COUNTYWIDE : Group Advocates Frugal Funerals

Though he is no preacher or poet, Ventura resident John Buchanan urges people to prepare for their own death.

The 75-year-old retired college teacher is president of Continental Assn. of Funeral and Memorial Services Inc., a national consumer rights group that helps people plan for a sensible, dignified funeral.

Most of the group’s 350,000 members, including about 4,000 in Ventura County, are well-educated, Buchanan said. Yet, he said, “even among the educated, those who can face their own demise are few.”

The organization encourages people to overcome their aversion to death and plan ahead so that decisions about their funerals will not be left to emotionally distraught relatives or profit-driven morticians. Its local chapter, the Channel Cities Memorial Society in Santa Barbara, serves Santa Barbara, Ventura and San Luis Obispo counties. The association promotes funeral services done with simplicity, dignity and economy.

Members of the local chapter can arrange with one of four participating mortuaries to have their bodies cremated or buried in a wood casket for less than $600. More extravagant funerals can cost more than $3,000 at local mortuaries, Buchanan said.

Buchanan and his wife, Eleanor, have been active in the group since 1966. He advocates cremation followed by a memorial service in a church, home or other familiar place. “You have to look at death as part of life,” Buchanan said.

“If people looked at it that way, they wouldn’t need the limousines, the caskets and the tons of flowers, the embalming and all the other barbarities that go on at a so-called traditional funeral.”

“The hoopla is undignified,” he said. “The other indignity is putting so much emphasis on the body, which is not a person.”

Buchanan has not made the trip to his mother’s grave site in Spokane, Wash., in years, he said.

“That grave site does not mean anything,” he said. What does mean something is that the dead still live in our minds, he added.

The Channel Cities Memorial Society can be reached at 569-1794.