The LAST THING you want to do

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All that began to change with the industrial age. If you couldn't keep people down on the farm, the pursuit of happiness often ended with no one to dispose of the body. Enter the undertaker (with help from a Civil War doctor who invented an embalming process that made it possible to preserve and transport bodies with one profitable stop at the funeral home). Back then it was called a mortuary, but funeral home had a much nicer ring to it, and the undertaker (make that funeral director) was catching on to a brilliant psychological insight. As Americans lost their intimate contact with death, they were just as happy to forget about the whole damned thing. It wasn't just industrial streamlining that inspired coffin makers to ditch the six-sided "toe pincher." A rectangular shape l ooked so much less like what it was. Changing the name to casket boosted the antiseptic effect even more.

The campaign continues today. Over the past decade or so, 10 to 15 percent of the funeral homes in the United States have been bought out by corporate chains whose names have been sanitized of any sepulchral trace, among the biggest is Service Corporation International (SCI). But they've made sure the Mom and Pop funeral parlors they acquired retain their trusted names. However, they have made big changes in mark-ups, often lure unwary customers into lucrative contracts, and oc casionally even engage in deceptive deals with church organizations to corral cus tomers. Coffin prices continue to be one of the worst over-charges, even after an FTC ruling in 1984 that allowed customers to buy their own coffins. Funeral directors still can charge as much as $1,000 for bring-your-own coffin "handling fees." (Virginia, Louisiana and Oklahoma still won't permit you to buy your own coffin.)

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