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Taking the profit out of death A local funeral co-op aims to kill the high cost of death By CYDNEY GILLIS, Staff Reporter Char Barrett watched her father die of cancer when she was 25-years-old. It was fortunate, she says, that she was with him at the end. He was in a hospital, under harsh lights in a starched bed. Five years later, after an even longer struggle, Barrett lost a childhood friend to Hodgkins lymphoma. But the friend died at home, in the care of hospice providers surrounded by loved ones. Barrett never forgot the difference – one passing in sterility, the other in warmth. So, a few years ago, she gave up a career in real estate and went back to school to study mortuary science. Today, she is one of a handful of licensed funeral directors who will prepare a body for viewing and farewells the way families once did: at home, without embalming, fancy caskets, or funeral halls that cost a fortune. She will bathe and dress the deceased in a final suit or gown, lay the body in a simple coffin of wood and cloth, then place dry ice under the torso to cool and preserve the remains. “The beauty of it is that the person is natural,” she says – and can even maintain a glow to their complexion for two days. It’s a service Barrett provides not only to aid families emotionally, but financially. After a decade of corporate takeovers of family-owned funeral homes, one national chain in the Seattle area charges from $4,000 to $7,000 for similar services. At $1,500, Barrett’s home funeral is a deal—one of many she and a Seattle nonprofit consumer group will start offering next week at a new, parlor-less funeral company that plans to take the profit out of people’s suffering. Barrett is the managing director of the People’s Memorial Funeral Co-op, the state’s first-ever mortuary cooperative, which opens June 11 on Capitol Hill. For a one-time fee of $25, family members can chose from eight low-cost funeral plans, including a simple cremation with boxed ashes at $650, a cremation and funeral at $1,200, and full services with embalming, a basic casket, memorial and cemetery transport at $2,200. Since 1939, the nonprofit People’s Memorial Association has offered its members six of the low-cost packages (the funerals at home are new) through contracts it’s had across the state with various local funeral parlors. But last fall, Service Corporation International of Houston, the nation’s largest funeral chain, paid $1.2 billion to buy out its main competitor, Alderwoods. The deal doubled SCI’s holdings in the Puget Sound area from 13 to 26 funeral homes, setting PMA and its 100,000 members on a final collision course with profit. In 2005, the corporation had already cancelled eight contracts at funeral homes that served the nonprofit’s members. Then, in April, after PMA refused to go along with price hikes at three other funeral homes the corporation had just acquired, SCI sent it a 90-day notice cancelling those contracts as well—including one at the group’s only Seattle provider, Acacia Funeral Home. The nonprofit still had 11 funeral homes on contract. But left with some 40,000 Seattle members who would have no PMA services nearby if they dropped dead after the contracts expired on June 12, Board President Ruth Bennett said the organization made a crucial decision: It would not only start its own funeral service, but have it up and running within 90 days. “Since the corporate death-care companies have taken over, they don’t want to handle people who want simple, dignified services” because there’s no profit in it, Bennett says. “We just thought that opening our own funeral service was what we needed to do in order to continue as an organization.” The nonprofit hired Char Barrett and has already moved a location at Northgate to new and larger headquarters on Capitol Hill. Unlike distant chain operators that are concerned with profit and loss, “small, independent funeral homes have a much better opportunity to really serve families that are in grief,” Barrett says. “That’s a huge part of our philosophy—creating a cradling environment.”