The story reveals two things: That funeral directors, morticians, embalmers, hearse drivers and anybody involved in the process of putting a person six feet under has a sense of humor; and that despite their close contact with the dead, they’re not exempt from a good fright.
Arlington CEO Raffy Jose, whose father founded the company in 1982, says that yes, they do "laugh at incidents about death" and that since HBO’s Six Feet Under went on air, the industry has been basking in a favorable light.
"The death that changed the public’s perception of the funeral director was Princess Diana’s. Five years ago, the industry was down. The perception of the funeral director was that he was a morbid person, a vulture. Then Diana died and they saw the role of the funeral director, giving dignity to the event. The three guys in the hearse during her procession, they were the funeral directors responsible for the planning, the organization of the procession, the memorializaiton, etc. With Six Feet Under, the funny side and the quirks are shown. Not all of it is true, but some is. They really capture what the industry is going through, like the takeover of the conglomerates, elevating the prices because they’re being controlled by one corporation."
According to Raffy, in a US survey the funeral director ranks third in the "most respected profession" category, the first being doctors. "I’ve forgotten what the second is," he says.
We’re betting it’s not lawyers.
For an industry whose business is to be with people (the dead and the ones left behind) on the worst day of their lives, death is an everyday occurrence. Yet, it’s funny how death is metaphor-ized and punned to death in their trade magazines. For instance, an ad for a hearse has the headline "A Moving Tribute"; or consider how the term "memorial park" is not enough anymore, giving birth to names such as "Home for Happy Souls"; or how the verb "die" has spawned so many slangs and metaphors – kick the bucket, cross the bar, pass over to the great beyond, bite the dust, check out, cash in one’s chips, buy the farm, give up the ghost and, my personal favorite, push up the daisies.
Maybe they have too much time on their hands or too much silence at their workplace, but people involved in the funeral industry and related services are now offering much more than what they did decades ago.
Like a value meal, in fact.
Today, caskets from the United States come not just in brown or white, but in many other colors (pink, lavender, blue, green, and fuchsia) and designs.
Arlington, for instance, offers the White Light caskets or art caskets. They are painted with different themes and designs such as gardens, Raphael’s angels, Our Lady of Guadalupe, the rosary, a golf course, Monet’s waterlilies, The Last Supper and the holy cross. By the way, a casket is different from a coffin; the latter is the flat-top type, like Princess Diana’s or Count Dracula’s (take your pick).
The late Ishi Raquiza, Vandolph’s girlfriend who died in the accident they were in, was buried in an art casket with the painting of a garden and a bridge over a pond.
The art caskets are constructed from an 18-gauge steel with protective gasket and silver swing bar hardware and white interior. They’re pricier than the local ones, but Raffy clarifies that the price tag includes not just the cost of the casket (usually 40 percent of the price), but also embalming, retrieval of the body from the place of death, the chapel and the hearse to be used.
The art casket packages cost an average of P200,000, twice that of local caskets, which cost about 25 percent of the P100,000 package price.
"You can mix and match but only up to one level," says Raffy. "The art caskets, for instance, are put in the bigger chapels like the Faith chapel, which can accommodate 100 people and has a fountain inside, while the lower priced are in the smaller chapels."
Pointing to a blue casket, Raffy says Rico Yan was buried in a similar one. They got a lot of good-natured ribbing over that one – imagine a La Sallite in a blue casket!
Another blue casket was used for true-blue Atenean Senator Raul Manglapus. When he died, his family "wanted either a traditional brown or gold casket. I said, wasn’t your dad an Atenean, why not put him in a blue casket? They didn’t even know there was a blue one. We got noticed for that. It was one of the few times back in 1999 when a casket came in a different color."
It’s impractical to get a costly casket, isn’t it? Raffy says that they have what’s called the "cremation cradle," a cloth-covered particle board casket just like a regular one.
"The reason we suggest this for cremation is because it’s combustible. They burn the casket along with the body and nothing is left except probably small screws that hold the handles together, which are normally removed by a magnet after the cremation."
At P10,000 or so, they’re less expensive than the local steel caskets.
And don’t forget the urns. Arlington has ornate Chinese urns made of stone but they look like wood, and urns made of Romblon marble. They cost from P9,000 to P11,000.
Surrounded by caskets during the interview, we ask Raffy if it gets very emotional here when family members are choosing casket. "We calm them down first or we ask them to designate a member of the family to do this task. If a father dies, it’s usually his sibling or children who choose, not his wife."
