December 16, 2020 • 12 mins
The way we deal with our dead has changed a lot over the past 50 years. Learn all about it in 12-15 minutes right here.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, you welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
Jerry's floating around out there somewhere, and Dave c is
here in spirit. So the gang is all ready to
go with short Stuff. Let's talk about funerals, baby, Let's
talk about you being dead. Let's talk about all the
good things and the bad things happened to your head
after you die. Yeah. Man, we should just stop and
(00:29):
in this episode because it will be the best episode
in the history of the show. All right, Well that's
it for short Stuff. Everybody, Short Stuff is out. Oh wait,
we gotta stop for an head break. Oh yeah, that's right.
Uh yeah. So we're talking about funerals, and we've talked
a little bit about this stuff over the years in
our Death Suite, and I think we actually did one
(00:49):
on things to do with the dead body way back
in the day. Oh yeah, we've talked a lot about
this kind of stuff. But the notion that we're tackling
today is that since the nineteen sixties and up until
the nineteen sixties, Americans, uh and especially American Christian people
had one kind of funeral and that was largely dictated
(01:11):
um a k A. Shoved down our throats by the
funeral industry. If you wanted to fit in in America,
you had to to be presented upon your death in
a certain way. That meant being embalmed, put in a
suit or dress, whatever your preference was, um, and be
presented in a casket usually open for like your friends
(01:32):
and family to dress in black and come kind of
grieve over you. And it's very solemn, unhappy affair. What
was it When was the last time, not to get
too personal, but that you had to go to an
open cast it cast GT scene. I I don't remember, honestly. Um,
it's been a while for me. Yeah, I genuinely don't
remember because it is kind of like old school, you know,
(01:55):
but you know, it still happens every once in a a while.
I don't remember, Chuck, But I mean I have been
ever since I was a little kid. My mom was like,
it's time for you to learn about death, and I
was like, I'm only two. She's like, yeah, it's a
little late. Frankly. Yeah, all I know is the last
few that I've been to, and in fact, most that
I've ever been to, which I haven't been that many.
I have always just been like, you know, like, do
(02:17):
you want to go up and take good by to
your grandmother? And I've always been like, no, I've done
that in my head in my heart, so I do
not need to go see that weird, powdery, waxy figure
that looks nothing like her in real life. Do you
want to go smell Grandma's hair one last time? God? Yeah,
I've never been into it, and we're both kind of
on record with that over our shows over the years.
(02:38):
But uh, this whole thing started to kind of change
with a book in nineteen sixty three that I kind
of want to read now from Jessica Mitford called The
American Way of Death, where she really kind of exposed, um,
the US funeral home industry is being not so great. Yeah,
Basically she she portrayed it as an entire industry built
(03:00):
around taking um advantage of people in a really predatory
way during a really um vulnerable moment, when they're grieving,
when they're at their weakest. These these skills come in
and start being like, well, of course you need this,
and the deceased would want that, and the platinum packt
ching cho ching cho ching, right, they got like the
(03:22):
the cash registered dollars signed cartoon wolf Eyes. Um. That's
basically how she portrayed and it was a really UM.
I think she wrote an article at first and it
got very little attention, and then it was turned into
a book. I think she went on TV and it
ended up becoming a book and really had a huge
effect on how people viewed funerals from that point on. Yeah,
and I guess maybe we should just caveat this now
(03:44):
and say, if we have listeners that work in the
funeral industry, we're not coming after you. Here. This was
a book that was written in the nineteen sixties, and
we realize it's a business for profit business, and up
selling is part of that business, and it takes on
a bit of a I guess, sort of an untoward
feeling when it's dealing with people while they're grieving. But
(04:07):
that's also the business you're in. So I'm not just
I'm not slamming you if you work for If I
have one across the street, they're very nice people. I
live across from a funeral home. That's lovely. But um,
having said that, stop it. No, things have changed a
lot over the years. In the nineteen sixties, the cremation
rate was three percent and which is astounding. And now
(04:30):
it's fifty one percent, and it's going to go up
to about fifty seven or fifty eight percent by two.
