Final Rights: Reclaiming the American Way of Death - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Lisa Carlson is executive director of Funeral Ethics Organization, http://www.funeralethics.org . FEO is a national nonprofit organization that works with the funeral industry in efforts to improve ethical standards and treatment of funeral consumers. She is a former executive director of FCA. She can be reached at lisa@funeralethics.org .

Josh Slocum is executive director of Funeral Consumers Alliance. FCA is a national nonprofit organization with over 90 chapters throughout the U.S. Its site is http://www.funerals.org . Josh may be reached at josh@funerals.org .

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Chapter 1

Three-year-old Lorenzo Farmer’s tiny body lay locked up in a Salt Lake City hospital morgue for days in 2006. It wasn’t that he had no family; his grief-stricken parents had been by his side. It wasn’t that the family didn’t know what to do for his funeral; they were unusually clear-minded and resolute. Lorenzo was going back to the Fort Hall Indian Reservation in Idaho for a traditional Native American funeral. But the hospital wouldn’t release Lorenzo to his own mother and father thanks to a new state law that made the dead in Utah hostages of the funeral industry.

“It was like a wall. Everybody was telling us ‘No, no, no. We can’t release the body to a family member. A funeral home has to be involved,’” Lorenzo’s grandmother, Wendy Rodriguez, told the Herald Extra.

Until 2006, Utah law followed those of most other states; if no funeral director was involved, the family member acting as the funeral director could sign the spot on the death certificate describing the final disposition of the body. After May 1 of that year, however, only a funeral director could. Lorenzo finally made it back to his parents’ arms, but not until Fort Hall consumer advocates David Robles and Marcia Racehorse-Robles found a sympathetic funeral director—as shocked at this law as we were—who signed the certificate and refused to take a fee. And not before Lorenzo’s parents, Adrian and Crystal, had to endure the outrage of being denied the custody of their own son and the prospect that a mortuary might forcibly embalm his tiny body.

“You just go with whatever they tell you to,” said Rodriguez. “We were just going to have to do it because we thought that was the only way we were going to get him back home.”

The Utah Funeral Director’s Association (UFDA) and the legislators who danced to their tune were responsible for this family’s misery. In a brazen act of self-dealing, the UFDA told state lawmakers the slight change in wording in the death certificate law was part of a housekeeping bill to clean up technicalities. The bill slipped onto the “consent calendar,” where noncontroversial acts get a rubber stamp.

“The primary goal was to protect the consumer more than anything,” UFDA President Tod Bonzo told the Herald Extra when the story broke. “It is a protection for human health . . . .

”It defies believability that UFDA was trying to protect the public by requiring that every citizen pay for the services of their dues-paying funeral homes. Utah was the latest to join the few other states with laws that restrict or prohibit full family control over their funeral rituals.

Fortunately, consumer activists stepped up. Joyce Mitchell, President of FCA of Utah, gathered families, consumer advocates, and Native American tribal representatives to testify against the restrictive law. Dave Robles and his wife, Marcia Racehorse-Robles, drove from Idaho and stalked the halls of the Utah legislature with Mitchell, pushing hard to restore this important family right. Their collective efforts sparked newspaper coverage and support from influential talk-radio hosts. Thanks to Mitchell’s Representative, Brad Daw (R-Orem), HB 265 passed the House overwhelmingly, and Senator Luz Robles (D–Salt Lake, no relation to Dave Robles) became an enthusiastic Senate sponsor. The governor signed the corrective bill into law in 2009.

State Laws Denying Rights of Grieving Families

Eight other states continue to restrict families’ rights to funeral privacy. Every one of these nonsensical prohibitions offends fairness and decency and reeks of an industry meddling to prevent consumer choice and protect its members’ income:

• Connecticut requires a funeral director’s signature on the death certificate and bars anyone but a funeral director or embalmer from removing a body or transporting it.

• The Illinois administrative code (which appears to have been changed after the publication of Carlson’s 1998 book) defines “funeral director or person acting as such” to include only funeral directors or their employees or “associates.” This means a mother couldn’t obtain a disposition permit for her own deceased child, but any anonymous “associate” of a licensed funeral director could. • Indiana law says burial permits can be given only to funeral directors, even though other statutes clearly refer broadly to the “person in charge” of the disposition, the next-of-kin.

• Louisiana law mandates funeral-director involvement in obtaining all necessary permits and funeral director presence at the final disposition of the body. Who knows what nefarious activities families Circling the Hearses 19 and preachers might get up to if left alone at the grave with a casket! New York has similar requirements.

• Michigan health department officials have always been uncooperative with home-funeral families, and statutory changes in 2003 and 2006 now give them a legal excuse for their resistance. All death certificates must now be “certified” by a funeral director—though the statute doesn’t even define what that means. Even more strangely, the wills and probate section of the law requires all body dispositions to be conducted by a licensed funeral director.

• Nebraska law requires a funeral director to supervise all dispositions and gives funeral directors the right and authority to issue “transit permits” to move the body out of state.

• New Jersey statutes changed after the publication of Carlson’s 1998 book, revising sections of law that had allowed families to care for their own dead before that. References to the “person acting as” her own funeral director disappeared from the law.

While family-directed funerals are still permissible in Minnesota, the state tightened the screws in 2007. The law change barred families from using pickup trucks for transporting their dead (a hearse would be just fine, though). When Carlson and Slocum complained about this in response to a press interview, David Benke, director of the Health Department’s mortuary science section said, “If that’s what you want, go to one of those countries where they have no rules or regulations. You can dig a hole and bury a body in your back yard.” (Mr. Benke was apparently unaware that Minnesota law did allow for family cemeteries on private land.)

Also, the state decided to keep its one-of-a-kind law requiring embalming for public viewing—religious or personal objections be damned. Once again, consumer activists mobilized, and they found the sympathetic ear of Representative Carolyn Laine. Laine successfully shepherded a bill into law in 2010 that rolled back these nonsensical restrictions and finally ended Minnesota’s dubious claim to fame as the only state that required embalming for public viewing. Funeral Directors Write Their Own Laws The great majority of laws covering funeral licensing and practice were historically instigated by the National Funeral Directors Association and its handmaidens at the state level. Nearly all funeral licensing boards in the various states are dominated by funeral directors. They routinely legitimate consumer complaints and sweep abuses under the rug.

Take Alabama as an example. The Alabama Examiner of Public Accounts (the state’s inspector general) published a scathing audit of the Alabama Board of Funeral Service in 2007. Some of the findings showed that the board lacked transparency or even any kind of reasonable record keeping. The Examiner found the Board didn’t have a website...