the Hyde Park Dog Cemetery, opened in 1881. As the name denotes, this was primarily a burial ground for dogs. However, according to author Gordon Stables (qtd. in Animal Death 22), the cemetery also admitted the corpses of “three small monkeys, and two cats.”
Other pet cemeteries existed throughout Victorian England, both public and private. The pet cemetery at the Essex seat of Sir Thomas Lennard had pet monuments dating as far back as the 1850s. While the pet cemetery at Edinburgh Castle originated as a burial place for 19th century regimental mascots and officers’ dogs. And I would be remiss if I did not mention author Thomas Hardy, who had a pet cemetery at his home at Max Gate in Dorchester in which all but one of the headstones were carved with the famous novelist’s own hands.
Unsurprisingly, the majority of headstones and monuments in pet cemeteries of that era are for dogs. Dogs were incredibly popular pets during the 19th century. They were typically viewed as selfless, devoted friends and guardians. While cats were, to some extent, still seen as sly, self-serving opportunists (for more on this, see my article Peter Parley Presents the Treacherous 19th Century Cat). In addition, as author Laurel Hunt points out in her book, AngelPawprints:
“Queen Victoria’s fondness for dogs strengthened their role as companions in the Victorian era.”
This bias in favor of dogs had no effect on Victorian cat fanciers whatsoever. Cat funerals continued to take place with just as much pomp and ceremony as dog funerals. The public reaction to both was very much the same – amusement, outrage, and occasionally scorn. One of my favorite examples of the latter is from an article in an 1880 edition of the Portsmouth Evening News which reports on a lady who sent out “black-edged funeral cards” upon the death of her dog. As a sort of disclaimer, the article states:
“It is superfluous to affirm that the owner of that lamented Fido is a maiden lady.”
It does seem that a great many reports of pet funerals in the 19th century news involve some stereotypical variety of spinster – the Victorian cat (or dog) lady, if you will. Though humorous, I do not believe this was the norm. The simple fact is that, throughout history, there have been people who have grieved at the loss of their pets. During the Victorian era, this grief took shape in elaborate pet funerals. For cats, who were still persecuted in so many ways, these ceremonies strike me as especially poignant.
Elizabeth Platonovna Yaroshenko by Nikolai Yaroshenko, 1880
I close this article with poet Clinton Scollard’s 1893 elegy for his cat, Peter. In her book Concerning Cats (1900), author Helen Winslow claims that this tribute to a deceased cat is the “best ever written.” I’ll let you be the judge.
Alex Janin