It seems like yeah, and that that was a big
effect that Mitford had with her book The American Way
of Death. It was like like, you just did not
get cremated before then, and then all of a sudden
and she by the way, she she had a very
cheap funeral, including being cremated. UM. I read that she
(04:54):
spent less than I think eight hundred dollars in today's
dollars um on her own funeral role um. But but
because of this, it kind of made it like okay
to not go through all this rigm roll and to
not even like preserve the body. And I was reading
about that preserving the body, like there's this idea that
um that had been around for a really long time.
(05:16):
Like I don't know if it was so that you
looked your best when when God teld told everybody's staying
up in their graves and be judged or apparent Yeah, yeah, okay.
But apparently it was Abraham Lincoln that really kicked off
the American trend for embalming. UM. He had his son embalmed.
He was a big devotte of embalming. And then when
(05:38):
he was embalmed and he made a whistle stop tour
after death, that was like the first time a lot
of Americans ever saw an embalmed body, and like it
basically started this trend that lasted for a good century
or more. Yeah, so let's take a break and we'll
talk about kind of how this cultural shift fit in
with all the other cultural shifts that were happening in
the nineteen sixties right after this. Now I'm not large
(06:07):
sk alright, so nineteen sixties come along. This book is
written in the early sixties, the countercultural counterculture arrives, People
(06:31):
start doing drugs, start exploring different kinds of spirituality, uh,
including what they think about the afterlife, and sort of
one of the natural things that happened was funerals started
to change a little bit to compare, you know, to
kind of lean towards more what we think of them
uh today in today's terms. Yeah, that was a big
(06:52):
part of it. You know, this this idea of um,
you know, taking acid and thinking about being embalmed is
not they don't really go hand in hand, you know
what I'm saying it's a really easy way to decouple
yourself from the traditional ideas of funerals is to take LSD.
I only inject heroin into my body band exactly. So UM,
(07:14):
that was a big part of it. In addition to
Mitford's book, I think her book came at a really
like good time. I think it had an impact because
the general um awakening of people in the movement away
from religion in a lot of ways, not necessarily away
from spirituality. But um, you know, there's this guy that's
interviewed in this house Stuff Works article who is the
(07:35):
UM I think, the dean of religious studies at Emory University.
So he's like, big Wood, you know what I'm saying,
Gary Lotterman, And he points out that, UM that if
you are talking about religion, like religions bread and butter,
it's basic business is death in the afterlife. So it
has all sorts of UM ideas and and um very
(07:58):
clear guidelines about how you're supposed to behave upon death
and how your body is supposed to be treated upon death,
and if you're religious, you follow those. But if as
a country America started to get less and less religious,
those kind of constrictions fell away too. Yeah, and you
know the idea that, um. The other thing a big
(08:20):
thing that's changed and changed things funeral wise, is it
used to be very vague in your will, Like funerals
were just kind of done one way, so when you die,
that was expected. And starting in the sixties and definitely
in the past couple of decades, people have gotten way
way more specific and they're what they want, like for
(08:40):
their own funeral arrangements, and it's leaned more toward and
they've even changed the nomenclature from funeral surface uh to
memorial service and then eventually the celebration of life, and
things have just gotten a lot less rigid, a little lighter,
and more celebratory. I don't wear black, I want you
to lay you know, uh, craft work, and I want
(09:04):
alcohol served. And I wanted to be outdoors and scatter
my ashes in my favorite dog park and then chuck.
So if you're if you're running a funeral home these days,
you're trying to keep up with this crazy changing wacko
time um for how funerals are carried out or sorry,
celebrations of life are carried out. Um, you you have
(09:26):
to kind of get more creative now than you you
did before. And I came across a blog post on
funeral one dot com or funeral alone dot com, depending
on how you want to say it, and it's I
think like twenty something creative ideas for a funeral, and
one of them, number ten, really sticks out to me.
