The Price of Memory

On an almond farm in Merced county, in a straw-bail house — built with efficiency in mind — Jean Okuye has been thinking about the cost of death.

Okuye has been a member of the Funeral Consumers Alliance for over 50 years, following after her father who first joined the Vallejo chapter of the organization. “I became a member in my thirties because I was concerned and I was so impressed with my father.”

The Funeral Consumers Alliance is a national organization that aims to protect and prepare consumers who are planning and paying for funerals. The FCA monitors funeral industry players and advocates for proper legislation — such as price transparency laws — on behalf of the consumer.

After she joined, Okuye got her whole family on board. Even her husband, who found it difficult to talk about death. “I thought, you know, this is really good because you never know when you're going to die,” she said, casually.

The FCA also helps consumers make the right choices because, at the end of the day, funeral homes are businesses. “The need to shop,” said Okuye, “I found 15 different mortuaries that had the prices on their websites, and for the basic service, it varied from $550 to about $4,000 for the same service.”

At one point, Okuye was president of the FCA of California, which supports all the state's chapters. Now she volunteers her time at the Los Angeles branch — while also advocating for small farms in Merced. She is determined to make death arrangements more equitable and affordable.

Jean Okuye stays busy working with many organizations and activits groups while also running an almond farm in Merced county. Courtesy of Jean Okuye.

Since the 1920s, consumers have protested the high financial expectations that funeral homes and cemeteries place on them, said David Sloan, author of the 2018 book “Is the Cemetery Dead?” and USC Price School of Public Policy professor. In the 1960s, journalist Jessica Mitford reopened the conversation with her exposé, “The American Way of Death,” which explored the exploitative practices of the funeral industry.

Today, the average cost of a funeral in the United States is almost $8,000 dollars, the National Funeral Directors Association reports. This is an 8% price increase from 2016.

The high price of funeral arrangements is why organizations like the FCA continue advocating for change in the United States. Part of that work entails encouraging Americans to discuss the realities of death more, something many seem reluctant to do.

Okuye, for her part, wants to make dying economically and environmentally sustainable by reinvigorating the conversation around death.

“We try to put the fun in funerals,” she said

A Billion-Dollar Industry

The funeral industry generates $16 billion dollars in revenue, IBISWorld reports. And, almost 90% of all funeral homes are operated by privately owned, family businesses. Cabot & Sons Funeral Directors has been one of these family-run funeral homes for the past century.

In the shadow of St. Andrew Catholic Church in Pasadena, with its Romanesque bell tower, the funeral home has enmeshed itself into the community.

The interior is eerily calm. Newly renovated in 2008, the space is clean and respectfully modern. Pale green walls line a cavernous hallway and the sound of plug-in fountains attempt to create a calming ambiance. Commercial prints of Chinese urns remind the consumer of their overwhelming mission.

Chris Cabot and his father have spent decades engaging with the local community, through clubs and organizations. That is how he fights off industrial funeral corporations that have been trying to buy the Cabot family business since the 1980s.

“Keep your reputation,” he said, “That’s how you compete with the big boys.”

The larger commercial funeral homes lack intimacy, Cabot said. “There’s just no personal service.” For Cabot, engaging with families going through the grieving process is essential.

But, after generations of Cabots running the funeral home, it seems like the dynasty might be coming to an end. Cabot’s children are not interested in carrying on their family’s legacy. “Unfortunately, none of my nephews and nieces want to come into it either.”

According to IBISWorld, the Funeral Home industry grew 2.7% between 2019 and 2020. Both the funeral home and cemetery industries, respectively, generate over 20% of their revenue from merchandise. This includes caskets and urns. According to Cabot, urns can cost anywhere from $150 to $4,000. This 20% total also includes cremation jewelry, printed photographs and flowers.

Cabot & Son’s front desk has a pile of thick catalogs that consumers can look through for merchandise. The bereaved customer orders through the funeral home but the product is supplied by the large third-party vendor, Matthews Memorialization.

Cabot said that his funeral home probably sells about 15 to 20 pieces of jewelry from this catalog a month. Jewelry prices range from $40 to $200. While not exceptionally expensive, everything at the funeral home adds up.

Not a Gift…?

“When you walk into a funeral home, you walk into a cemetery, when you're walking into a church, somebody is selling you something,” said “Is the Cemetery Dead?” author Sloane, “It's not a gift.”

