Oh, those wacky funeral directors...
It's really eye-opening doing the research for my current writing project. Even though I grew up going to a funeral home for piano lessons (the organist there, who was married to the funeral director, was also the organist at our church, and I took lessons from her daughter, who was also an organ and piano teacher) I didn't really witness the funeral business from the "inside". I saw a little of how the house was run, from a purely physical standpoint. (I often was in the position of racing past an open casket with a body in it in the viewing room to get to my lesson. And no, I didn't have to run past it, but in a way, yeah, I really did.)
I hated encountering the enormous guard dogs, which made me terrified of dogs for many years afterward. My sister also cleaned house for them occasionally, and I also sometimes had to walk up and down to my lessons via the "servants' stairs" that were at the end of a long corridor and were almost EXACTLY like the servants' stairs you see on Downton Abbey. I loved the house itself for its grand architecture; it was a Tudor Revival, possibly from the twenties, with lovely woodwork and enormous stone fireplaces and a lot of diamond-paned windows. For a little while I was also friends with the caretaker's daughter; that family lived in a former carriage house on the grounds, built in the same style as the main house, but on a smaller scale, which I thought was much cooler than my own 1958 twin ranch house.
Anyway, the eye-opening part started with reading The American Way of Death Revisited by Jessica Mitford; she updated her original 1963 book in the mid-90s. Then today I read the entire 71-page Pennsylvania Funeral Director Law, a lot of news stories about 30 funeral directors challenging the law in a lawsuit, the judge hearing the suit declaring 11 different parts of the law unconstitutional, and the appeal of this decision by the Pennsylvania Funeral Directors Association, the result of which won't be known for a couple of months still. (The appeal was heard last month, over a year after the judge said a lot of it was unconstitutional.)
I also read about the traffic laws pertaining to to funeral processions. And about an order of Catholic Monks in Louisiana who were told to stop building simple wooden caskets to sell to people who didn't want to pay a huge markup at a funeral home and the monks' triumph in court. And another story about an Orthodox rabbi who won a civil rights case against the Funeral Directors Association on the grounds that their rules muddied the separation of church and state, because Orthodox Judaism doesn't permit embalming and in general Orthodox Jews tend to eschew the services of funeral directors and rely on their rabbis to conduct the services and even clean the remains to prepare them for burial.
Now I need to do some editing to reflect the info dump into my brain, but it's all good. I'm ahead of my self-imposed schedule (on chapter 6 out of 13) and tomorrow I can do a sweeping edit to incorporate a lot of what I've learned. It's almost--almost--making me nostalgic for my childhood piano lessons...
I hated encountering the enormous guard dogs, which made me terrified of dogs for many years afterward. My sister also cleaned house for them occasionally, and I also sometimes had to walk up and down to my lessons via the "servants' stairs" that were at the end of a long corridor and were almost EXACTLY like the servants' stairs you see on Downton Abbey. I loved the house itself for its grand architecture; it was a Tudor Revival, possibly from the twenties, with lovely woodwork and enormous stone fireplaces and a lot of diamond-paned windows. For a little while I was also friends with the caretaker's daughter; that family lived in a former carriage house on the grounds, built in the same style as the main house, but on a smaller scale, which I thought was much cooler than my own 1958 twin ranch house.
Anyway, the eye-opening part started with reading The American Way of Death Revisited by Jessica Mitford; she updated her original 1963 book in the mid-90s. Then today I read the entire 71-page Pennsylvania Funeral Director Law, a lot of news stories about 30 funeral directors challenging the law in a lawsuit, the judge hearing the suit declaring 11 different parts of the law unconstitutional, and the appeal of this decision by the Pennsylvania Funeral Directors Association, the result of which won't be known for a couple of months still. (The appeal was heard last month, over a year after the judge said a lot of it was unconstitutional.)
I also read about the traffic laws pertaining to to funeral processions. And about an order of Catholic Monks in Louisiana who were told to stop building simple wooden caskets to sell to people who didn't want to pay a huge markup at a funeral home and the monks' triumph in court. And another story about an Orthodox rabbi who won a civil rights case against the Funeral Directors Association on the grounds that their rules muddied the separation of church and state, because Orthodox Judaism doesn't permit embalming and in general Orthodox Jews tend to eschew the services of funeral directors and rely on their rabbis to conduct the services and even clean the remains to prepare them for burial.
Now I need to do some editing to reflect the info dump into my brain, but it's all good. I'm ahead of my self-imposed schedule (on chapter 6 out of 13) and tomorrow I can do a sweeping edit to incorporate a lot of what I've learned. It's almost--almost--making me nostalgic for my childhood piano lessons...