(09:49):
They now they point out, as long as it wasn't
a tragic death, you can insert a bit of humor
by um passing out mad libs for people to creative
out the about the deceased. And I think it's smart
of them to caveat that as long as it was
a tragic loss, because that definitely does kind of change
the tone of something even today, even in today's you know,
(10:12):
whacked out alcohol fueled celebrations of life, if it's a
tragedy that that led to the death, it's it's still
going to be pretty somber. This is typically for things like, um,
you know somebody who, um, I don't know where their
death wasn't wasn't a tragedy. I don't think there's really
any other way to put it or create create Number fourteen,
(10:33):
create a memorial hashtag. Okay, so they give an example
hashtag remembered Grandma Smith, but they've shortened Grandma to g
M A so it could also be remembered good Morning America.
I think it we settled on. I know you've changed
your mind since then, but you were going to be
(10:55):
shot out of a cannon or something. Yeah, And then
I was always into this guy Burial, and Emily was
just like, I'll make you into a tree, but I
don't want to want vultures eating you. For God's sakes,
Guy Burial is pretty hardcore man for sure. Um. Yeah,
I used to to really be into myself, so I
wanted to be shot out of a can, and now
(11:16):
I'm like, I think I just rather be cremated and
spread somewhere nice. Okay, So I've got one more for you.
What you got um Number seventeen Celebrate Life fun with bubbles.
So you know, basically, what they're saying is the funeral
industry has gone into the wedding industry, wedding reception industry,
(11:37):
and said we could translate a lot of these to
these celebrations of life because they're both celebrations, and that's
kind of where we're at with funerals right now. That's right,
there's no wrong way to do it. If you are
still into an open casket and that traditional funeral service,
there certainly um businesses that can accommodate that. And we're
not gonna yuck anyone's yum even in death. No, we're not,
(11:59):
unless unless you fall for number eighteen, which is to
host icebreaker games, which it doesn't matter whether it's a
corporate function, a wedding or funeral. Icebreaker games are horrible.
Everybody across the board just don't do that. No one
wants you to go out like that. Well, since Chuck
said we'll judge you for that, that means that short
(12:20):
stuff is done and short stuff is out. Stuff you
should know is production of iHeart Radios How stuff Works.
For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Hey, you welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
Jerry's floating around out there somewhere, and Dave c is
here in spirit. So the gang is all ready to
go with short Stuff. Let's talk about funerals, baby, Let's
talk about you being dead. Let's talk about all the
good things and the bad things happened to your head
after you die. Yeah. Man, we should just stop and
(00:29):
in this episode because it will be the best episode
in the history of the show. All right, Well that's
it for short Stuff. Everybody, Short Stuff is out. Oh wait,
we gotta stop for an head break. Oh yeah, that's right.
Uh yeah. So we're talking about funerals, and we've talked
a little bit about this stuff over the years in
our Death Suite, and I think we actually did one
(00:49):
on things to do with the dead body way back
in the day. Oh yeah, we've talked a lot about
this kind of stuff. But the notion that we're tackling
today is that since the nineteen sixties and up until
the nineteen sixties, Americans, uh and especially American Christian people
had one kind of funeral and that was largely dictated
(01:11):
um a k A. Shoved down our throats by the
funeral industry. If you wanted to fit in in America,
you had to to be presented upon your death in
a certain way. That meant being embalmed, put in a
suit or dress, whatever your preference was, um, and be
presented in a casket usually open for like your friends
(01:32):
and family to dress in black and come kind of
grieve over you. And it's very solemn, unhappy affair. What
was it When was the last time, not to get
too personal, but that you had to go to an
open cast it cast GT scene. I I don't remember, honestly. Um,
it's been a while for me. Yeah, I genuinely don't
remember because it is kind of like old school, you know,
(01:55):
but you know, it still happens every once in a a while.
I don't remember, Chuck, But I mean I have been
ever since I was a little kid. My mom was like,
it's time for you to learn about death, and I
was like, I'm only two. She's like, yeah, it's a
little late. Frankly. Yeah, all I know is the last
few that I've been to, and in fact, most that
I've ever been to, which I haven't been that many.
