WHAT’S THE POINT?
I think the whole death industry is fascinating, scary, altruistic and predatory. It makes a great investment. I’ve watched Service Corporation International for years. They’ve consistently grown their business by buying up those little mortuaries like Little Chapel of the Dawn and applying big business efficiencies of scale to them.
I don’t like cemeteries from a land use perspective. I see no need to take good land and dedicate it to the dead, thus making it unusable for any other purpose. I understand that they serve historical purposes, fill a societal need to honor the leaders and martyrs of our society, and occasionally can be educational.
Cemeteries have an odd mix of uses. On the one hand they are usually quiet, good places to read a book and are an interesting storybook of our history. Some cemeteries are famous and evoke images of valor and honor such as Arlington National. Others are ramshackles, falling into disrepair plots of land that serve only as vague reminders of past civilizations.
Each society has its own relationship to cemeteries. Some prefer large ornate above ground mausoleums, others are really no more than a patch of ground where bodies are buried to return to the earth from whence they came.
In the Philippines, graves are only rented. Once the rent goes unpaid, the plot is opened and the bones removed, only to be re-rented to some other family.
Each religion has its own relationship to death and the treatment of the body after life. In the Jewish and Muslim faiths, speedy burial precedes a long period of mourning that is very ritualized. Cremation is disallowed for the devout Jews and Muslims, but preferred in Hindu.
Even in America we have a wide divergence of opinions on what should be done with the dead. In the Midwest, open casket funerals are more common than on the coasts. In Caucasian families, cremations are growing in acceptance, but in Hispanic families the opulent and hence expensive, funeral is preferred.
The average funeral costs about $7,000 and the average cremation is $1,200. The most expensive part of a funeral for most people is the casket. I don’t understand caskets. Why take perfectly good wood, satin and metal, put a body in it that is only going to decay and rot, and then plant the whole thing in a concrete box, that then gets buried underground? Caskets costs from a few hundred dollars, which can be bought at bargain retailers like Costco, to the extremely ornate which costs in the tens of thousands.
Funeral directors like to take advantage of a person’s vulnerability at a time of loss and they couch it in terms of appearing concerned and caring. But let’s face it, when you are planting a loved one in the ground, in a box, do you really need a 25-to 50-year warranty on the casket? How do you know if the casket “leaked” and how do you make a claim on that warranty?
Let’s not forget the “protective seal.” What are you protecting them from? Anyone who thinks about the natural process of decay knows that the body is going to disintegrate. Selling someone in the midst of grief a “protective seal” is upselling at its finest.
I have had an interesting relationship with funerals, funeral directors and the death industry. When I was a kid, my father worked for Gates, Kingsley, Gates as a salesman for about two months. He was the guy who would go out to the convalescent homes and do the pre-planning, and occasionally he would have to process the papers for the people who died and just wanted to be cremated. I can still remember him telling my brother about how the company called it a “box ‘em and burn ‘em” call.
When I was in law school I was doing paralegal work and one of my jobs was to summarize deposition transcripts of witnesses in the Pasadena Lamb Funeral Home murders. The stories that were told of contests to see how many bodies could be cremated at the same time, gold teeth being kept in a Styrofoam cup that was collected from the corpses and then sold, along with other more gruesome events, made me ever cautious about the industry as a whole.
I believe in cremation. I asked my law partner what he wanted done with him when he died. In typical fisherman fashion he said, “You can stuff me in a mackerel and feed me to the fishes.” I told him I’d have to charge him, and that there has to be a joke in there somewhere of a lawyer, charging another lawyer to be fed to the sharks.
In Santa Monica, we are getting a rare glimpse into the worlds of cemeteries, funeral directors and the unsettling economics of the industry thanks to the current legal problems with Woodlawn Cemetery. It appears that Michael Steen did nothing criminal. I find it curious that he wanted to sell plots in a “Court of Honor,” but at least it wasn’t bad business.
The problems at Woodlawn show why cemeteries don’t make financial sense. As a city we are subsidizing Woodlawn because it loses money. That means that living Santa Monica residents are paying the rent for the dead, while our schools go underfunded. That seems like a waste to me.
Cemeteries have irrational economics. They are controlled by statute as to what they can and cannot do. They must have trust funds and if you think about it, eventually they don’t make sense. They have only so much land to sell, and once it’s all sold, there needs to be a new income source, or the city must pick up the cost.
We don’t have enough resources in this city to fund all its needed operations for the living, let alone the dead, so perhaps that “Court of Honor” is not such a bad idea after all. (David Pisarra is a business development lawyer and partner in the Santa Monica law firm of Pisarra & Grist. He (310) 664-9969 or by e-mail at)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 24, 2006. Read the original PDF.