Sloane, who grew up watching his father run a cemetery, thinks that funeral homes and cemeteries exist in a sort of limbo: “in a liminal space between open commercialism and sacredness.”

But, especially with the movement toward a professionalized death experience that has trended upwards for the last two centuries — as opposed to dying at home — mourners arranging for their loved one’s death must also remember that they are consumers.

That is why the FCA and Okuye emphasize the importance of “shopping.”

“Be sure to shop because it can be one of the most expensive costs you'll have in a lifetime,” said Okuye, “We shop for a car, we shop for a house.”

Both Cabot and Okuye agree that the one thing that can be a gift is making all the arrangements beforehand.”

“It’s a wonderful gift to have funeral expenses paid,” said Cabot. His front office has a file cabinet full of prearranged plans, some paid for, some not.

Okuye felt the same way. Her husband, who had Parkinson’s disease, and her mother died within two months of each other. Both had prearranged cremation services that cost $498 each — a bargain by today’s standards.

“We did what they wanted, and that's the best gift you can leave your kids is to have something planned,” said Okuye.

The (New) American Way OF Death?

Much has changed within the death industry over the last few decades. Between 2005 and 2020 cremation rates rose from 32% to 57%, the Cremation Association of North America reports. New technologies and methods have emerged to make dying greener, cheaper and easier. But, as new practices arise, the commercial impulse continues to thrive.

Okuye, concerned about high costs and environmental impact, is excited by these new, greener technologies, and she is especially interested in green cemeteries.

“Green” can mean anything from spreading ashes in a specific part of a cemetery to dissolving the body in lye — which is less environmentally harmful than using heat, said Okuye — to simply leaving the body somewhere to decay.

Okuye said more and more people are showing interest in a greener way of death.

Sloan has also noticed these trends. But, he doesn’t think they’re necessarily new. “There are hundreds, if not thousands, of burials in my dad's cemetery that were natural, but they didn't think of them as natural, they just buried them the way they were supposed to be buried,” he said.

But, like the jewelry sold at Cabot & Sons, and tree pod burials, capitalism is still the driving force. Green burials are “a commercial trend,” Sloane said. He acknowledges, however, that consumers’ ultimate motivation may still be to protect the environment.

Scroll over the images to see the prices for these death-related purchases

Memorilization jewelry can cost between $40 and $200+.

The average price of an urn in 2021 was $295.

In total, some families spend between $500 and $700 for flowers.

Turning cremation remains into tattoo ink costs $289 for one 5oz. bottle

A biodegradable urn cost $99 on Amazon. Cremation remains are placed in a pod that can grow into a tree.

The average price of a casket in 2021 was $2,500.

Preserving Memory

While Okuye is excited by methods that reimagine the death process in this country, Sloane has some concerns about too much change.

The jewelry, the headstones, cremation tattoos, the funerals, they all do something, Sloane said. “Memory is the key link.” It’s about “memory and respect.”

He sees funeral homes, cemeteries, and hospitals as important social spaces. His book explores how Americans have distanced themselves from the experience of death and sickness by making both experiences external and professionalized. But, for Sloane, these institutions are not wholly bad. As tangible, protected spaces, they play an important role in physically preserving memory.

“When you get your cremation remains and you scatter them in a national forest or you take them out into the ocean, that's a real loss of community memory, of communal memory, collective memory,” Sloane said. “It's also a financial loss to the cemetery, but it's really the loss, I think, most importantly, it’s the collective memory.

For Okuye, conserving memory is also important. She once traveled to Japan — where her deceased husband’s family was from — and tracked down ancestral graves, marked by gravestones or crosses. But, she pointed out, in the United States, cremation does not equate to a lack of physical memory.

In the US, for example, GPS is used to locate cremation remains in green cemeteries, Okuye said. Technology has been an important tool in reimaging how collective memory works.

Furthermore, the United States keeps extensive records. In California, people are required to tell the health department where ashes are spread. These are all means of preserving memory.

Okuye isn’t anti-cemetery or anti-funeral. Rather she is simply concerned with the financial cost of death. “I am concerned that many people don’t know their rights and assume they must spend a lot for a funeral and are encouraged to go into debt to pay for one,” she said in a follow-up email.

And, for Sloane, it isn’t the funeral homes that perpetuate capitalism in America, but rather American capitalism that breeds exploitation.

“Like everything else in American society and our good capitalist society, the way we handle death is through revenue streams.”