I have always just been like, you know, like, do
(02:17):
you want to go up and take good by to
your grandmother? And I've always been like, no, I've done
that in my head in my heart, so I do
not need to go see that weird, powdery, waxy figure
that looks nothing like her in real life. Do you
want to go smell Grandma's hair one last time? God? Yeah,
I've never been into it, and we're both kind of
on record with that over our shows over the years.
(02:38):
But uh, this whole thing started to kind of change
with a book in nineteen sixty three that I kind
of want to read now from Jessica Mitford called The
American Way of Death, where she really kind of exposed, um,
the US funeral home industry is being not so great. Yeah,
Basically she she portrayed it as an entire industry built
(03:00):
around taking um advantage of people in a really predatory
way during a really um vulnerable moment, when they're grieving,
when they're at their weakest. These these skills come in
and start being like, well, of course you need this,
and the deceased would want that, and the platinum packt
ching cho ching cho ching, right, they got like the
(03:22):
the cash registered dollars signed cartoon wolf Eyes. Um. That's
basically how she portrayed and it was a really UM.
I think she wrote an article at first and it
got very little attention, and then it was turned into
a book. I think she went on TV and it
ended up becoming a book and really had a huge
effect on how people viewed funerals from that point on. Yeah,
and I guess maybe we should just caveat this now
(03:44):
and say, if we have listeners that work in the
funeral industry, we're not coming after you. Here. This was
a book that was written in the nineteen sixties, and
we realize it's a business for profit business, and up
selling is part of that business, and it takes on
a bit of a I guess, sort of an untoward
feeling when it's dealing with people while they're grieving. But
(04:07):
that's also the business you're in. So I'm not just
I'm not slamming you if you work for If I
have one across the street, they're very nice people. I
live across from a funeral home. That's lovely. But um,
having said that, stop it. No, things have changed a
lot over the years. In the nineteen sixties, the cremation
rate was three percent and which is astounding. And now
(04:30):
it's fifty one percent, and it's going to go up
to about fifty seven or fifty eight percent by two.
It seems like yeah, and that that was a big
effect that Mitford had with her book The American Way
of Death. It was like like, you just did not
get cremated before then, and then all of a sudden
and she by the way, she she had a very
cheap funeral, including being cremated. UM. I read that she
(04:54):
spent less than I think eight hundred dollars in today's
dollars um on her own funeral role um. But but
because of this, it kind of made it like okay
to not go through all this rigm roll and to
not even like preserve the body. And I was reading
about that preserving the body, like there's this idea that
um that had been around for a really long time.
(05:16):
Like I don't know if it was so that you
looked your best when when God teld told everybody's staying
up in their graves and be judged or apparent Yeah, yeah, okay.
But apparently it was Abraham Lincoln that really kicked off
the American trend for embalming. UM. He had his son embalmed.
He was a big devotte of embalming. And then when
(05:38):
he was embalmed and he made a whistle stop tour
after death, that was like the first time a lot
of Americans ever saw an embalmed body, and like it
basically started this trend that lasted for a good century
or more. Yeah, so let's take a break and we'll
talk about kind of how this cultural shift fit in
with all the other cultural shifts that were happening in
the nineteen sixties right after this. Now I'm not large
(06:07):
sk alright, so nineteen sixties come along. This book is
written in the early sixties, the countercultural counterculture arrives, People
(06:31):
start doing drugs, start exploring different kinds of spirituality, uh,
including what they think about the afterlife, and sort of
one of the natural things that happened was funerals started
to change a little bit to compare, you know, to
kind of lean towards more what we think of them
uh today in today's terms. Yeah, that was a big
(06:52):
part of it. You know, this this idea of um,
you know, taking acid and thinking about being embalmed is
not they don't really go hand in hand, you know
what I'm saying it's a really easy way to decouple
yourself from the traditional ideas of funerals is to take LSD.
I only inject heroin into my body band exactly. So UM,
(07:14):
that was a big part of it. In addition to
Mitford's book, I think her book came at a really
like good time. I think it had an impact because
the general um awakening of people in the movement away
from religion in a lot of ways, not necessarily away
from spirituality. But um, you know, there's this guy that's
interviewed in this house Stuff Works article who is the
(07:35):
UM I think, the dean of religious studies at Emory University.
