Set against the backdrop of the 2020 Covid-19 outbreak, a young woman, Gravely Eaton, is stuck working at the family funeral home with a father she hates. The world is dying around her, but there seems no escape from her boring life with no friend...
At this point, you have to understand a little bit about the modern funeral industry.
You see, when my grandfather opened up the business around 1900, it was the wild west. Every man for himself. Naturally, there were laws and standards in big cities like Toronto, but when it came down to funeral products and services, every business was a little bit different. Some enterprising funeral directors made their own caskets, and some were even associated with making headstones, there were sidelines like flower shops and even ambulance services. Imagine, showing up at the scene of an accident in an ambulance. Instead of toting a dead person to a hospital or morgue, it was off to your funeral home. Cutting out the middleman was always good for the bottom line.
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Today, in America, the death industry collects something like $15 billion a year in revenue. Word is that there's something like ten companies that control most of the casket industry, granite for tombstones, and goodies that are used by funeral homes to make corpses look and smell good. Did you know that WalMart in the United States sells caskets online? It's true.
There might be a trusted family name on the brass plaque on the front of the funeral home that has served the community for decades, but chances are, the operation is a franchise. Yeah, like McDonald's. The funeral home has to buy its stuff from the head office to operate, products like cleaning products, advertising brochures and media buys, embalming fluid, cremations urns, mortuary equipment, even caskets.
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Many family-run funeral homes caved in long ago to competition and pressure from franchising corporations that are publicly traded on the stock market. While grandfather Eaton paid off the mortgage on the funeral building in the 1940s, and the family name is stamped on our stationery and brochures, we're still contractually accountable to North American Burial, or NAB as it's called.
The family business was "NAB'd" in 1996, the year I was borne. Father took the plunge when he and others in the local funeral industry noticed that more and more people were going for cheap cremations instead of expensive burials. That was a financial worry. NAB offered father a new business model that promised cheaper operating costs and a way to stay ahead of inevitable downturns in business. So now, they're kind of a silent partner - silent as long as we continued to buy their funeral products and pay them a seven percent royalty every month. I knew that I'd have to deal with our NAB representative in the days following my father's death, and I wasn't looking forward to it.
