09/21/98 DEATH KIT

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DEATH KIT

THE AMERICAN WAY OF DEATH REVISITED
By Jessica Mitford
Knopf 296pp $25

Jessica Mitford was never much in awe of death. And now, the late author of numerous muckraking books on American life has sent a message from the beyond. Her contention: Funeral directors have a long history of bamboozling the bereaved, and in the past 35 years their practices have gotten worse.
Mitford died of cancer in 1996. She spent her final years revising her classic The American Way of Death, a runaway best-seller in 1963. To that out-of-print work she added chapters on funeral prepayment, the growth of huge industry multinationals, and the failure of the Federal Trade Commission to enforce pro-consumer regulations. The end result, The American Way of Death Revisited, has lost none of the original work's power to shock, appall, and--despite the grim subject matter--jolt the funny bone.
''If the Dismal Traders...have traditionally been cast in a comic role in literature,'' Mitford argues in her opening attack, ''they have successfully turned the tables in recent years to perpetrate a huge, macabre, and expensive practical joke on the American public.'' To unearth industry thinking--from its musings on sales practices to its sustaining ideology--Mitford turned to such trade journals as Mortuary Management and conducted interviews with morticians.
Thus she found in one journal that families were to be encouraged to ''atone for any real or fancied neglect of the deceased'' by choosing Mercedes-class caskets and other services. Embalming, nowadays a uniquely North American practice that the author describes in considerable detail, was said to be necessary to disinfect the body (untrue, says the author). It also allowed ''therapeutic'' viewing of the body by the living--and let funeral men function as ''grief therapists,'' helping families come to grips with their losses. In view of this ''exalted, almost sacred calling,'' as one trade journal put it, who could be so crass as to suggest that the death industry was guilty of high living?
Mitford's book was one of many factors that compelled the FTC to adopt new trade regulations in the 1970s--requiring, for example, that the cheapest caskets must be openly displayed alongside others. But in her revised volume, the author tells how many of those rules have been abandoned or subverted. All in all, costs have continued a heavenward trajectory: ''The average undertaker's bill--$750 in 1961 for casket and 'services'--is now $4,700.'' Adding such other expenses as flowers and cemetery charges brings the ''total average cost for an adult's funeral today [to] $7,800.''
A new chapter considers the multinationals who now conduct 20% of U.S. funerals. Here, Mitford notes that Service Corp. International, the ''undisputed giant,'' by 1994 had taken over 9% of U.S. funeral homes, 15% of those in Britain, and 25% in Australia. To better understand this development, Mitford says she arranged an interview with SCI CEO Robert L. Waltrip--only to be told that a meeting was ''impossible'' for several months. But a ruse enabled her to get an estimate of SCI's charges for a cremation--$2,882--and for interment--from $6,095 up to $20,378.
This high cost of dying was what first alarmed Mitford back in the early '60s. Is there a way out? At the end of her account, the author provides a directory of not-for-profit funeral societies. That list alone may be worth the book's price.
By HARDY GREEN

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PHOTO: Cover, `The American Way of Death Revisited'

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