Sam Adams Alliance

By Rachel Stewart

Death, as Helen Williams knows all too well, is an expensive proposition. Since 2006,when a grandson’s friend was killed in a drive-by shooting, she has helped more than 1,000 families in her low-income neighborhood of Minneapolis provide dignified funerals for their loved ones. Death by violence is not uncommon here, and many of these families do not carry life insurance. So Williams has pitched in wherever she can, arranging, for example, for donated caskets and burial plots.

She’s a newcomer to courtrooms and legislative chambers, though that is where her work now leads her. She is a plaintiff with Verlin Stoll, a local undertaker, in a suit challenging a Minnesota law that requires all new funeral homes to be equipped with embalming rooms.

Stoll, whose Crescent Tide company provides affordable funerals, wants to build a second funeral home. Another embalming room would cost a prohibitive $30,000, and Stoll wouldn’t use the second room, anyway. Funeral directors routinely out-source the service which isn’t required by law. Judaism, Islam and Hinduism either prohibit or discourage it.

Williams, who has relied on Stoll for burials, fears that compliance with the law will require him to raise his rates. He now charges $750 for a burial and graveside service—competitors charge $5,000 and more—and Williams wants to make sure the families she works with have an affordable alternative.

The Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm, is helping Williams and Stoll challenge the law.  They, along with the Funeral Consumers Alliance of Minnesota, filed a complaint on January 19, alleging that Minnesota state law arbitrarily violates the rights of consumers “by driving up the cost of funeral services without any legitimate public purpose.” The case is currently pending.

Quiet Agitation

Williams has also agitated in her quiet and dignified way for clarification of a state law that implies that only funeral directors can sell coffins and other “funeral goods.” This in itself discourages families from less costly options, such as buying them online. “The most important part of a funeral,” she notes, “is the coffin.”

Williams, it should be noted, won’t get a cut of what anybody she works with charges. She’s a volunteer, which makes her involvement all the more admirable. “Perhaps it’s not the happiest honor, and it’s certainly not the most lucrative activity,” she says of her work. “But it has become part of who I am.”

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