Coping with grief the first time you lose a loved one is overwhelming. Expressing your feelings, both negative and positive, is important.
When you’re young, the distinct pain of grief may be felt with the loss of a beloved pet. Sometimes years go by, though, before a family member or close friend dies.
Losing someone close to you for the first time is overwhelming. The grief is an unexpected cascade of treasured memories intertwined with feelings of incomplete, unexpressed emotions. In “On Death and Dying,” author Elizabeth Kubler-Ross described the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
Denial is the first stage that will hit you when someone you love dies. It opens the door to what is to come.
Kubler-Ross and David Kessler, in the book’s new edition “On Grief and Grieving,” explain that denial comes first to help you survive the loss. During this stage, “the world becomes meaningless and overwhelming. Life makes no sense. We are in a state of shock and denial. … We go numb.” Really, we just want to run away.
Denial must be met head on though, because it starts the grieving and healing process.
“Do your best to remain self-aware in the face of the emotions that will surge,” says Virginia A. Simpson, a Sacramento, Calif., bereavement care specialist and author of “The Space Between,” a book about caring for her dying mother. “Acknowledge that thoughts such as ‘I can’t handle this’ or ‘I’m not strong enough’ are just a story you are telling yourself.”
Expressing feelings, negative and positive, is important. “You can’t avoid the enormity of the situation,” says Judy Rosenberg, a Los Angeles-based clinical psychologist. “Along with the death of a person comes the death of precious memories and feeling of incomplete, unexpressed emotions. … Expression allows you to heal and move on.”
Spiritual counselor Audrey Hope said she walked in circles at her office for hours after receiving news of her sister’s sudden death. She then expressed her rage and grief by lying on a table and screaming off and on for three hours, she said.
If you are able, being at the bedside of a dying friend or family member can help blunt the pain of denial. Although the paradox of denial is that it can keep you from being there, being part of the dying process can help you through the other stages and lead you toward acceptance.
“Because most people are intimidated by the dying process, they tend to leave the bedside before they have said their final goodbyes,” Rosenberg said. “When death is not appropriately grieved, you bear the burden of feeling incomplete. This sense of incompletion can show up as guilt, nightmares and a general feeling of suppressed emotions.”
The unexpected loss of someone you love calls for true courage. Chicago therapist David Klow believes that while many people might shrink from the unexpected experience, they would benefit by remaining open to it and “leaning into the feelings.”
“Rather than fighting through the feelings, it helps to stay with them and let the feelings guide how you might say goodbye,” he said. “Most people worry they will become too overwhelmed by emotions (but) being able to feel what we are going through in the moment actually allows for a healthier grieving process.”
To help prepare them for the loss of a loved one later, kids can benefit from learning about loss not related to death early on. Learning how to deal with leaving one school for another, losing a friend who moves away or breaking an object that had special meaning can help create understanding of grief.
“Those experiences help us learn to cope with a loss,” says Kriss Kevorkian, a Los Angeles-area thanatologist, a person who studies death and dying. “When losing a loved one for the first time, the best thing to do is ask (yourself) how you coped with other losses in your life.”
“In our society, we’re often told to ‘get over it,’ which is just about the worst advice ever,” she said. “Sit with your grief, find the meaning in it through appreciating that fact that you have loved ones that you care for.”
There’s no way to avoid grieving, Kevorkian says. It will come no matter how much you try to resist. “Allow it to unfold,” she says. “Grief … teaches us to appreciate life and those we love. Instead of pushing it aside, embrace it and learn to truly be grateful for every day.”
Simpson, the bereavement care specialist, offers this advice when you are at the bedside of a loved one who is dying:
1. Consider that being present at the end of someone’s life is a sacred honor, a privilege and a gift.
2. Accept that you may be scared and that it’s OK.
3. To alleviate your own fear, focus your attention on the person you love. Touch them, speak to them, sing to them, thank them.
4. Don’t worry if you cry.
5. Don’t be concerned about knowing the right thing to do. There is no single right thing. Just show up, pay attention, tell the truth and don’t be attached to the outcome.
It was five days after Teresa Van Deusen’s sister died when the letter from American Express arrived, offering condolences. How they knew her sister had died was a mystery—Van Deusen never called to inform them, and they hadn’t made any changes on her account. But there it was, a letter expressing sympathies, and also reminding her of the $16,000 in credit card debt her sister owed.
