When Sue Adelson’s husband Steve was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 2019, the couple knew it was a death sentence. “I’m a planner,” Adelson said. So that year, she and her husband visited Drozdal Funeral Home in Northampton, she told The Shoestring.
While the couple did not make a deposit on Steve’s funeral ahead of time, they wanted to get a sense for their options. They quickly realized that the costs of laying a loved one to rest — funerals, obituaries, and headstones, for example — are “really expensive.”
Over the next five years, they set aside money in a checking account. Sue called it their “death account,” although that wasn’t the title her husband would have given it, she said.
She said she was fortunate to find an independent, family-owned funeral home to perform her husband’s burial rituals according to their Jewish faith — a home she described as “kind and easy to work with.” It was also the funeral home that her family used when her mother passed away in 1984. “I just knew what was good for my mother would be good for my husband.”
But finding a local, independent funeral home, like Adelson did, is becoming harder these days. Increasingly, consolidation firms are buying up smaller mortuaries nationwide, including in western Massachusetts, where a Shoestring investigation has found that one private equity-backed firm bought more than 10% of the region’s funeral homes in recent years. That means that a quarter of all of the region’s funeral homes are now part of a chain.
It’s a trend that doesn’t seem to be slowing down, either.
A nationwide survey by the National Funeral Directors Association found that 46% of funeral directors said they planned to retire in the next five years.
Funeral homes have traditionally been passed down through families since the mortuary profession first started to become commonplace around the end of the Civil War. But when the children of directors are not around, or aren’t interested in carrying on the family business, directors are left with few exit strategies except to sell.
And that’s when corporate chains step in.
In a 2020 paper titled “Funeral Poverty,” Victoria Haneman, a fiduciary law professor at the University of Georgia School of Law and an expert on the economic forces that drive the death care industry, explained how one company, Service Corporation International, grew to be the largest deathcare services company in the United States and Canada through the mass acquisition of these businesses. SCI’s model is to capitalize on the “goodwill and heritage” of the family-owned funeral homes it purchases by continuing to use their original names, Haneman explained.
“The stated business plan, in effect, exploits the consumer’s belief that they are doing business with a local company — when, in fact, consumer advocates and funeral industry experts state that SCI funeral homes are among the most expensive,” Haneman wrote. “A study from Consumer Federation of America found that median prices at SCI funeral products were ‘47 to 72% higher.’”
SCI rose to prominence in the 1990s, and came to own more than 3,800 funeral homes by the turn of the millennium. Following the 2013 acquisition of its largest competitor, Stewart Enterprises, the Federal Trade Commission subjected SCI to a 10-year review period limiting its ability to expand through acquisitions.
In western Massachusetts, a company formed by two former SCI employees has now begun purchasing funeral homes, acquiring around 10% of the market already.
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Milestone Funeral Services was founded in 2021 by Michael Martel and Timothy Smart. Having “come up” in suburban funeral homes, the two realized that the suburban and rural funeral home market is largely underserved.
“We knew it was a place that we were very comfortable working in and building an organization, understanding businesses that are driven by personality more than by institution, if you will,” Martel told The Shoestring. “So we deliberately sought to build an organization that focused on that. Does that make us special? I’m not sure, but that certainly has been our strategy, and to this day, it continues to be our strategy.”
One of the businesses that Milestone purchased in western Massachusetts was Ahearn Funeral Home in Northampton.
When Michael Ahearn, the funeral home’s former owner, died in 2021, Milestone bought it. The acquisition was part of the company’s larger strategy, and through a quiet series of recent buyouts, Milestone has become the single largest owner of funeral home businesses in western Massachusetts, according to records reviewed by The Shoestring.
Today, Milestone owns about 20% of all funeral homes in Hampden County, and a handful in other parts of the state, including one in Northampton and two on the western edge of Worcester County. The shopping spree is part of Milestone’s larger consolidation strategy throughout New England and New York. Martel said the company owns 77 funeral homes throughout the northeast at the time of publication.
In 2024 Milestone was acquired by Rosewood Private Investments, the private equity arm of the Rosewood Corporation, which is wholly owned by the trust of the estate of the late hotelier and heiress Caroline Hunt.