If it’s a baby? "The parents are always the ones who choose, no one else," says Raffy.
We wonder out loud why there aren’t any small caskets in the room. Raffy says, "We have infant caskets though it’s been my stand not to maintain them in the selection room because I don’t want to see a baby casket here. It’s just something personal."
A baby casket is just a little bigger than a shoe box. And no room is big enough to contain the grief over a baby that small.
Case No. 1 involves a dead man who was apparently a veritable Mr. Suave with two wives. Wife No. 2 came to the chapel and the brother of the dead husband, feeling insulted for his sister-in-law, asked No. 2 to leave – not too politely.
Another case, it was a husband who was about to be buried in the afternoon when his legitimate wife called from the US three hours before and demanded that Raffy stop the funeral at all costs because she was coming home the next day. Raffy said politely but firmly that they could not do it since he didn’t have any proof that she was really the wife and that their services were contracted by the common-law wife. The wife came home, filed a case for exhumation, won it and transferred her husband’s body to another memorial park.
Then there are the quickie cremation cases. (Arlington doesn’t offer the service just yet – but they’re planning to expand by next year.) "Sometimes we get a call that says their mother is dying and could they cremate her tonight? We have to say no because you cannot get all your permits during the night and what if a daughter comes home and says why did you cremate my mother right away?"
This happened to a former Marcos crony, says Raffy, who was cremated six hours after he died and family members couldn’t understand why.
The opposite would be the wake that was so long the girl turned 18 in her casket. Arlington had to hold the body for a month and a half because her father was at sea and couldn’t get back to the country for another 30 days.
As for the biggest funeral, he says it was Charlene Sy’s, the 15-year-old girl who was kidnapped and killed along with her kidnappers on EDSA in a botched rescue attempt by PACC agents.
She was killed on January 6, 1993. Exactly a week later, a six-kilometer-long funeral march brought her body to her final resting place. Ten thousand people, according to newspaper estimates – most of whom were Chinese-Filipinos and did not even know her personally – mourned with her family and felt their outrage.
Raffy says the flowers that were brought to the chapel were so overwhelming they had to put most of them along Araneta Avenue because they couldn’t fit in the Arlington compound anymore.
Another memorable funeral was that of Ninoy’s mother Doña Aurora Aquino. Her wake was at Sto. Domingo Chruch in QC then her remains were brought to Tarlac. Arlington took care of the body’s preparation. Doña Aurora had left instructions that she be buried in the same casket as the nuns use – a simple, austere casket without even the handles on sides.
"It was such a spare casket for someone of her stature," says Raffy.
There are many more stories that Raffy tells – a young doctor who died of liver cancer and his fellow doctors set up a bar at the back of the chapel to toast him throughout the wake; a young man whose family played his favorite rock music during the funeral procession; National Artist Cesar Legaspi who was surrounded by his own paintings which his family hung in the chapel; Inday Badiday, whose hearse was a 4x4 Lincoln Navigator instead of the usual one (this is becoming the hearse of choice, especially for males who want to go the macho way!); or a daughter who had always driven for her mom and wanted to do the same with the hearse, but Raffy could only allow her to drive her mom’s hearse from the enrance of the memorial park to the plot. When a grandfather dies, Arlington encourages the family to release balloons at the burial because they’ve seen how young children react to the balloons as they say goodbye to their lolo. Or maybe butterflies, which was what they planned for Rico Yan – until they realized that at P90 each, 500 butterflies were going to cost a lot!
Raffy says they are continuously innovating their services, and one of the most important is memorialization – paying tribute to the person who died in the way he lived his life. "When a person passes away, we ask his family to bring in personal items. Like if he had a religious devotion to the Virgin Mary, we could put a statue of the Virgin Mary, or if he was a Rotarian, we could display his citations."
"You know what I did at one Halloween party? I removed the interiors of one of our unfinished caskets and put coolers inside. One side was ice, the other side was beer."
Raffy’s two kids aren’t spared of teasing either. At the Ateneo High School, they’re called the "Prince of Darkness."
Before he became CEO of the company, Raffy drove hearses and was a funeral director – an events planner, if you really think about it. He shares that he’s got his own funeral planned already. As a child of the ‘70s there will be lots of good music: Beatles, maybe James Taylor, Simon & Garfunkel and all those songs with lyrics.
As a poet once wrote: Do not go gentle into that good night – at least not without a Beatles song.