Health
Extreme Unctuousness
Texas Morticians believe so fervently in embalming for one reason: money. That’s why they’re fighting over your dead body.
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The legislators might never have chosen to deal with the subject at all, except that in 1979 the Board of Morticians came up for Sunset review. The Sunset staff wanted to dismantle the morticians’ board and put the industry under the Health Department’s jurisdiction. But funeral directors weren’t about to surrender any of their professional prerogatives without a fight, and they certainly weren’t going to welcome the authority of an agency that wasn’t wholly in favor of embalming. The man charged with forestalling those calamities was Johnnie B. Rogers, a long-time insurance lobbyist also employed by the Texas Funeral Directors Association (TFDA). To play TFDA water carrier in the Senate, Rogers tapped Democrat Grant Jones of Abilene, and for a House sponsor he recruited Lynn Nabers, a Brownwood Democrat and a twelve-year veteran of the Legislature.
Senator Lloyd Doggett of Austin, one of the Legislature’s few fighting liberals and a champion of the Sunset process, met the TFDA and its lobbyist head on. For allies, he turned to the Austin Memorial and Burial Information Society (AMBIS), one of a nationwide federation of groups that advocate immediate burial or cremation as alternatives to the ubiquitous open-casket funeral, and the Consumers Union, a public-interest law firm associated with Consumer Reports magazine. But perhaps Doggett’s most energetic—and potentially effective—confederate was James Reveley, a robust 37-year-old mortician from San Antonio. Reveley had spent a decade in the funeral industry learning to despise it, then spent much of the following decade campaigning—before the Legislature and Congress—against what he saw as its shabby treatment of bereaved customers. In the process, he won the undying ingratitude and occasionally the open enmity of his colleagues. In 1978 Reveley, who by then was also practicing dentistry, opened his own San Antonio mortuary—equipped with one of the few refrigeration units in the state—to conduct simple, low-cost funerals with no embalming and no cosmetics.
Each side in this blackly humorous drama treated legislators to quite a show: when the TFDA regaled them with slides of decomposing bodies, Doggett’s team countered with a Federal Trade Commission videotape of a funeral director pressuring an indigent widow to go into hock so her husband could enjoy an elaborate funeral. Remarkably, in the face of such scare tactics, what emerged from the session was a workmanlike compromise. The Legislature retained the Board of Morticians but added lay members to its ranks, spelled out stringent consumer protection measures, and prohibited any state agency from requiring embalming unless the agency found that the public’s health was at stake.
Doggett and company already knew that the Health Department considered embalming medically useless, so they concluded that forced embalming was legally dead. Just to be sure, however, health officials asked Attorney General Mark White to clarify whether the law automatically rescinded the regulation. After pondering this thorny problem for nine months, White in July 1980 issued a ruling so opaque that each side read it and claimed victory. By the time White had untangled the controversy in late November—finally agreeing with the Health Department that the old rule was unenforceable—the 67th Legislature was nearly upon us. And in March Nabers and Jones introduced the TFDA’s latest legislative efforts, bills that would incorporate the now defunct regulation directly into the statute. Whether or not the TFDA succeeds in resurrecting what Sunset interred, the fight will be worth watching, both as a case study in how the lobby works to circumvent the public interest and as a barometer of how significantly this Legislature differs from its predecessor.
Not even the TFDA claims anymore that embalming is necessary in the interest of public health; morticians justify the current legislation on the grounds that it will avoid aesthetic unpleasantness and possible lawsuits against the profession. One of their fellows, they like to point out, got caught between two warring factions of a family—one side wanted the dear departed embalmed, the other didn’t—and wound up getting sued. And how many such cases are likely to arise? Perhaps one a year, according to the president of the TFDA. Of course, funeral homes and common carriers can make their own rules about the conditions under which they will deal with an unembalmed body—or to refuse to deal with one at all (although morticians can deal effectively with problems like odor, even without embalming). So the question is: do Texans want to adopt a law that will restrict their choice of funeral arrangements in the interest of protecting one hypothetical mortician per year from a hypothetical lawsuit?
A suspicious mind might see even darker consequences lurking in the proposals, which say that a body may not be “in transit” more than 24 hours after death unless it is embalmed or refrigerated. That provision, strictly interpreted, would conceivably forbid transportation from a refrigeration unit to a cemetery. The TFDA and its allies staunchly deny that that is their intent, but the ambiguity could leave morticians like Reveley open to legal action by the Board of Morticians that would put them out of business.
The funeral directors may or may not be out to squelch Reveley, but there’s no doubt that morticians across the country are fighting desperately to stop the erosion of their trade. Growing demand for immediate interment and cremation has got them running scared, and they know they must hold on to embalming if they’re to hold on to everything else. It is, as one candid mortician admitted, “the very foundation of mortuary science—the factor which has made the elaborate funeral home and lucrative funeral possible.”
So what are the TFDA’s chances? Pretty good—for reasons that have to do with both historical patterns and current political fashions. For one thing, a funeral director is a lot like a car dealer: he sells a product people can’t do without, he knows everyone in town (including his legislator), he takes care to cultivate his image as a pillar of the community. And that collective image will carry a lot more weight than even the $28,000 the TFDA’s political action committee (called MortiPAC, believe it or not) doled out during last year’s legislative races. Then too, there’s the marked pro-lobby tilt of this Legislature; Senator Ike Harris’s Economic Development Committee—which reported the Senate bill favorably in April—is the most conspicuous example. And last, Doggett’s overworked staff is already embroiled in major Sunset battles with doctors and dentists.
Other than legislators’ natural reluctance—if any—to pass such a bad ol’ bill, the anti-embalming forces can count two factors in their favor: first, the severe crowding of the calendars in both houses, which may prevent any number of bills from seeing the light of day, and second, a possible ace in the hole in the person of Jim Kaster, the governor’s legislative liaison. Kaster, like Reveley, is a funeral director and embalmer who has absolutely no use for most of his colleagues. In the event that a TFDA-backed bill does reach Clements’ desk, at least one voice at the governor’s elbow will be urging a veto. But even if the TFDA loses, don’t look for the funeral industry to give up. A good many Legislatures may pass away before Texans can consider embalming laid to its eternal rest.
It’s Your Funeral
If you want the “traditional” extravaganza—embalming, cosmetics, viewing of the body, and other costly extras that can drive the price well beyond $2000—you’ve got no problem. But if you’d rather choose immediate burial or cremation, perhaps followed by a memorial service, you’ll have to hope your relatives can withstand the mortician’s sales pitch—or arrange the affair in advance yourself. Some 7500 Texans have done just that with the aid of one of the state’s eight memorial societies, listed below. The role of these nonprofit organizations differs somewhat from city to city, but they all aim to help their members secure simple, inexpensive funerals, typically costing about $500. Some of them contract with a local funeral home to provide the desired services; others simply supply information and advice. For details, contact the society nearest you:
Austin Memorial and Burial Information Society, Box 4382, Austin 78765 (no phone).
Dallas Area Memorial Society, 4015 Normandy, Dallas 75205 (528-3990).
Golden Triangle Memorial Society, Box 6136, Beaumont 77705 (833-6883).
Houston Area Memorial Society, 5210 Fannin, Houston 77004 (526-1571).
Lubbock Area Memorial Society, Box 6562, Lubbock 79413 (792-0367).
Memorial Society of Bryan-College Station, Box 9078, College Station 77840 (696-6944).
Memorial Society of El Paso, 3313 Diamond, El Paso 79904 (751-6670).
San Antonio Memorial Society, 777 San Antonio Bank & Trust Building, 771 Navarro, San Antonio 78205 (no phone).
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