Indie undertaker Ru Callender on the rise of “direct cremation”, and how it might not be as respectful an option as advertisers claim

Fans of the marvellous US series Six Feet Under might remember the hawkish corporate undertaking firm Kroehener Inc, who try to make the Fisher family an offer they can’t refuse.

The Fishers run an independent “funeral home”, as the Americans call them, and Kroehener represents everything they despise.

It gets nasty. Kroehener try to put them out of business by fair means or foul, trying to set up a branch of their own right opposite the Fishers’, but a convenient arson attack makes them back off, for the time being.

Kroehener Inc were an extremely thinly disguised portrait of SCI – Services Corporation International, a Houston-based mega company that spread like a virus across the US. They are the SMERSH of the funeral industry.

Their business model involved buying up everything associated with a funeral: florists, coffin makers, printers, manufacturers of embalming equipment and products, hearse and limousine companies, crematoriums, probably even organ manufacturers and dove-releasing companies, and of course independent funeral directors.

They pooled resources by operating in clusters, which meant loads of redundancies, set up pre-paid funeral plans and bought up existing ones (always really just a cynical attempt to put competitors out of business by securing a funeral years before the person has died). By the nineties they had gone global, moving into Australia and into Europe, particularly France and of course, the UK.

But you don’t have to be a professor of economics to guess what happened: too much, too big. Too damn expensive. The American taste for expensive ostentatious caskets and visually lavish, limousine-heavy funerals failed to fully translate. I imagine it was probably the Aussies who first called bullshit.

They are still big, a huge multinational, but when their bubble burst, or at least wizened like a two-week-old birthday balloon, they retreated. SCI went from operating in 20 countries to eight.

What remains of the old SCI morphed in the UK into Dignity, an old established corporate company themselves originally swallowed by SCI, but managed to be belched out intact, Jonah like, as the behemoth inched its way off the beach and back to the US.

Dignity remains one of the dominant funeral companies in the UK, running a number of crematoriums and still making small undertakers offers they can’t refuse. I live in hope.

Yet despite their vast resources and centralised shared body hubs and car pools, they remain one of the most expensive.

This is one of the ironies of the funeral business. Companies that should be able to pass on substantially lower costs to their clients because they own nearly everything, are the most expensive, while small bespoke undertakers who have none of the access to the hardware that this mega company has, are almost always cheaper. The main reason I suppose is ethics. The Fisher family attitude remains strong in Funeral World.

The death industry is not the sure and certain path to financial security everyone thinks. It’s popping with opportunistic start-ups, who appear and disappear like night-flitting hotel guests. The death rate is far from predictable, and the market is saturated.

The thing that sent Dignity’s profits plunging (apart from their over-inflated charges) threatens all of us who work by helping the living deal with the dead. It is the insidious rise of direct cremation – cheap, funeral-free, straight-to-the-oven convenience, which costs less than some of the more expensive high-end coffins alone.

Their working model is a no-meeting, non-attended cremation carried out by the company, sometimes in their own crematorium or sometimes as part of a deal with a private crematorium in their slack times.

The subtext is that no one likes funerals, apart from the clinically morbid, so why go? Far better to let them deal with the ugly bit and you can enjoy a “celebration of life” at a time of your choosing.

They are often marketed, as are pre-paid funeral plans, as acts of financial and emotional generosity to your children.

How thoughtful to excuse them the ordeal of a rushed slot in a grimly designed council-run crem, not to mention all the decisions that go into creating a funeral. Let the gravy train take the strain. Ashes delivered back to you after the non event. These funerals are really enticing to anybody who has to face the cost of a funeral, and appeal to the “chuck me in a bin bag and put me out with the rubbish” brigade.

The money behind some of these companies is extraordinary. One of the bigger ones has a rolling advert in the background of Sky News, but the money needs to be extraordinary because the margins don’t add up. To be able to offer a nationwide service for under a grand and offer the levels of respect and dignity to the deceased that the companies claim, and pay anybody a living wage, is just impossible. Corners are being cut. Smarmy advertising platitudes hide the reality of this race to the bottom.

I recently received a mortuary release form from the biggest local hospital that I have been collecting bodies from for the past 23 years. It’s a place I’ve grown accustomed to, and I always pass the time spent there chatting with the young and utterly lovely people whose job it is to receive the dead from the hospital and surrounding area, and perform a postmortem if necessary to determine the manner of death.

At the bottom of the release form, there was a stern new warning that any body not collected within 24 hours of receiving this would incur a 50-quid-a-day charge.

I was rattled. We are a two-person business, one of us part time, and quite often can’t collect someone within that time frame.

I rushed in to collect my person. When I enquired nervously about this new stern rule they airily waived it away. “Oh don’t be too worried, that’s just to stop the direct cremation lot taking the piss.” Why? I asked. “Well, they were leaving bodies here for up to a month.”

A month.

I won’t name the company, but they are quite prominent. Imagine if that was your mum, after being assured that she would be receiving the same level of care that she would with your local independent funeral director.

All of this might seem like a moan from someone who does the opposite to a direct cremation, although like a lot of undertakers I do now offer a no-frills unattended cremation service, but with the knowledge that your dead aren’t being left in a hospital fridge, or being driven around the country in a van. But it’s bigger than that, more important than that.

A funeral is the first nano seconds of grief, the beginning of an emotional process that you will never “get over”, just learn to live with. Our relationships, good or bad or just complicated as most are, are too important and too consequential to be swerved.

And most funerals are still better value than most weddings. Just saying.

Ru Callender runs The Green Funeral Company thegreenfuneralcompany.co.uk (email: enquiry@thegreenfuneralcompany.co.uk / tel: 07759 890 639) and is the author of What Remains?: Life, Death & the Human Art of Undertaking (Chelsea Green).

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