I have a friend whose family owned a funeral home, but due to unfortunate circumstances were forced to sell it. Now it belongs to an investment company who threw out any sense of respect and slathered it in gaudy baby-blue paint and a sans-serif logo, still keeping the old family name of course. I grimace every time I drive by.

PE has also done this with locally branded veterinarians.

This book is mentioned a lot early in the article, and its effects on people's perception of the industry are discussed.

Reading the passage, I was surprised that she attributed greed specifically to men. There’s a number of male coded sins out there (wrath, lust) but greed has always seemed like a pretty universal affliction.

if you ever find yourself creating a new profile just to make a comment like you just did, ask if you're the kind of person who is afraid to acknowledge their own thoughts publicly

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A friend of mine was pretty big on minimizing impact on the environment. We got this surreal funeral: a thousand people were invited, flew in from all over the world. Lavish digs rented at insane expense, lots of food, a gift bag and so on. And then when they brought in the deceased it got a bit weirder still because they had just rolled the body in a linen sheet. So many conflicting memories about that. He was a great guy by the way.

Our church does most of the work preparing the body for our parishioners. We have a group that goes to clean and dress the body, then brings it to the church in a simple coffin with dry ice until the funeral and burial. Frequently the only thing the family has to pay for is for coffin (the church keeps one or two on hand that the family can buy at cost) and the cemetery to dig a whole in the ground (we're not quite hardcore enough to do that b hand). We do insist on burial because we see cremation as disrespectful to human bodies that are created in the image of God, but usually use a simple wooden coffin and no vault if allowed by the cemetery, and no embalming if the family wants the members of the church to prepare the body.

You may be getting downvoted because this is a bit of a rant, but I agree with you. Chemical embalming and sealed caskets aren't for the dead, they're for the living who don't want to think of their loved one decomposing in the ground. Funeral homes sell the illusion that they can somehow prevent that. Unfortunately, what happens to an embalmed body is equally gruesome, just slower and with added poison. Personally I'd rather let the worms recycle me into a nice shrub or something.

My understanding is that embalming is mainly an American thing, not a Western one. Caskets are also a lot cheaper around here (Austria).

My mum died this year so I have recent experience with this. It does seem, like so many things, to profit from the weak. But they do, of course, provide a valuable service. I didn't really fancy chucking my mum's body into my hatchback and going down the tip.

I didn't feel like they pushed hard at all to upsell anything, it wasn't like a car dealer, but the options were definitely available. We chose the cheapest possible coffin because what a ridiculous waste of resources otherwise. Literally nobody was going to scrutinise it and then it was going to get burnt. I noticed the catalogue had quite a few more pages in it, though.

Interestingly my dad, newly widowed, was much more sceptical of the whole thing than me. He found the language they used quite disagreeable. They would refer to the body as "her" and say things like they are "looking after her" etc. She had lost almost half her bodyweight before death so it is kinda weird that this half matters so much. To us, of course, she had already left. We looked after her, they were just moving a body around.

But you have to think, a lot of people will pay a lot more to buy into this illusion and perhaps soften the blow of the death. I feel like you have to confront it one way or another so just get it over and done with. I just imagine the souls of the departed watching from a higher plane of existence puzzled about why we care so much about their former bodies.

The real cost now is the required “vault.”

> Spending many thousands of dollars to "embalm" a person and then thousands more on a big fancy wood casket.

Is that general western thing or rather "there is small western subculture that does it while the rest of the west does NOT do it"? The funeral I was involved in did not involved "thousands of dollars" equivalent of casket or embalming.

I have lately noticed a lot of claims about what "west" does that seem to be very specific to just parts of America.

"Over the past four decades, female enrollment in mortuary programs has grown from five percent to roughly 75 percent of recent graduating classes."

It's dramatic language, but justified, imo.