Susan Alvarez knows better than to tell strangers what she does for a living.
At least not straight off, when people first ask. Once she answers, the 46-year-old braces for the usual reaction.
“Ooooh, how can you do that?” she mimics, drawing out the “oooooohh,” and feigning a look of creeped-out curiosity.
“That” is running a funeral home. Embalming bodies. Handling caskets. Driving a hearse. Facing the fresh grief of one family after another at Alvarez Funeral Directors, the small business she owns on Chicago’s West Side.
All of that is uncomfortable territory for most of us, the stuff of dark jokes and nervous laughter.
No wonder the profession appealed so much to Alan Ball, creator of “Six Feet Under,” the new HBO series about Fisher & Sons, a fictional family-run funeral home. Ball won an Academy Award last year for his satirical “American Beauty” screenplay.
Now he mines this new territory — for its black humor, to be sure, but also for the sharp commentary it yields about American culture and our attitudes toward relationships, work and, of course, death. Not to mention what it’s like to live above a funeral home and deal with the dead. The show, which airs on Sunday nights and repeats during the week, has fared well in the ratings. But as a look into a shrouded business, the question seems inevitable: How realistic is it?
“It is Hollywood, but at least it humanizes these people,” said Thomas Lynch, 52, a poet, essayist and second-generation funeral director.
“Most funeral directors see it as good entertainment and that at least it gives them a fair shake,” Lynch said.
Lynch’s non-fiction “The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade” was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Award. His day job is running his family business, Lynch & Sons Funeral Directors, in Milford, Mich.
According to him and other mortuary pros, the producers of “Six Feet Under” nailed much of the technique and lingo of the trade. But it’s still clear that this is a more colorful funeral home family dealing with far more colorful deaths than is usual.
Yet, if there have been any complaints about inaccuracies, the show’s co-executive producer, Alan Poul, says he hasn’t heard about them.
“I’ve been bombarded by phone calls from funeral directors across the country and they all have been wildly supportive of the show,” Poul said.
“You expect to have your errors pointed out to you and instead what I’ve gotten is people saying, `I’m a funeral director and you are touching on the things we go through and I want to share a story of something that happened to me.’ “
In the show, set in Pasadena, the Fishers live in a large, old-fashioned house. The funeral home is downstairs and the living quarters upstairs, a common arrangement.
During the first episode, the Fishers are jolted by a death in their own family. A bus broadsides the new hearse that the family patriarch, Nathaniel, is driving to the airport, killing him.
All of a sudden, as specified in the father’s will, sons Nate and David are in charge of the business. Nate abandons his free-wheeling existence working at a Seattle food co-op to join the tightly wound David, who has been working alongside their father.
The brothers clash with resentments new and old. (“You know nothing,” David seethes at Nate after Nate suggests changes.)
Meantime, a powerful funeral conglomerate targets the small business, vowing to take it over or drive it out of business.
The show isn’t all bodies and business. Nate becomes involved with a brilliant woman whose mysterious past slowly comes out.
David, ambivalent about revealing his homosexuality at the church where he is a deacon, argues the issue with his boyfriend, a black cop with the Los Angeles Police Department. The brothers’ prim, widowed mother, Ruth, keeps a nervous eye both on her suitors and her rebellious teenage daughter, Claire.
Not your ideal family
“This is not the picture perfect American family,” Poul said. “So if [funeral directors and their families] wanted to say, `That’s not us,’ I would understand.”
This is not G-rated material, either. Sex is more than hinted at, and four-letter words salt the dialogue.
For many of us, the show may provide our only glimpse of funeral homes behind the scenes. For funeral directors and their families, of course, looking for themselves in the show, and spotting inaccuracies, is reason enough to tune in, starting with the show’s take on what it’s like to live in a place that also houses the deceased.
Living above the prep room
“Six Feet Under” scene: Claire, the tough-talking teenager, brings home a date. “It must be weird” living there, he tells her upon entering the family’s living quarters above the funeral home.
“You get used to it,” Claire replies.
That rings true for Susan Alvarez’s son, Roberto, now 20. He grew up above a couple of Chicago funeral homes where his mother practiced her trade. He starts a one-year program at mortuary school this fall, in Wheeling, then plans to join his mother in her business as an apprentice.
He remembers his 3rd-grade birthday party, held at home. “I invited a bunch of kids in my class and only one kid came.
“I guess they were probably scared. They relate funeral homes and death to scary movies. They freak out.”
In “Six Feet Under,” a flashback shows one of the Fisher sons as a young boy, curious but afraid of the embalming room where his father would spend long hours working.
Not so Alvarez. “Living above a funeral home was OK for me,” he said. ” I didn’t really care. I just grew up with it. I used to walk by the chapel without even acknowledging there’s a person in the casket. It was just there.”
The one “Six Feet Under” episode he watched recently struck him as entertaining but far-fetched. “People taking the foot [Claire steals a corpse’s body part and puts it into a classmate’s locker] and using it for pranks . . . that doesn’t happen at all.”
As many in the funeral business point out, “Six Feet Under” features far more exotic deaths than funeral homes routinely deal with. That stolen foot, for example, belonged to a baker chopped up in a giant mixing machine.
“If it was like normal, who would watch it?” Alvarez said. “It would be boring.”
Each episode begins with a fatal vignette. A charismatic con-man dives into a swimming pool and hits bottom. A gang member is shot by a rival. A porn star is electrocuted when a certain appliance falls into the bathtub. An old woman dies in her sleep. And every one of their families becomes a customer of Fisher & Sons.
Fiction mirrors fact
Susan Alvarez has never dealt with a dismembered baker or an electrocuted porn queen, but she can relate to the theme of dealing with all kinds of families, all kinds of deaths.
