The Business of Dying Part Three: Funeral Homes

Wednesday, 05. 5. 2010  –  News and Features

Chris Richards

A death in the family unit happens once every 12 years. To avoid a feeling of “helplessness”, it is important to understand that death is a process.

So says the pamphlet, Helpful Information About Funerals, published by the Funeral Services Association of British Columbia.

Step 1: You die.

That’s the easy part - for you, anyway. The rest of the process is the burden of family and friends, who will likely solicit the services of one of Metro Vancouver’s two-dozen funeral homes. Near the top of the Yellow Pages is First Memorial Funeral Services on Kingsway. It’s a wholly owned subsidiary of Service Corporation International. The Texas giant owns four funeral homes in Vancouver, and several more in the surrounding suburbs. SCI has turned the local funeral home business into a franchise game, with different cookie-cutter brands operating in 46 states, eight provinces, and Puerto Rico.

I spoke with Lisa Marshall, a corporate communications representative for SCI, located in Houston, Texas. She said that SCI aren’t trying to homogenize the funeral experience, but they are looking to bring strong businesses into their fold and grow them with support from head office.

“We may own the property but the people who are delivering the service in your area are locals and they know what’s important to the people in that community. Because we are a national provider we can provide services that nobody else does and couple that with local flair.”

Terissa Hill, funeral director at First Memorial, is tasked with providing that “local flair.”

She says that dealing with death on a daily basis can be emotionally taxing, but it’s also rewarding.

“This is a job where we get to help people. We are working together to help make it into something where the family can say goodbye, which is really important. It can be challenging because, yes, sometimes there are very traumatic deaths and the emotional burden of what has happened is significant. But many people live long and happy lives and so it’s a way to say goodbye and send them off and that’s what we’re trying to accomplish.”

Hill explains the various service levels, which range in price from around $1400 for immediate cremation to $3200 for a full funeral service, including documentation, shelter, removal and transportation. Cremation is by far their most popular option, but if you’ve got money to burn, you’ll want a casket too.

Available in a variety of designs and materials, they range in price from a few hundred dollars for particle board containers, to $4000 for the higher end models with a cherry finish and champagne sovereign velvet interior. For those of us with expensive tastes but smaller pocketbooks, there is a rental casket option where the body is displayed in a high-end mahogany piece, and for cremation the lining is removed and the body is placed into a more cost-effective receptacle.

Should you decide to go for the glitz and glamour of an open casket, you’ll need to be embalmed. In a nondescript white van, you will be driven to Forest Lawn Cemetery in Burnaby, where the central-processing plant for all SCI embalming is located - the headquarters of undertaking. Embalming is an invasive process that involves draining the blood through the carotid artery and replacing it with a restorative chemical that rejuvenates the look of the deceased. A device called a trocar needle is then inserted through your navel to perforate and drain your internal organs. A topical cleanse ensures that your face and exposed skin looks natural. All this costs just $495, but if outward appearance is your only concern upon entrance into the afterworld, the topical cleanse alone is $195.

Following your goodbye ceremony you will once again be transported, likely by hearse to a cemetery or crematorium, where you are lowered six feet beneath the ground or unceremoniously incinerated.

At this point, save some paperwork, the funeral home’s participation in your death has come to an end. Though there is the small matter of the bill.

For something as intimate as death, the whole process is handled with the individual care and personalization of a fast-food lunch. A person you’ve never met in an office tower in Calgary will transcribe your obituary, and unless you’re particularly well-to-do, you will be burned or buried somewhere other than Vancouver - slid on a slab by a stranger into an oven in some nearby suburb you visited once or twice a year. And all the details will be taken care of by a funeral director who handles dozens of cases a month and will lay out options on neatly laminated pieces of paper with price plans and names like “Plan C.” In spite of the individuality so coveted in our culture, in the end, we all get roughly the same treatment. Instead of a unique tribute to a loved one that has passed, we offer up generic packages that have been outsourced to people in other cities with the profits funnelling to mega-corporations in Texas.

Friends:

Don’t bother with my obituary. I’d like to think my life can’t be summed up in six sentences or less. Besides, I don’t want to be contributing financially to the Canwest media empire; even in death I have particular news values.

Don’t embalm me. My fear of large needles extends well beyond the grave.

And while I don’t like the idea of being buried and left for the creepy-crawlies, I like the idea of being burned even less - as if I’m evidence that needs to be disposed of. The thought of sitting on my mother’s mantle for eternity is horrifying, and while having my ashes scattered sounds romantic, there isn’t a place I can think of that would be appropriate. I wish there were more options. I bet if there were choices for mummification or a Tibetan Sky Funeral (body chopped up and placed on mountaintop to be carried away by birds) more people would take them. If human taxidermy was legal it might be an attractive option. Some poor family member or significant other left with a life-sized reminder of me.

No, I want a Viking’s funeral. Put me atop a barge piled high with timber and filled with my most cherished belongings. Letters from loved ones and childhood treasures like my old baseball glove, the binoculars my grandfather left me and the hood ornament from my first car. Douse the whole thing with gasoline, or better yet, some high-proof liquor, then set me adrift on Tuc-el-Nuit Lake. Push me gently off the shore and toss a match to set the whole thing ablaze. Everyone raise a glass and talk about the good times we had while I was still amongst the living. And as the whole thing slowly burns and finally collapses on itself in the middle of the lake, laugh.

What I really want above all else, and what I think most people do, is to be remembered in a way that reflects how I lived my life.

There are so many of us to process that we end up getting whisked through profiteering parlours, outsourced obituary departments and city-run cemeteries.

That’s not to say that companies like SCI, Mountain View Cemetery, First Memorial Funeral Services, or our daily papers are heartless corporations hell bent on squeezing every cent out of us, but the grim reality is that their fundamental purpose is to profit.

If you’re looking for an original funeral service or a unique send-off, you’d better start planning now, because the services offered in Vancouver are expensive, unoriginal and impersonal. That is, until I get Valhalla Pyre Company off the ground.