STEVE NICELY
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Steve Nicely spent his working years as a journalist, writing about the doings of Kansas City area people who were very much alive. And he's a funny, loves-to-laugh man who takes chances, welcomes change, and immerses himself in life.
But he also has more than an ordinary familiarity with death—and his comfort with death has caused him to become an advocate for the rest of us. As we work out the fine points of an elder's passing or plan for our own, we have resources and knowledge available because of the efforts of Nicely and his colleagues with the Funeral Consumers Alliance.
We talked to Nicely, 74, of Mission, during a walk through Resurrection Catholic Cemetery in Lenexa and then at the Porter Funeral Home across the way.
Sum up your youth for us.
I was born in Topeka, Kan. My dad worked for the State of Kansas as a Social Security tax auditor and Mom was secretary for the archbishop of the Kansas City Kansas Diocese of the Catholic Church. I was one of six children.
When I was 7, we moved to Kansas City, Kan. It was an older community, and we had an old house at 16th and Armstrong. The neighborhood was filled with people of all ages and nationalities: Serbs, Croats, Poles. In some ways I assumed their ethnic identity.
After high school I spent two years at Donnelly Community College and one year at St. Thomas Seminary in Denver before transferring to Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wis. I didn't have a stellar grade point average, but some nuns who knew me were friends of the Journalism School dean at Marquette; they wrote him a letter and somehow I got in.
Adulthood came early for you, with military service and marriage.
At Marquette I had my first date with Marcia Donovan, a liberal arts major, on St. Patrick's Day in 1961. We were engaged one month later, graduated two months later, and married five months later. The draft forced the issue of getting married.
I was in the Navy from 1961 to 1965, and Marcia and I more or less grew up together in the Navy. We were in Pensacola, Fla.; Corpus Christi, Texas; and Oahu, Hawaii. I navigated four-engine Super Constellations on the Pacific Barrier. Our two oldest sons were born at Tripler Army Hospital. It was wonderful peacetime duty.
The Kansas City Star claimed most of your career.
I held a variety of jobs at The Star, including automotive editor, assistant city editor, editorial promotions director, TV and radio editor and columnist, real estate editor, and general-interest columnist.
I guess I was brash enough to ask questions most people won't ask. But I had little talent or patience as a manager (I learned that you can't apply military leadership principles in a newsroom) and sometimes I was difficult to manage. I spent my last 11 years at the newspaper in its Wyandotte County bureau—some would say in exile—covering life in the metro's most economically challenged area. It was my privilege to cover the county's renaissance, beginning with a grass-roots campaign launched by two fed-up political outsiders to consolidate city and county governments.
I loved being a journalist, and I would do it all over again. Sometimes the life of a journalist is terribly boring or stressful, but it's always a learning experience.
And when you quit, you quit!
Thirty-six years after I started at The Star, I was offered a buyout and retired. It took me about 10 minutes to adjust to it. I would do the job again, but it was time for me to go. Every year or so, I get together with the Wyandotte County reformers for a "smoke, drink, and cuss" session.
Marcia was vice president of the Family Conservancy when I retired. She decided to retire one morning a few weeks later as she was getting ready for work and noticed I was back in bed with a cup of coffee reading Harry Potter.
Family means the world to you.
Deprived of daughters, we have three daughters-in-law, two granddaughters, and five grandsons, all within an hour of here. How lucky is that! We have a son who just celebrated 10 years of sobriety, another who survived cancer, and another who bombed out of two state universities but now is a school superintendent with a doctorate in education.
Let's talk about where your contact with death began.
One of my best jobs during high school and at Donnelly was working for Porter's Funeral Home at 19th and Minnesota in Kansas City, Kan. I was a chauffeur and doorman and did odd jobs. I also worked at a service station across from Porter's, and did some maintenance on their cars, great old 1950s Cadillacs. I got to know the Porters well; they were good people.
At the funeral home I would go into the "preparation room" to get cleaning supplies, so I saw all types of bodies. I saw blood, embalming, and autopsies. I helped move some large bodies when extra help was needed.
One day at Porter's I came upon the body of a beautiful young woman about my age. Seeing her stopped me in my tracks. She was dressed in a slip, all made up, and she just looked like she was sleeping, like Snow White, like maybe if I kissed her she would wake up.
In some ways, I trace my career in journalism to her because I wrote a story about the mystery of her death for an English assignment at Donnelly. The instructor read it aloud in class and afterward suggested I could be a writer. It sounded good to me.