So he's like, big Wood, you know what I'm saying,
Gary Lotterman, And he points out that, UM that if
you are talking about religion, like religions bread and butter,
it's basic business is death in the afterlife. So it
has all sorts of UM ideas and and um very
(07:58):
clear guidelines about how you're supposed to behave upon death
and how your body is supposed to be treated upon death,
and if you're religious, you follow those. But if as
a country America started to get less and less religious,
those kind of constrictions fell away too. Yeah, and you
know the idea that, um. The other thing a big
(08:20):
thing that's changed and changed things funeral wise, is it
used to be very vague in your will, Like funerals
were just kind of done one way, so when you die,
that was expected. And starting in the sixties and definitely
in the past couple of decades, people have gotten way
way more specific and they're what they want, like for
(08:40):
their own funeral arrangements, and it's leaned more toward and
they've even changed the nomenclature from funeral surface uh to
memorial service and then eventually the celebration of life, and
things have just gotten a lot less rigid, a little lighter,
and more celebratory. I don't wear black, I want you
to lay you know, uh, craft work, and I want
(09:04):
alcohol served. And I wanted to be outdoors and scatter
my ashes in my favorite dog park and then chuck.
So if you're if you're running a funeral home these days,
you're trying to keep up with this crazy changing wacko
time um for how funerals are carried out or sorry,
celebrations of life are carried out. Um, you you have
(09:26):
to kind of get more creative now than you you
did before. And I came across a blog post on
funeral one dot com or funeral alone dot com, depending
on how you want to say it, and it's I
think like twenty something creative ideas for a funeral, and
one of them, number ten, really sticks out to me.
(09:49):
They now they point out, as long as it wasn't
a tragic death, you can insert a bit of humor
by um passing out mad libs for people to creative
out the about the deceased. And I think it's smart
of them to caveat that as long as it was
a tragic loss, because that definitely does kind of change
the tone of something even today, even in today's you know,
(10:12):
whacked out alcohol fueled celebrations of life, if it's a
tragedy that that led to the death, it's it's still
going to be pretty somber. This is typically for things like, um,
you know somebody who, um, I don't know where their
death wasn't wasn't a tragedy. I don't think there's really
any other way to put it or create create Number fourteen,
(10:33):
create a memorial hashtag. Okay, so they give an example
hashtag remembered Grandma Smith, but they've shortened Grandma to g
M A so it could also be remembered good Morning America.
I think it we settled on. I know you've changed
your mind since then, but you were going to be
(10:55):
shot out of a cannon or something. Yeah, And then
I was always into this guy Burial, and Emily was
just like, I'll make you into a tree, but I
don't want to want vultures eating you. For God's sakes,
Guy Burial is pretty hardcore man for sure. Um. Yeah,
I used to to really be into myself, so I
wanted to be shot out of a can, and now
(11:16):
I'm like, I think I just rather be cremated and
spread somewhere nice. Okay, So I've got one more for you.
What you got um Number seventeen Celebrate Life fun with bubbles.
So you know, basically, what they're saying is the funeral
industry has gone into the wedding industry, wedding reception industry,
(11:37):
and said we could translate a lot of these to
these celebrations of life because they're both celebrations, and that's
kind of where we're at with funerals right now. That's right,
there's no wrong way to do it. If you are
still into an open casket and that traditional funeral service,
there certainly um businesses that can accommodate that. And we're
not gonna yuck anyone's yum even in death. No, we're not,
(11:59):
unless unless you fall for number eighteen, which is to
host icebreaker games, which it doesn't matter whether it's a
corporate function, a wedding or funeral. Icebreaker games are horrible.
Everybody across the board just don't do that. No one
wants you to go out like that. Well, since Chuck
said we'll judge you for that, that means that short
(12:20):
stuff is done and short stuff is out. Stuff you
should know is production of iHeart Radios How stuff Works.
For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
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