When someone dies, his or her debt doesn’t disappear. His or her remaining assets get pooled together, and then a probate court doles out payments to cover any remaining debts: First the mortgage; then other secured debts, like car loans; and then, if there’s any money left, unsecured debt, like credit cards. If, say, you’re set to inherit the family house but your parents die with debt that their other assets couldn’t cover, a court can force you to sell the house in order to pay off the debts. Most Americans who have debt don’t die with a ton of money or assets leftover, and credit card companies clamber to get to the estate first, since when that money gets paid off to other agencies, the debt goes away.
Credit card companies have two options: Pursue the debt, or chalk it up as a loss to get a tax credit. For example, Van Deusen’s sister had about $5,000 outstanding on her credit card with Wells Fargo, but the bank chose not to chase it down. “They sent a letter that said, ‘We’re declaring this as a loss, and we’re sorry for your loss,’ and [sent us] a 1099-C”—a form Van Deusen would need to pay taxes on the canceled debt. But plenty of other collectors take other strategies.
“Collecting the debts of the dead—particularly the unsecured debt, like credit card debt—is a pretty good racket,” said Oliver Bateman, a former debt collector who wrote for us last year about his demoralizing experience in that job.
The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act prevents collectors from making threats, calling too many times, harassing family members, or using deception in the pursuit of collecting debt. But collectors can contact family members of the deceased in order to reach the administrator of the estate. Some companies take it one step further, trying to squeeze money out of relatives or friends, even though they have no legal obligation to repay the debts of the person who’s died. (The only time a creditor can legally collect from a family member is if someone has co-signed on a loan or if he or she is the debtor’s spouse and live in a community property state.)
Michelle Dunn, a consultant for the debt collection industry who literally wrote the handbook on debt collection, says this kind of thing “happens every day.”
“Some bill collectors will talk to anybody in the family and try to get them to pay a bill. They’ll say it’s their ‘moral obligation,’ which is absolutely false,” Dunn said. “But people are not educated on what their rights are, and if they’ve just had a death in their family, they’re upset. So when a bill collector tells them something like this, they might be more likely to believe it [and agree to pay the debt].”
Bateman told me about a colleague who used a legal research database to track down addresses of next-of-kin, sent those relatives threatening letters about an owed amount, and then persuaded people there was a “moral obligation” to pay it. “A few times, we got payment in full from the kids or other relatives of these people. It was truly breathtaking,” Bateman said.
The Social Security Administration gives notice to financial institutions a few months after someone dies, but debt collectors usually find out much sooner by using databases to track recent deaths. Dunn, who was a bill collector herself before she became a consultant, told me she always read the newspaper obituaries to see if anyone she needed to call had died. “There used to be a newspaper—I’m sure it’s online now—where you could pay for a subscription and see, state by state, the people who have died that day,” she said.
As these online tools become easier to use, collection companies are increasingly more likely to pursue the debt of dead people, one way or another. There are plenty of horror stories: A woman in Hawaii sued Bank of America collectors, after she says they called upwards of 48 times a day just after she received her husband’s life insurance check. (There’s no obligation to use life insurance to pay off debts, unless the deceased person named his or her estate the beneficiary of his or her life insurance money, in which case it gets divided up with the other assets.) Another woman said she was harassed by collectors for five years about her dead sister’s debt, to the point where she moved and changed her phone number multiple times. The collection agency Rumson, Bolling & Associates was sued in 2011 after harassing debtors’ family members, co-workers, and neighbors, as well as threatening to “desecrate the bodies of deceased relatives” if they failed to pay off funeral bills. The company was eventually banned by the Federal Trade Commission from the debt collection business.
But the worst cases are sometimes people who think they’re doing the right thing by informing a bank, loan, or credit card company that the account holder has died, and then get manipulated into paying the debt.
“Someone will call and say, ‘I’ve been going through my uncle’s mail because he’s passed away and I see you’ve sent this letter that he owes some money, and I’m calling to tell you he’s dead,'” said Dunn. “Some bill collectors will then tell them to pay that bill, and they don’t know they don’t need to, so people pay it.”