As the funeral industry changes and the baby-boomer generation ages, some say it’s likely that the number of independent businesses will begin to dwindle in the future as companies like Milestone expand.
“It’s tough,” said Chris Powers, who took over as Ahearn’s funeral director following Milestone’s acquisition. “In Hampshire county, there are eight funeral homes, and none have any children going into the business. In the next ten years or so, the landscape in this area is going to change dramatically.”
Powers, himself a Deerfield native who has been a licensed funeral director in Massachusetts for 39 years, said he sees his work as more of a stewardship than a business. A 24/7, 365-days-per-year stewardship.
“Just coasting, my typical week is about 60 hours,” Powers said. “But what’s the alternative? Do you just put the key in and walk away?”
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While Milestone may be notable for its recent entry and rapid growth, it is not the only consolidation firm operating in western Massachusetts.
Using corporate filings, price lists, and state licensure data, The Shoestring identified three consolidation firms that are full or partial owners of funeral homes in the region’s four counties. Alongside Milestone are Foundation Partners Group and Carriage Services. Carriage Services is publicly traded, while Foundation Partners Group was acquired in August by an undisclosed group of investors.
An analysis performed using 2024 pricing data from the Funeral Consumers Alliance of Western Massachusetts found that all three companies — accounting for 25% of the 81 funeral homes in the area — had higher average prices across six price categories than the average prices charged by their independently owned competitors.
The Shoestring’s analysis was possible in part because of state regulations in Massachusetts that require funeral homes to disclose all entities that have an ownership stake in the funeral home, and thanks to data collected bi-annually by the Funeral Consumers Alliance of Western Massachusetts.
“Massachusetts is very progressive in some of the laws that they pass. Most states do not have these disclosure statutes,” Haneman said.
Funeral homes are regulated by the Federal Trade Commission under what is referred to as the Funeral Rule, which requires them to give consumers accurate, itemized information about their prices and other funeral goods and services. This information must be provided on a general price list, a document given to anyone upon inquiry. The price list must also disclose that consumers are not required to purchase anything they do not want except for the funeral home’s fee for their basic services and overhead, sometimes referred to as non-declinable fees. The rule also mandates that consumers must be free to provide their own alternative container — a coffin or urn, for example — if they do not wish to purchase one.
Using price lists collected by the Funeral Consumers Alliance of Western Massachusetts, The Shoestring analyzed pricing trends for 2020, 2022, and 2024 across 81 funeral homes. The analysis included six basic price categories: basic service fee, immediate burial, direct cremation, embalming, least cost casket, and least cost burial vault.
Across all categories, the average price charged by publicly traded or private equity-backed companies was higher than the average price charged by independent funeral homes collectively.
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State regulations also require at least one person with a controlling interest in a funeral home to be a state-certified funeral director.
“When my partners and I set out to do business, we decided very early on that one of us would be a licensed funeral director in that state, and our partners in that state would [also] be licensed funeral directors,” Martel, the Milestone CEO, told The Shoestring. “That’s the core of these state laws, and I’m sure there’s probably all kinds of legal mechanisms to get around that, with holding companies and so forth, but we just chose to interpret it in a very literal fashion.”
Records for Milestone show that the company holds nine separate entities registered in the state.
Articles of organization could not be identified for Carriage Funeral Services, and the state’s licensing board could not find records related to its application, which lists all beneficial owners of the company.
Foundation Partners Group was listed as owning a 49% stake in the Beers and Story chain of funeral homes, with longtime director Marc Gaudreau owning 51%.
A spokesperson for the state’s Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation told The Shoestring that “investigators ask about a funeral home’s ownership interests for each licensee as part of their inspection process to ensure that a Type 3 licensee owns a controlling interest in the establishment,” but “does not otherwise oversee business arrangements between owners.”
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Dina Stander has been an “end-of-life navigator” for the past 20 years in western Massachusetts, where she’s worked adjacent to the funeral home industry. As the founder of the Northeast Death Care Collaborative — a group organizing professionals in the death care industry locally — she said she always prefers to send people to local, family-owned funeral homes.
