The High Cost of Dying

"In keeping with our high standard of living," said San Francisco Undertaker Warren J. Ringen last week, "there should be an equally high standard of dying. The cost of a funeral varies according to individual taste and the niceties of living the family has been accustomed to." The niceties in coffins range from the show models for $2,000-and-up funerals, displayed on what the trade calls "aisles of resistance," to such novelties as the $785 Eternalite ("manufactured by experts in the field of space-age materials") to inexpensive "flat tops," the trade's contemptuous euphemism for an unadorned pine box.* What with flowers and hearse (the compact hearse, briefly fashionable, is going out of style), limousines and embalming, the average funeral cost in 1960 was just below $1,000. In Santa Monica last week, the California Funeral Directors' Association was fighting hard to maintain the American dying standard. Reason: the growth of "funeral cooperatives," a new version of the old-fashioned burial societies.

Organized in most cases by clergymen, the co-ops sign up undertakers--often those just starting out in business and in need of financial backing--who guarantee a reasonably low, price-fixed funeral for members. There are about 42 such co-ops in the U.S. and Canada already, and the number is growing, generally in middle-income brackets. One group, founded by a Unitarian church in Seattle, offers funerals for only $75; in San Francisco the Bay Area Funeral Society members, who can join for a one-time administrative fee of $10, pay as little as $125; a Cleveland group charges $300; in Toronto the price is $85.

Chief advantage for members is that they can specify in writing exactly what kind of funerals they want and precisely what the cost should be. Explains Unitarian-Universalist Minister Robert MacPherson, of Auburn, Me.: "We're not trying to fight the funeral directors. This is no attempt to undercut their business. And we don't mean to dictate to families how to run their funerals. But I've seen husbands, wives and children agree on how they wanted funeral services arranged, and then just lose control."

The big undertaking groups are fighting back hard against what the California Funeral Directors' Association News calls a conspiracy "to bury the American funeral program." Last week the association ousted two members who refused to hold the line. One of the ousted is San Francisco's Nicholas Daphne, one of the city's most successful funeral directors. Daphne had discarded the association's "suggested" rock-bottom funeral price of $450, had agreed to handle a Berkeley co-op's business for $210 including embalming.

*With admirable Yankee practicality, one Rhode Island dealer advertises: "For those who wouldn't like to be caught dead in a plush-lined coffin," a mail-order traditional plain wooden box with strong rope handles, at $120. "Cover it with cushions, and it can double as a storage chest and low seat until needed for its ultimate purpose."

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