“There are so many ways to leave this earth,” she said. Over her more than two decades in the funeral business, Susan Alvarez mostly has buried people who died of illness or, essentially, old age. But also some who died in car wrecks and gang wars, suicides and accidental falls, murders by strangers and murders by husbands.
“Fire and water must be the worst,” she said, recalling clients who had burned to death or drowned.
“It’s those extremes. It is . . . [a death] of desperation for someone in a drowning situation, and the pain of being in a fire.”
Every profession gives its practitioners their own insights like that. For funeral directors, most of whom prefer that modern term to undertaker or mortician, their job also teaches them that the dead, surprisingly, are not always silent.
An eerie sound
Scene: Nate Fisher, new to driving the hearse, is transporting a body to the funeral home for embalming.
Suddenly, an eerie sound that resembles a moan escapes from the corpse in back. Fisher shoots a startled look at his cargo.
Still dead. But air escaping the recently deceased had creating a breathy noise somewhere between a sigh and a groan.
The incident is fiction but the phenomenon is real.
In fact, the scene is in the show because it happened to the funeral director hired to inject realism into each episode.
“When someone dies, when you move the bodies, the air just flows out past the vocal cords,” said Vaughn Nybakken, 49, who reviews scripts for the show. He spent two decades working full-time in the industry and now works for IBM and does part-time funeral duty.
“When I first got into this, my partner didn’t tell me [corpses] make noise. It’s like 2 in the morning and in the call car — or the deadwagon, we call it — the guy’s head is less than a foot behind my head,” recalled Nybakken, who, as he drove around a corner, heard the body behind him emit that moaning sound.
“I just about had a heart attack myself,” Nybakken said. “My partner thought that was funny.”
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Nybakken and his wife, Kathy, another veteran of the industry, sometimes attend the show’s tapings for further reality checks. Not that the producers always listen.
“A lot of times they want accuracy, they want realism, but they’ll bump the line or cross it for show business,” Nybakken said.
For example, said Kathy Nybakken, there was the opening scene in which a young woman had her face smashed in by a cherry-picker truck. “They came up with this really cool looking prosthetic device of what she’d look like after the cherry picker. Major, major [facial] reconstruction.
“Vaughn and I told them, `Look, that would be a closed casket, end of story.’ They would not even attempt it. The results would have been horrifying.”
But an open casket it was. “In this script,” Kathy Nybakken said, “the writers were adamant about wanting to show off Federico [the program’s restoration artist character] as being a primo restorative artist.”
Competition
Scene: At a coffee shop, the Fisher brothers inform Matthew Gilardi, the slick representative of the conglomerate that wants to buy their funeral home, that they are not selling.
“I’ll make it simple,” Gilardi tells the brothers. “You either accept our offer by the end of the day or I’ll make it my personal mission to bury you by the end of the month.”
Much is made in “Six Feet Under” of how a big conglomerate is trying to take over Fisher & Sons or drive it out of business.
Those worries about conglomerates exist in real life, too, with some predicting the funeral business one day will be dominated by big companies more interested in consolidation than offering the personal service of a small, family-run business.
But those larger companies say they provide much-needed innovation in what they offer and what it costs. They have the economy of scale on their side, with the price breaks they get for purchasing in bulk, everything from fleets of hearses to acres of cemetery plots.
The impersonal, ruthless conglomerate on the show appears to be a stand-in for the funeral industry’s real-life titan, Houston-based Service Corporation International (SCI). The chain operates more than 3,500 funeral concerns in 18 countries. Greg Bolton, a spokesman for CSI, had this terse, prepared statement about the show: ” `Six Feet Under’ does not represent the real funeral business as we know it. The business dealings of the consolidating company on the program do not represent our company’s policies and practices.” He declined further comment.
In Chicago, Susan Alvarez was approached by a large chain — not SCI — a couple of years ago, but rejected a buyout offer that would have kept her on as a salaried manager. “I think it would just turn my stomach around,” she said.
She wants to do things her way and fears that her passion for her work would fade under someone else’s dictates. “If you don’t love your work, it’s not the same,” she said. “Once you get burned out, people can see that. Everything becomes about numbers. You lose the personal side.”
Lynch, too, failed to see why anyone — in a small funeral home or a big chain — would want to be a funeral director if he or she thought of it as just another way of making money.
“Most of the known world could not be paid enough to embalm a neighbor on Christmas or stand with an old widower at his wife’s open casket or talk with a leukemic mother about her fears for her children about to be motherless,” Lynch wrote in “The Undertaking.”
“The ones who last in this work are the ones who believe what they do is not only good for the business and the bottom line, but good, after everything, for the species.”
Soft-pedaling death
The funeral business — make that the “deathcare industry” – is full of euphemisms. The language is supposed to make death sound less harsh, make the business sound less commercial and make its practitioners sound less dated. For starters, don’t call them undertakers or morticians. It’s funeral directors now. Here is a guide to some other industry terms:
Aftercare: Services such as post-funeral grief counseling.
Cremains: Cremated remains, ashes.
Dead wagon: Hearse or other vehicle used to transport bodies.
Death calls: Telephone calls to a funeral director that someone has died and the body needs to be picked up and prepared for a funeral, whatever the hour of the day or night.
Final resting vessel: Casket.
McFunerals: Disparaging term for look-alike, impersonal funerals, especially those from one of the big chains.
Preneed planning: Planning, and usually paying, in advance for your own funeral.
Removal vehicle: Not necessarily hearses, these vehicles have room for cargo in back and are dispatched to ferry bodies from, for example, hospitals to funeral homes.
Restoration artist: Embalmer who is skilled in restoring badly damaged bodies and faces.
— Marja Mills