Van Deusen, who was the administrator of her sister’s estate, estimates that she spent more than 50 hours on the phone with collectors from BBVA bank, and even more with other credit card companies, which she described as “endless, persistent gas lighting.” She was never asked to pay her sister’s debt out of her own pocket, but she says collection agents tried to get the estate to pay off debts that weren’t even real—including nearly $7,000 in fees that were issued post-mortem, and debts that had already been written off. “Death and taxes, sure,” she said, “but dead people shouldn’t be paying debt that the credit card companies have already written off.”
Van Deusen also battled numerous calls from a third-party collection agency that claimed they had purchased her sister’s American Express debt and demanded money from the estate. “I said, ‘Show me a contract.’ Any evidence this was her debt. In the year we were negotiating, they just never produced that.”
Many collection agencies, including the one where Bateman worked, pay employees based on how much debt they collect, which can motivate collectors to squeeze every last dollar out of a family—whether it comes from the dead person’s estate or otherwise. I asked Bateman if he ever felt compelled to bully a debtor, or a family member, in order to earn higher commission. “Sure, all the time,” he said. “Sometimes, I’d have an argument with a particularly sassy debtor who wasn’t going to pay me any money, just because it was fun to do.”
“It’s a recipe for someone to push the limits and break the law because he or she is desperate trying to get these people to pay,” said Dunn. “It’s setting them up to do something wrong.”
In the year since I first wrote about cliché-free memorial tattoos for Modern Loss, I’ve encountered people’s ink tributes in bathroom lines at concerts, at book readings and all over the Internet. I’ve heard about a wedding party who got a mass tattoo for a late groom and from a reader who inked the title of my memoir on her forearm to honor her late brother.
I confess that I’m still contemplating tattoo designs for my late husband and brother, but not for lack of exposure to meaningful, aesthetically stunning tributes. The memorial tattoos included below reach beyond rose-wrapped crosses and words like “R.I.P.,” and into the realm of the remarkably personal. Some take a high-design approach and some are unassumingly simple, but all use unexpected symbolism to honor the deceased.
Redford Reid
Name: Redford Reid Age: 34 Current City: Brooklyn, N.Y. Date of Loss: Feb. 8, 2014 Tattoo Artist: Thomas Hooper of Rock of Ages in Austin, Texas
Who does your tattoo memorialize? My father, Gary R. Parker.
How did you lose him? In a tragic skiing accident.
Did you get the tattoo on a significant date? No, the timing was based on the artist’s availability.
Tell us about the tattoo’s design: My dad often wore ties, so I chose several from his closet that had design potential for a tattoo. Then I asked the artist to create a mandala inspired by those ties.
Meghan Schuttler
Name: Meghan Schuttler Age: 25 Current City: Santa Rosa, Calif. Date of Loss: June 3, 2011 Tattoo Artist: Brandon Bartholomew of The Hole Thing in Santa Rosa, Calif.
Who does your tattoo memorialize? My father, Scott Schuttler.
How did you lose him? Sudden heart attack.
Did you get the tattoo on a significant date? Following my college graduation, and almost exactly one year after he passed.
Tell us about the tattoo’s design: My dad was a musician and loved music. The design is his first name, “Scott,” represented in musical symbols. The numbers indicate his birthday (June 5) and death day (June 3). I chose to place the tattoo on my left ribcage so it would be close to my heart.
Angela Lee Bellefeuille
Name: Angela Lee Bellefeuille Age: 35 Current City: Washington, D.C. Date of Loss: February 2, 2014 Tattoo Artist: Alessandro Contu of Tattoo House Perugia in Perugia, Italy
Who does your tattoo memorialize? My husband, Riccardo Romani.
How did you lose him? Metastatic brain tumors. He fought for 14 months and endured five brain surgeries before losing the battle.
Did you get the tattoo on a significant date? On March 31, 2014, after a bout of depression left me contemplating suicide.
Tell us about the tattoo’s design: In order to feel the pain of slitting my wrists — so I’d never do it — I decided to get a tattoo there. The act of tattooing represents curbing my desire to end my life (and the pain) after losing my husband. Literally, the three birds represent the three souls lost: his, mine, and our 19-year old cat who died two weeks before Riccardo did. But it also symbolizes the hope of flying away and finding a beautiful life after tragedy.
Who does your tattoo memorialize? My husband, Riccardo Romani.
How did you lose him? Metastatic brain tumors. He fought for 14 months and endured five brain surgeries before losing the battle.