“They’re much more pleasant to deal with,” she said. “What you see now is, you know, the big corporate SCI, whoever it is, buys up the funeral home and keeps the family in place, at least for a while, because they’ll run it for them. But it feels different.”
Stander said that consolidation is “always bad for the community,” resulting in a rise in prices and less intimacy with funeral directors. And she said that’s important when people, in the emotional turmoil of a loved one dying, are making quick decisions about potentially expensive services.
“And there’s a lot of money in death because we have a seriously aging population,” she said.
Kennedy Smith, a researcher at the Institute for Local Self Reliance, told The Shoestring that funeral homes rely on personal reputation in their communities. They’re often multi-generational businesses and rely on their personal relationships to build trust with the people who turn to them to take care of a loved one who has died, she explained.
“One of the interesting side effects of consolidation is that piece of it is beginning to fall away,” Smith said. “You can’t quantify that in economic terms, but it definitely has an impact on the sense of community.”
Last year, the Institute for Local Self Reliance submitted comments about the death care industry in response to a solicitation from the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice Antitrust Division regarding the effect of serial acquisitions and roll-ups on the U.S. economy. Their letter calls for increased scrutiny from antitrust regulators, arguing that because the product sold by funeral homes is primarily labor-intensive service work, there are few efficiency gains to be found by scaling, leading larger companies to increase their profit-hungry margins by instead raising their prices.
Some in the industry have noted some upsides that have come amid the consolidation of recent years, though.
Paul Phaneuf, the chair of the state’s Board of Registration in Embalming and Funeral Directing, told The Shoestring he was encouraged by an increase in women morticians and directors in a previously male-dominated field. Additionally, employees of several funeral homes — all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity due to either employer rules about speaking to the media or a perceived backlash that could hurt their future careers — all said that while they saw owner-operated businesses as having more autonomy and opportunities for financial rewards, this also came with downsides related to work-life balance, as funeral homes need to be prepared to respond to calls for service 24/7.
Massachusetts is now considering easing regulations on the industry, which are some of the strictest in the country, according to experts who spoke to The Shoestring.
In May, Gov. Maura Healey sent a letter to Phaneuf instructing the board to undertake a broadscale review of regulations, “with the goal of eliminating outdated requirements to reduce business cost, repeal unnecessary barriers and onerous requirements, and rescind regulations that stifle competition and hurt Massachusetts businesses and consumers.”
Phaneuf told The Shoestring that the regulations potentially on the chopping block were primarily related to a labor shortage of workers trained in the mortuary sciences. The licensing board does not currently accept licenses from out of state, for example, requiring transplants to re-do training and apprenticeship requirements, which can take at least two years, before they can work as a funeral director.
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On Beacon Hill, however, bigger legislative changes could be on their way.
“We’ve been pushing for a couple of years to expand the death care options in Massachusetts,” said Sandy Ward, trustee at the Funeral Consumers Alliance of Western Massachusetts, which is a volunteer-run nonprofit organization. “This is our third go-round.”
Ward said the consumer’s alliance is in favor of legalizing two new methods of disposition, which advocates say are more environmentally friendly options than cremation, which relies on fossil fuels to power the retorts. (Green burial is already allowed in Massachusetts.)
One method, alkaline hydrolysis, dissolves the deceased tissue in a heated solution of lye — typically potassium hydroxide. Another proposed means of disposition is natural organic reduction, or human composting. Both methods are already practiced in some U.S. states.
Several bills related to the death care industry have been introduced this legislative session, including a bill, one of several death care related bills sponsored by state Rep. James Arciero, D-Westford. Arciero has sponsored identically named bills in past legislative sessions. State regulations currently prohibit funeral homes from engaging in any business other than operating a funeral home, including running a crematory, but Arciero’s bill would change that.
Proposed changes to the law about who may operate crematoriums have previously been supported by lobbyists for the Massachusetts Funeral Directors Association. Similarly, it has been opposed in the past by the Massachusetts Cemetery Association. Cemetery corporations have a monopoly on the practice under state law, but due to federal tax code regulations, cannot operate a funeral establishment if they are organized as a nonprofit corporation.
