Price Check, Reality Check

I had to call several funeral homes today to get a price check.

It felt very odd.

I didn’t want to do it because it felt a little tacky but I dusted off my old journalist’s cap (and man, was it dusty) and pretended I was calling for a story. I pretended it was not because my mom asked me to, not because my step-father is being eaten up with cancer.
I pretended I was doing it for someone else.

I watched every episode of Six Feet Under and I’ve read excerpts from Jessica Mitford’s “The American Way of Death.” I know that funeral homes are businesses and, like so many other businesses in this country, they’re struggling to make a buck. And even in this industry, the locally owned businesses are being squeezed out by big corporations.

But I was still unprepared for the wide range of prices for the exact same services. My stepfather is dying and we want to know who to call to pick him up from his house when he goes. He wants to be cremated and we will have the service at his church. Anyway, my mom has found an urn she wants to order, so we don’t need a funeral home to provide one. What we’re asking is pretty basic. It turns out the prices range from $980 to $3000 for the same exact services.

And even though it's the American Way, I'm still shocked that morticians' prices vary so widely for the same services. Some funeral homes were more direct than others. One place said the crematorium fee was $200, another said it was $185. One made it sound like the number of death certificates I needed could drastically affect the price; I called another place where they said the death certificates only cost $6 each. The woman who answered the phone at yet another place tried to gently and subtly tell me that when you choose cremation, there has to be a container for the body to go *into* the…furnace or oven, whatever it’s called. And finally, one man said that while his home did provide a nice fiberboard box for the cremation itself, you could also use a big cardboard box, such as one that holds a big-screen TV or a refrigerator.

I can’t imagine doing this business but apparently several of my ancestors ran funeral homes in the 1800s. And, in fact, my grandmother has a letter from her uncle who attended mortuary school in the 1920s. He was really excited about the new embalming technique using formaldehyde. (I just looked up the history of embalming—it turns out my great uncle had reason to be excited. Before formaldehyde, embalmers used a combination of arsenic and water, which was pretty deadly to the technicians themselves.) Unfortunately, my great-uncle Clyde didn’t get to practice his new skills. He died at a very young age from TB.

Anyway, this proves that in death, as well as life, it doesn't hurt to shop around.