Daniel Richardson

Professor Jesse Miller

ENG 110, H-4

6 October 2017

 

In her “The American Way of Death Revisited”, Jessica Mitford presents an overlying argument that death has become an industrialized within North America. She claims that funeral directors are deceptive in their work. To support this, Mitford borrows a passage from Edward A. Martin’s Psychology of Funeral Service, which reads: “He may not always do as much as the family thinks that he is doing… the important thing is that his services may be used to make the family believe that they are giving unlimited expression to their own sentiment” (pg. 50). Having attended many funerals myself, I agree with Mitford. The funeral director merely makes arrangements and checks in, like a waiter. Mitford compares the funeral director to a salesman. To make this point, she brings up the practice of embalmment, as well as the cost caskets. She reports “The purpose of embalming is to make the corpse suitable for viewing in a suitably costly container; and here too the funeral director, routinely, without first consulting the family, prepares the body for public display” (pg. 43). Once again, firsthand knowledge comes into play, as I have seen catalogs for caskets, and experienced the push of funeral directors to spend more money. Mitford blames this expectation for extravagance on the greedy will of the industry, forcing their wishes upon rattled, grieving families. She points out on page 43 that “No law requires embalming, no religious doctrine commends in, nor is it dictated by considerations of health, sanitation, or even of personal daintiness. In no part of the world, but North American is it widely used.” Never being to a foreign funeral, I have little though about this before. But the more I think about it, the more the practice of embalmment seems just as another sickly way of marketing a deceased. Mitford believes a possible cause of the funeral industry’s control on how death is perceived in North America, is their elusiveness, hiding their process from the public. Mitford asserts that “A close look at what takes place in the [preparation room] may explain in large measure the undertaker’s intractable reticence concerning a procedure that has become his major raison d’etre (pg. 45). I must once again agree with Mitford. Why do we not know more about what the funeral directors do. We trust them. But just how much do they push us around?