During the current legislative session, lobbyists representing the Massachusetts Funeral Directors Association, Massachusetts Cemetery Association, and the Proprietors of Mount Auburn Cemetery have all registered a neutral “observe” position on the bill.
Asked about the bill, Margret Nolan, the president of the Massachusetts Funeral Directors Association, said that her organization is in support of the bill.
Cremation has become a hot business, having become the United States’ most common method of disposition about 10 years ago. Its use has been increasing since.
Amid all of the changes in the death care industry, several industry groups have begun spending more money lobbying state lawmakers in Massachusetts in recent years.
In 2021, the Massachusetts Funeral Directors Association doubled its lobbying budget compared to the previous five years. Previously, it had spent $14,000 per year on lobbying activities, an amount similar to the Massachusetts Cemetery Association’s $12,000 per year.
The following year, The Proprietors of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Watertown paid lobbying firm Tremont Strategies Group $54,750, according to state disclosure reports. By 2024, the total amount spent on lobbying activities by clients involved with either side of the death care industry was approximately the same as had been spent by the death care interests from 2015 to 2021 combined, according to The Shoestring’s analysis of state lobbying data.
The Proprietors of Mount Auburn, a tax-exempt cemetery corporation, said in a statement that it engages a lobbyist “to help educate policymakers about our multifaceted and evolving role as an active cemetery, a historic and cultural resource, and a public greenspace.”
“Under new leadership and as part of our vision planning in recent years, these efforts reflect a proactive commitment to connecting with decision-makers on matters that affect our work and community impact,” the statement said.
Nolan, the president of the Massachusetts Funeral Directors Association, told The Shoestring that their “increased spending was not due to any special push,” but because the organization was transitioning to using an outside lobbying firm, rather than Nolan herself doing the lobbying work.
Martel, the Milestone CEO, likened the integration of crematoria and funeral homes to “pure vertical integration,” but said it also means “the decedent never leaves the care of the individual that’s been contracted by the family.”
“While there are wonderful [crematorium] operators in the state of Massachusetts, most states allow funeral homes to own crematories, and most of the time, that is a very favorable outcome for the client families,” he said. “So having experienced both, yeah, I would rather own our own crematory.”
Nolan expressed similar thoughts when asked about a bill introduced by State Sen. Jacob Oliveira, which would legalize “natural organic reduction” — a method of disposition for those wanting a more environmentally friendly alternative. A company called Earth Funeral, which spent $23,000 on lobbying this year, describes the process on their website as something like expedited hot-composting, carried out in a coffin sized bioreactor.
“The Massachusetts Funeral Directors Association really feel they’re the ones that would be best to handle the body in that condition,” Ward said. “The bill, as it’s written, gives the nod to the cemeteries, but the details haven’t been worked out yet.”
“The funeral directors association feels strongly that it should be regulated within funeral homes,” Nolan said.
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For those who work in end-of-life care, it’s important to candidly communicate with loved ones before they die.
“The mistake is that nobody’s talked with grandpa about what he wants,” Ward said. “They’re all being polite or shy or don’t want to bring the subject up at all because it’s too awkward.”
That’s particularly important if consolidation brings fewer options, and higher prices, to the region, some said.
“We don’t educate ourselves about what happens after a person dies until we need to know,” said Stander, the Northeast Death Care Collaborative founder. And because families aren’t always prepared, she said they can end up facing more expensive funerals as they’re grieving and having to make quick decisions. “You pick one out of the hat and it may be the most expensive one, it may be the more reasonable one.”
As for Adelson, she said she experienced deaths throughout her life, making it a less taboo topic for her. Her father died at a young age, for example, and her cousin was on the local cemetery committee. She said she used to tell her husband, “If I die first just get someone to dig a hole and put me in it.”
Because of those early conversations, Adelson was able to plan financially for her husband’s eventual death.
“If my husband and I didn’t have that death account, I don’t know who would have paid,” she said.
Shoestring investigative editor Dusty Christensen contributed reporting to this article.
Jonathan Gerhardson is a journalist in western Massachusetts.
Email: jon.gerhardson@proton.me
