The Undertaking

The prep room answers curiosities about the unknown. But it isn’t where a funeral director spends most of her time. There are phones throughout the David Lee Funeral Home. When someone dies, Starry—not a doctor or religious leader—is sometimes the first one the family calls. That’s where her job begins.

She must address immediate practical details. Where is the deceased? When should she come pick up the body? If the person has died at home, and police or family haven’t already contacted the county medical examiner’s office, she’ll need to get clearance  to remove the body.

Emotions can be raw when she arrives. Family dynamics and dysfunction can be heightened by grief. Starry walks a delicate path between practicality and sympathy to find out how those close to the deceased would like that person’s remains to be handled and passing to be marked.

“It’s like planning a wedding,” she says, “except that you have a finite amount of time.” By state law, disposition of the body—embalming, burial, or cremation—must take place within 72 hours of when the body is released for pickup. “I end up doing a lot of listening and a lot of asking questions. You have to learn when to talk and when to listen.”

She’s uncomfortable talking about money to people who’ve just suffered a loss, but “the ramifications are bigger if you don’t,” Starry says. On this point, the Federal Trade Commission regulates her business: As soon as people begin to tell her what sort of arrangements they’d like to make, she has to disclose costs—to the degree that she can estimate them. The cost to dig a grave, for instance, can vary by hundreds of dollars from cemetery to cemetery.

That’s true of nearly all the products and services that funeral homes bill their customers for. Some price their products (caskets, vaults, urns) very competitively and rely on higher margins on services to carry the business. Others price their services more competitively. When customers don’t understand that, it can engender hard feelings, Starry says: People need to understand that their comparisons aren’t always “apples to apples.”

Those differences aside, the cost of arrangements varies widely, from perhaps $2,000 for a cremation with no casket for reviewal and no memorial service to as much as $15,000 for a reviewal, funeral, and burial with a plush casket and other extras.