aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Saturday, December 08, 2007
Pre-paid funeral scams; I’ll be giving my body to science
In 1975 Audrey and Carl Brewer purchased what they thought was peace of mind-both for themselves and their family-when they bought two pre-paid funeral plans from Forest Hill South, a mortuary and cemetery in Memphis. [...]
The Brewers had no reason to question the honesty of Forest Hill… Then in July 2006, one of Forest Hill’s new owners, Oklahoma oilman Clayton Smart, called a press conference to announce he was invalidating 13,500 pre-paid funeral contracts, including the Brewers’. While police stood by to prevent a customer riot, Smart explained that any contract holder who wanted to use his or her pre-need policy would have to pay an additional $4,000, more or less, at the time of death, even if the plan was already paid in full. “Obviously, things were a lot cheaper in 1965,” Smart explained. “I wouldn’t have bought the business if I thought I’d have to honor those contracts.”
Officials with the Tennessee attorney general’s office offer a different explanation for why Smart wasn’t honoring the contracts. They allege Smart and his partner, attorney Stephen Smith, drained the company’s pre-need trust funds of $20 million shortly after they purchased Forest Hill in 2004.
An AARP survey found 23% of those of us over 50 have signed up for one of these. Meanwhile:
The only federal agency currently concerned with protecting pre-need customers is the Federal Trade Commission. And it’s not doing much. The FTC focuses mainly on funeral homes’ compliance in providing itemized price lists to customers. But price lists can’t protect customers against pre-need fraud: “At this very moment some cash-strapped funeral director is diverting pre-need funds for his personal use,â€Â� declared the industry newsletter Funeral Monitor in April 2007. FTC attorney Monica Vaca says the agency is privately reviewing possible rule changes.
Via Pam Spaulding:
My mom wanted immediate cremation, no urn, no plot, no service. She didn’t believe in handing over cash to the death merchants. When she passed away in 1997, I followed her written wishes (though we had discussed it many times and was clear on what she wanted). A few days later the Cremation Society of the Carolinas sent me a plastic box containing a plastic bag with her ashes. I think the whole cost was around $500.
Daniel Gross had a recent piece in Slate on how cremation is impacting the death business:
Cremation is, well, on fire. The cremation rate rose from roughly 15 percent in 1985 to 27 percent in 2001, and to about a third of all deaths (PDF) in 2005 and 2006, according to the Cremation Association of North America.
Frontline had a moving episode recently on a family funeral home:
Thomas Lynch, 58, is a writer and a poet. He’s also a funeral director in a small town in central Michigan where he and his family have cared for the dead—and the living—for three generations. For the first time, Lynch agreed to allow cameras inside Lynch & Sons, giving FRONTLINE producers Miri Navasky and Karen O’Connor rare, behind-the-scenes access—from funeral arrangements to the embalming room—to the Lynches’ world for this film, The Undertaking.
You can watch online.
My parents have given their bodies to science. When they die the bodies will immediately be taken. We will have no role, no say, about anything that comes next. I always supported their decision and said I’d do that, too.
Hearing Lynch on the Frontline piece - “Funerals are the way we close the gap between the death that happens and the death that matters… A good funeral gets the dead where they need to go and the living where they need to be.” - made me rethink for a time.
AARP’s piece hints that I should go back to it.