Did you get the tattoo on a significant date? On March 31, 2014, after a bout of depression left me contemplating suicide.
Tell us about the tattoo’s design: In order to feel the pain of slitting my wrists — so I’d never do it — I decided to get a tattoo there. The act of tattooing represents curbing my desire to end my life (and the pain) after losing my husband. Literally, the three birds represent the three souls lost: his, mine, and our 19-year old cat who died two weeks before Riccardo did. But it also symbolizes the hope of flying away and finding a beautiful life after tragedy.
Katie Irish
Name: Katie Irish Age: 35 Current City: Brooklyn, N.Y. Date of Loss: Nov. 14, 2012 Tattoo Artist: Sue Jeiven of East River Tattoo in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Who does your tattoo memorialize? My daughter, Roxane Persephone Chinn.
How did you lose her? I was 40-weeks pregnant, and it was our due date. Late in the afternoon, I became aware that Roxy wasn’t moving as much as she normally did. I attributed it the fact that she was full term and had pretty much run out of room. We called the doctor, and she had us come in for an ultrasound. We arrived at the hospital, but they could not find a heartbeat. After I delivered her the next morning, we saw that there was a true knot in her umbilical cord that had probably formed very early in the pregnancy.
Did you get the tattoo on a significant date? It took time to decide that I wanted a tattoo (this is my only one) and once I did, to figure out what I wanted. After that all became clear to me, though, I wanted it as soon as I could get an appointment with Sue. The date itself wasn’t significant, but the act definitely was.
Tell us about the tattoo’s design: Once I decided that I wanted to commemorate Roxy in this way, I began researching ideas. I knew that I wanted something beautiful that wasn’t immediately recognizable as a memorial tattoo. I began looking at Victorian mourning jewelry (no one has done mourning like the Victorians) and found a beautiful brooch with an outstretched hand holding some foliage. This symbolizes remembrance. I changed the foliage to Cyprus branches, which is what we had carried at Roxy’s memorial. When I met with Sue, she was thrilled by the idea of using Victorian mourning symbols for this and suggested the addition of the hair jewelry piece at the bottom. The Victorians would cut the hair of their dead and weave it into incredibly intricate pieces: bracelets, brooches, rings, and even tiaras. We decided on a bracelet that attaches to the cuff of the hand and disappears into the Cyprus. This is another symbol for remembrance but it also reminds me that Roxy was born with a full head of beautiful, dark hair.
Rita Schell
Name: Rita Schell
Age: 50
Current City: Colorado Springs, Colo.
Date of Loss: Nov. 18, 2011 Tattoo Artist: Ron Dolocek of Lucky Devil Tattoo in Colorado Springs, Colo.
Who does your tattoo memorialize? My only brother, Johnny Schell.
How did you lose him? Suicide.
Did you get the tattoo on a significant date? I chose the month of February since that’s the beginning of our astrological sign’s timeline.
Tell us about the tattoo’s design: My brother and I had a bond that allowed us to communicate with a look and through humor that only we understood. When I lost him, I was devastated and went through a period of drug and alcohol use. I couldn’t stop thinking about what I could have done to change things. I didn’t want to stop thinking about Johnny because I thought if I did, he would disappear and I’d have nothing. But after I read the book [by the author of this column] “Splitting the Difference,” I realized that keeping my brother’s memory alive didn’t mean living my life for him and it didn’t need to come at the expense of my health. I could still love him, miss him and talk to him without destroying myself in the process. So the tattoo’s phrase refers to my choice to “split the difference” between losing him and losing myself. Johnny was a Pisces like I am, so I chose the two fish that symbolize our astrological sign. He was born on St. Patrick’s Day so the fish representing him is green; my fish is purple because my February birthstone is amethyst. The color of my fish also ties back to a pair of amethyst earrings that Johnny gave me when I was a little girl and he was a cadet at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
Jesika Doty
Name: Jesika Doty Age: 40 Current City: Kansas City, Mo. Date of Loss: Sept. 20, 2009 Tattoo Artist: Chris Orr of Mercy Seat Tattoo in Kansas City, Mo.
Who does your tattoo memorialize? My husband, Doug Doty.
How did you lose him? Helicopter crash.
Did you get the tattoo on a significant date? It was close to what would have been our seventh wedding anniversary.
