Hey, and welcome to the short stuff, I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Jeri's floating around out there somewhere in 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 that happened to your head after you die.

Yeah, and we should just stop in this episode because it'll be the best episode in the history of the show.

All right. Well, that's for sure stuff. Everybody sure stuff is out. Oh, we got to stop for an ad break.

Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah. So we're talking about funerals and we've talked a little bit about this stuff over the years and our death suite. And I think we actually did one on things to do with a 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 1960s and up until the 1960s, Americans and especially American Christian people had one kind of funeral and that was largely dictated, 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. And that meant being embalmed, put in a suit or dress, whatever your preference was, and be presented in a casket usually open for like your friends and family to dress in black and come kind of grieve over you and is very solemn, unhappy affair, which was what was the last time.

And not to get too personal, but that you had to go to an open casket, a casket scene. I don't remember, honestly, it's been a while for me. Yeah, I genuinely don't remember because it is kind of like old school, you know, but, you know, it still happens every once 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.

Yeah. 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 haven't been that many, I have always just been like, you know, like, do you want to go up and say goodbye to your grandmother? I was like, no, I've done that in my head, in my heart. So I do not need to go see that weird powdery wax figure that looks nothing like her in real life.

Do you want to go smell Grandma's hair one last time? Yeah, I've never been into it. And we're both kind of on record with that of our shows over the years. But this whole thing started to kind of change with a book in 1963 that I kind of want to read now from. Yeah, Jessica Mitford called The American Way of Death, where she really kind of exposed the U.S. funeral home industry as being not so great. Yeah.

Basically, she she portrayed it as an entire industry built around taking advantage of people in a really predatory way. Yeah. During a really vulnerable moment when they're grieving, when they're at their weakest, these these skells come in and start being like, well, of course, you need this. And the deceased would want that. The platinum packaging, ka ching ching. Right? You got like the the cash register dollar sign cartoon Wolfie's. That's basically how she portrayed it was a really I think she wrote an article at first and it got very little attention and then it turned into a book.

I think she went on TV and 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 and see 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 1960s and we realize it's a business for profit business and upselling is part of that business. And it just takes on a bit of a, I guess, sort of an untoward feeling when it's dealing with people while they're grieving. But that's also the business you're in.

So I'm not just I'm not slamming you if you work for I have one across the street. They're very nice people I live across from a funeral home. That's lovely. But having said that. Stop it now. Things have changed a lot over the years, in the 1960s, the cremation rate was three percent. Right. And which is astounding, and now it's 51 percent and it's going to go up to about 57 or 58 percent by 2022, it seems like.

Yeah, that was a big effect that Metford 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. I read that she spent less than, I think eight hundred dollars in today's dollars. Oh, nice. On her own funeral. But but because of this, it kind of made it like, OK, to not go through all this rigmarole into not even like preserve the body.

And I was reading about that preserving the body. Like there's this idea that that had been around for a really long time. Like, I don't know if it was so that you looked your best to when God told everybody to stand up in their graves and be judge or later.

Yeah, yeah. That guy. But apparently it was Abraham Lincoln that really kicked off the American trend for embalming. He had his son embalmed. He was a big devotee of embalming. And then when 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 1960s right up to this definition of trying to escape it.

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Oh, all right, so 1960s come along, this book is written in the early 60s, the counterculture counterculture arrives, people start doing drugs, start exploring different kinds of spirituality, 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, you know, to kind of lean toward more what we think of them today in today's terms.

Yeah, that was a big part of it. You know, 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 ban, not formaldehyde. Exactly.

So that was a big part of it. In addition to Milford's book, I think her book came at a really, like, good time. Totally. I think it had an impact because the general awakening of people in the movement away from religion and a lot of ways not necessarily away from spirituality, but, you know, there's this guy that's interviewed in this HowStuffWorks article who is the I think the dean of religious studies at Emory University. So he's like big, you know, Gary Latterman.

And he points out that 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 ideas and and very 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 the other thing, a big 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 died, that was expected and starting in the 60s and definitely in the past couple of decades, people have gotten way, way more specific in their what they want, like for their own funeral arrangements. And it's leaned more toward and they've even changed the nomenclature from funeral service 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.

Don't wear black. I want you to play, you know, Kraftwerk and I want alcohol served and I want it to be outdoors and scatter my ashes and 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 Wako time for how funerals are carried out or sorry, celebrations of life are carried out.

Um, you you have to kind of get more creative now than you did before. And I came across a blog post on funeral one dotcom or funeral alone dotcom, depending on how you want to say it. And it's, I think, like 20 something creative ideas for a funeral. And one of them No.

Ten really sticks out to me. Now, they point out as long as it wasn't a tragic death, you can insert a bit of humor by passing out Mad Libs for people to create about the about the deceased. OK, sure. And I think it's smart of them to caveat that as long as it was a tragic loss, because it definitely does kind of change the tone of something even today, even in today's, you know, whacked out, alcohol fuelled celebrations of life.

If it's a tragedy that that led to the death, it's still going to be pretty somber.

This is typically for things like, you know, somebody who 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. Yeah. What else?

You're number 14, create a memorial hashtag. OK, hashtag. Too soon.

They give an example hashtag remembered Grandma Smith. OK, but they've shortened grandma to GMA. All right. So it could also be remembered. Good Morning America.

I think we settled on I know you've changed your mind since then, but you were going to be shot out of a cannon or something. Yeah.

And then I was always into the sky burial and Emily was just sitting there like, I'll make you into a tree, but I don't want to want vultures eating you, for God's sakes.

Gabriel is pretty hardcore, man, for sure. Yeah. I used to to to really be into myself, so I wanted to be shot up again. And now I'm like, yeah, I think I'd just rather be cremated and. Fred, somewhere nice. OK, so I've got one more for you. Yeah, what you got? Number 17, celebrate life fun with bubbles. So, you know, basically what they're saying is the funeral industry is going into the wedding industry.

Right. Wedding reception industry 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 in that traditional funeral service. There are certainly businesses that can accommodate that. And we're not going to yuck anyone's yum even in death. No, we're not, unless unless you fall for number 18, which is to host ice breaker games, which it doesn't matter whether it's a corporate function, a wedding or a funeral, icebreaker games are horrible to everybody across the board.

Just don't do that. No one wants you to go out like that. Yeah, well, since Chuck said we'll judge you for that, that means that short stuff is done and short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of radios HowStuffWorks for more podcasts, My Heart Radio, is it the radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows?