Is the death care business dying?

Death is a certainty in life and there will always be a need for death care. The business of death care will never die. However, while there will always be clients in need of death care services, the Philippine Mortuary Association Inc. (PMAI) said the funeral industry has been experiencing a sluggish growth. “This is not really a lucrative business," PMAI president Renato Dychangco Jr. said in an interview Monday, All Saints' Day. All Saints' Day, November 1, has become part of the traditional commemoration of "Undas," or the time for remembering the dead. All Souls' Day, November 2, is a Catholic feast day for remembering the dead. However, millions of Filipinos start flocking to cemeteries as early as November 1, All Saints' Day, also a Catholic feast for honoring all saints, both those who are known and the unknown. According to Dychangco, the growth of the funeral industry is “stagnant." Mortuaries have thus introduced innovations in the death care business such as new embalming procedures, he said. Dychangco said some of the mortuaries in the Philippines have adopted from the US the technology of “soft embalming," where the person looks as if he or she is just sleeping. “We have skilled embalmers and staff who can beautify the dead," he added. “We train our people to handle dead bodies with utmost care. These bodies are sacred, so we handle them as we would to a living body," said Dychangco, who is also the president and CEO of Iloilo-based Cosmopolitan-Somo Memorial Chapel. Certainty in life In theory, the death-care business should be impervious from short-term economic swings. Death is one of the only two sure things in life-- getting old and dying. “But despite this stagnant growth, [funeral] industry pretty much holds strong regardless of the economy," Dychangco said. According to the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook, the Philippine death rate fell from 5.6 percent per 1,000 in 2003 to 5.1 percent per 1,000 in 2009. This means that fewer people died in 2009 than in 2003, despite an increase in population. For many Filipinos, regardless of their beliefs, it still seems anathema to scrimp on a loved one’s last life cycle event. As what most people say, “A funeral is something you can only do once." Cremation Meanwhile, a few Filipinos prefer cremation, Dychangco said, underscoring that this method “remains to be unacceptable to Filipinos." He said cremation is still more expensive than the traditional burial method. “You still need to pay for the casket used during wake and take into consideration the cost of cremation." “But cremation can still come out cheaper or more expensive depending on the service the customer would want to avail," he pointed out. These could be the reasons why the cremation rate in the Philippines is still low, Dychangco said, citing that in Cebu alone, only one to two percent of the death market prefers cremation. He also said that casket funerals retain their status as important religious rituals because Filipinos are “still conservative." The Roman Catholic Church however ruled in 1963 that cremation is an acceptable burial alternative. –VVP, GMANews.TV