Tell us about the tattoo’s design: On our wedding day, Oct. 1, 2005, my soon-to-be-husband gave me this handwritten card before we walked down the aisle together: ‘You are the love of my soul, and the soul of my life. I love you, Always, Douglas.’ He had a way of capturing the feelings that we experienced together, and these particular words from him remind me of the undying connection we have and the beautiful love we shared. It reminds me that a connection like that is real, can be real again and not to settle for anything less. It’s a daily message in his handwriting about the possibilities of love…a permanent love note directly from him.
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.”
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.
Funeral biscuits, a Los Angelitos celebration, a cemetery picnic
Our relationship with food is almost as complicated as the one we have with death. Food can bring comfort, be tied to feelings of guilt or pleasure, and can evoke memories and feelings as powerful as any song. It’s no wonder that throughout history and across cultures, people have used food to help honor loved ones who have died. Here are some ways in which it’s been done.
1. Dumb Supper
During this feast — thought by some scholars to be a precursor to modern Halloween — a table is laid out all in black, with places for both the living and the dead. No one speaks to allow for communion with the dead. Guests bring with them a letter written to a loved one who has passed. When the meal is over the unread letters are burned and one by one the messages within are thought to be carried into the spirit world. Believed to have roots in ancient Celtic tradition, the dumb supper was brought to Appalachia by American settlers. Some living in the region still hold the suppers. It is also observed on Samhain, one of the four Gaelic seasonal festivals, by Pagans and Wiccans.
2. Telling the Bees
One old English custom also practiced in America in the early 19th century — and a risky one, to be sure — involved going out to the beehive to deliver the news that a family member had died. The messenger would tap on the hive and whisper, “Little Brownies, your mistress is dead.” Families would attach an invitation to the funeral on the hive and bring food from the funeral feast to the bees. This was a way to show gratitude and respect for the bees and their gifts of honey, beeswax and pollination. Fail to do so, and you would risk offending the bees, which might choose to move on to a more appreciative family.
3. Fave dei Morti (Beans of the Dead)
During ancient Roman times, the souls of ancestors were thought to reside in fava beans. At Roman wedding feasts, beans were presented to the bride and groom, who would eat them in hopes of attracting the souls of male ancestors to carry on the family bloodline. (Eating beans on your wedding day — that’s risky in a different way.) As a bonus, beans were also believed to ward off ghosts and vampires, who were easily tricked into thinking the beans were living people. And on All Souls Day in Italy, it is common to consume bean-shaped cookies, or fave del morti. There are many different variations, but the most popular resembles a macaroon-like cake in appearance, but with a rich, buttery texture and sweet almond flavor. More traditional versions are shaped like kidney beans and flavored with almond flour and extract. Here’s a recipe.
4. Obon Figures
Obon is a series of festival days in Japan when the souls of the departed are thought to visit their living relatives. Horses and cow figurines are made from vegetables placed on altars. It is believed that the spirits of the visiting ancestors ride the animals between worlds of the living and the dead.
5. Funeral Biscuits
Funeral biscuits first appeared in 1600s Europe, and were also commonplace up until the early 1900s in America. They were sometimes taken door-to-door and served as a funeral invitation or handed out as a keepsake after the funeral. According to Barts Pathology Museum’s curator Carla Valentine, funeral biscuits were wrapped in a paper that bore a poem or prayer with the name of the deceased, then sealed with black wax and stamped with a skull or hourglass. Should you want to make a batch, here’s a recipe.
6. Lemons
In Switzerland, male mourners would wrap a lemon in a handkerchief and place it into their hat. The hat would be carried under the left arm for the duration of the funeral. At the end of the service, the lemons were placed on the grave to symbolize the “sharpness” of their grief.
7. Los Angelitos
During Mexico’s Days of the Dead, a sacred observance when spirits of deceased family members are believed to return to the earth for a family reunion with the living, one day is set aside to welcome the spirits of children, or Los Angelitos (The Little Angels). Altars are decorated, and food is offered up in miniature portions and served on tiny plates, often with a little glass of milk.
8. Journey Cakes
A staple of cuisine in the American south is a little corn cake, known as a Johnny Cake. The term “Johnny” was derived from the corn cakes’ original use as “Journey Cakes,” among some African tribes. They were placed in coffins to provide sustenance for the deceased during their long journey to the afterlife.
9. Parsley
After ancient Greeks dedicated this herb to the goddess Persephone, who reigns over the land of the dead, it became a staple during funeral rites. Parsley was planted over graves and athletes donned crowns of parsley during Funeral Games. The games, depicted in the Iliad, were played in the deceased’s honor and are recognized as the precursor to the Olympics. They included chariot races, wrestling, boxing, discus throwing and running.
10. Cemetery Picnics
During the Victorian era when cemeteries were cultivated as parks and gardens, people came to enjoy a day of leisure, to partake of a meal with loved ones no longer with them or even dine on the family’s prepaid plot. In America, the practice took on a more practical purpose: when communities would come together to help clean and maintain the cemetery grounds. Graves would be tended to, trees and flowers planted, and repairs made. Once the work was done, families would set out their potluck dishes and share in a communal meal.
Jane Faller is embraced by her longtime friend Deb Anthes after she changed Faller’s arm bandage on Oct. 1 in Republic, Wash. Injured in a fall, Faller’s arm required daily care from Deb, who would visit her as Jane’s husband, Bob Faller, lay in hospice care.
Bob Faller died after a day of fighting and struggling. Naked and fierce, gripped by death’s delirium, he rolled on the floor tearing paper into tiny shreds. He tried to flush his pants down the toilet.
Jane, his wife of 58 years, was alone in their rural Republic house, terrified. Helpless.
When a new day dawned, she called a hospice nurse, who told Jane to increase her husband’s morphine dose to every two hours. Bob eventually settled, slept, and slowly let his body shut down.
Longtime friend Steve Anthes was with Jane as Bob, 79, took his final breath. It was Oct. 19, nearly 18 months after Bob was diagnosed with throat cancer, 18 months of dying slowly in the forests far away from hospitals, tubes and machines. It was the ending he chose.
Now a new struggle begins for Jane. Can this 77-year-old woman live alone in the winter in remote Ferry County with little money and medical bills arriving daily?
A nondescript box containing the ashes of Bob Faller sits atop a hutch he built by hand in his earlier years. “There’s pieces of furniture he built all over the country,” Jane said.
Relief brings feelings of guilt
“It’s quiet now,” Jane said shortly after her husband’s death. Her voice was strong but soft over the phone, the relief evident.
Yet within an hour, her house filled with people and the chaos of dying’s aftermath. The coroner, friends bearing containers of food, phone calls, decisions.
By 9 p.m., Jane sat in near-darkness on her couch, alone. Murphy the dog slept on the floor near her feet. Bob’s hospital bed was around the corner, empty.
“I feel guilty at feeling so relieved,” she said. “I’m really going to sleep tonight.”
Three months later, Bob’s ashes are in a gray plastic box on a beautiful wooden shelf that he crafted with his own hands years ago. Jane carefully removed the lid, exposing a plastic bag of ash. She put her nose near the bag and took a big sniff. She shrugged. At first she talked to him a lot, lit candles. Not so much now.
Jane’s unsure what she will do with the ashes, other than eventually spread them somewhere in nature. It doesn’t matter right now as snow falls outside the window and each day presents more pressing problems and challenges.
Two weeks ago the weather warmed and snow slid from the roof, burying the deck so she couldn’t open the door. She called for help.
A few weeks before that, the ancient hot water heater leaked at least 25 gallons onto the floor and into the crawl space under the house. She called the local hardware store for the name of a plumber, who inspected the damage and asked for a $400 check to buy a new heater and supplies. The man was gone several hours, long into the evening; Jane panicked. At one point she held her cramping stomach, wrought with stress. But he eventually returned and by 9:30 p.m. had the tank installed and working. She paid another $125 in labor costs and then had to buy a new faucet for the sink. Her hand shook as she wrote the check.
After visiting her daughter in Issaquah, Washington, for Thanksgiving, she returned home and turned on the kitchen light. It crashed from the ceiling.
Jane Faller dons a coat in her mudroom containing canned goods on Wednesday. Everywhere she looks, she sees reminders of her late husband. Jane and Bob canned the goods last summer and they remain stored on a shelf he built for them next to a collection of his favorite hats.
Cumulative stress taking its toll
Jane knew living alone would be challenging, but she wasn’t prepared for the reality of it.
A year of stresses have snowballed: Bob’s illness and mental highs and lows. The nasty fall while walking her dog that turned into a three-hour ambulance ride and a weeklong stay in a Spokane hospital. The missed time with her dying husband because of her hospitalization. The nearby forests that erupted in wildfires this summer, the same week Bob started hospice care, forcing them to prepare to evacuate.
Now there’s snow and ice and long, dreary days. After spending months with her arm immobilized in a brace and then in physical therapy, Jane’s arm and hand still hurt. The scars are purple and angry. Her fingers ache.
Jane is timid about walking, although she used to hike miles a day in all weather. She hasn’t resumed her yoga practice. Her legs and feet are achy.
“She’s keeping a good face on it,” said Cherie Gorton of Rural Resources, who checks on Jane at least weekly and recently sat with Jane as she opened piles of medical bills. “I think it’s to the point where she probably needs to get out more. Accept invitations. But I know that is really hard to do.”
Gorton called Jane’s daughter in Issaquah, Cat Kelley, to see if she could help her mother make sense of the mounting medical bills from the hospital stay and ambulance ride. Jane has Medicare, but that only covers a percentage of the bills. She has a few too many dollars in her savings account to qualify for Medicaid. Jane and Bob took out a reverse mortgage that covers their mortgage payment, and she receives Social Security. Her son in North Carolina recently created a GoFundMe account to ask people for donations.
The financial woes weigh heavy on Jane. She doesn’t like owing people. Her kids want her to wait for all the bills to arrive so she knows how much she owes. Then they will figure out a plan.
“It makes me really upset,” Jane said, after a recent trip to the mailbox, which most always contains a bill. “It’s horrible.”
On Oct. 20, the day following Bob’s death, daughter Cat Kelley holds Jane’s healing arm as the two go for a walk on the Fallers’ Republic, Wash., property.
Once estranged, the kids have visited their mom
Jane and Bob chose an adventurous, nomadic life at the cost of not having more than a few thousand dollars in savings. They never thought about getting old, getting sick or having medical expenses.
Yet Jane doesn’t regret their independent lifestyle and her husband’s dreamy, back-to-the-land mentality.
Kelley, Jane’s daughter, said her mom recently told her that’s she’s trying to remember only the good things about her life with Bob.
“That will be stuck in my mind forever,” Kelley said. “I like it.”
The Fallers’ romance with nature, however, hasn’t been embraced by their four living children.
“That’s how she wants to live,” Kelley said recently. “She has something in her that thrives on that.”
All the children have rebelled against their parents’ hippie lifestyle. In subtle ways, they have all alluded to the fact that having Bob as their father wasn’t easy. He was gruff, demanding.
Today all the Faller children are financially conservative, have stable, traditional jobs and live in large houses in the suburbs. They drive nice cars and buy material things.
Kelley, an attorney who no longer practices, proudly has three bathrooms in a big house. It has a generator so she is never without electricity. She said she will never again live like a squatter, as she believes the family did when they homesteaded in Canada and lived in a shack without running water or a toilet and where her mom cooked over an open fire.
The result was something of an estrangement between the children and Bob, and by association, Jane.
Since Bob’s death, three of the children have reconnected, however, jointly visiting their mom in November to help her prepare for winter and sort through Bob’s possessions. Kelley said it’s relieved a lot of family tension.
Before Bob died, one of his grandsons, Bobby, came for a rare visit, to say goodbye and make peace. Afterward, Bob would talk about the visit until his voice gave out. He reiterated the importance of family, even when people don’t agree and view the world differently. Afterward, Bob felt energized, somehow released from his burdens. Perhaps it was that connection he needed, proof that the Faller tenacity lives on.
With that same tenacity, Jane is reaching deep into her adventurous soul and said she intends to stay put on her beloved land. She looks through seed catalogs by the wood stove. Friends are plenty, checking on her, plowing the driveway, helping in any way she needs. This is home.
“I’m staying as long as I can,” she said with her girlish giggle. “We’ll see what happens.”
Jane Faller eats dinner by herself as snow settles outside her home in Republic, Wash., on Tuesday. Her children worry about her making it through the winter, but her friends Steve and Deb Anthes regularly check in on her, and a neighbor plows her driveway. Still, the solitude can be unrelenting. “It’s an empty home,” she said.