How did you get involved with the Funeral Consumers Alliance of Greater Kansas City?
The Greater Kansas City chapter of the Funeral Consumers Alliance has been around for 50 years, about as long as the national organization has been around. Bev McGill, who was active in the alliance for years and was its president, was our neighbor. She and I used to take walks together, and she was relentless about getting me involved. "Just do the newsletter!" she would say. So I agreed to edit that newsletter, and now I'm president of the board, whereas Bev just attended her last board meeting!
We are one of about 90 affiliated organizations in the U.S. functioning as a consumers union for people dealing with the funeral industry. On the Web site, funeralskc.org, people can compare prices of nearly all funeral homes and most cemeteries in the metro area. The all-volunteer board collects the information, publishes and posts it, and conducts presentations for civic groups and others.
We think a $14,000 slot in the wall of a mausoleum is fine if someone wants and can afford it, but we think even those people should be informed about alternatives. And many people can't afford a $15,000 funeral, which is the average cost these days. All we're about is pointing out how people can save costs. People don't shop for funerals, though they shop for everything else.
We're also about raising awareness that there are many ways for people to make a funeral more personal, more in line with their own wishes and philosophies.
In what ways has your thinking about death expanded through the FCA?
Through the alliance I learned about "green" burial, or "natural" burial— a favorite topic in our newsletter.
Natural burial means no embalming, no metal casket, no concrete grave liner. It's the way we all were buried until relatively recently in Western culture. It's a natural "dust-to-dust, earth-to-earth" process. When in contact with the earth, the body decomposes into compost, feeds vegetation, and rejoins the cycle of life.
I naively thought we could spread the word about natural burial and then cemeteries would dedicate sections for it, but it hasn't worked out that way. It turns out that there is a large amount of cultural, economic, and mental inertia to overcome.
The subject gets a significant amount of media exposure, but the demand is not yet sufficient to overcome the funeral industry's resistance. The funeral industry is profit-oriented and so are most cemeteries. There's a lot of profit in caskets, vaults, and grave liners.
And natural burial can be more trouble for cemeteries. If you bury a body in a wooden box, a cardboard box, a wicker basket, or a shroud, you fill the hole with dirt and you have a mound on the surface. For awhile, that's difficult to mow. As the earth slowly settles, a depression may develop that has to be filled in with more dirt. All that makes maintenance more time-consuming.
A lot of cemeteries now are owned by funeral homes—so if the idea of natural burial doesn't suit a funeral home, then natural burial won't happen in that cemetery.
Until very recently, Lawrence's Oak Hill Cemetery was the only one in the region to offer natural burials. Now natural burial also is available at Mount Muncie Cemetery in Lansing, Kan.
Some cemeteries offer "semi-green" burials. The shrouded body is placed in the grave. The lid is taken off a concrete grave liner, turned upside down, and lowered over the body to stabilize the surface of the ground. At least the body is in contact with the earth, and it can decompose more quickly and naturally.
Green cemetery proponents say the cemeteries preserve land in its natural setting.
Cemeteries dedicated to natural burial can be used by the living as well as the dead. Think of walking and running trails through forests or fields of prairie grass. Think of retreats from civilization, parks, gaming fields. Why not? I don't think the dead will object very much.
Where does Kansas stand?
Kansas does not require embalming, caskets, or vaults. In fact, Kansas does not require the use of funeral homes or burial in a cemetery if you live on acreage. It's the way of all our ancestors, when the body was washed, dressed, and laid out in the parlor, then buried in the back 40.
That would take a lot of planning to arrange, but it can still be done. I would recommend finding a cooperative funeral director to assist with paperwork, logistics, and other practicalities.
What are the greatest benefits for an individual who chooses a green burial?
Some will say saving Mother Earth from the contamination of concrete vaults, steel caskets, and caustic embalming fluids is the greatest benefit, not to mention the chemicals and fuel emissions involved in perpetual cemetery lawn care. Others will say there is something spiritual about the cycle of life on this planet. They like the idea of rejoining that cycle as soon as possible after death.
What are the causes of consumer resistance to natural burial?
The tradition before the Civil War was natural burial. But during the war, young men died on battle fields far from home and families wanted the bodies back, so the practice of embalming began.
Another turning point was Abraham Lincoln's assassination. His body was placed on a train and carried around the country so citizens could bid the president farewell. While on the train, his body was repeatedly re-embalmed.
After that, the practice of preserving bodies to postpone the course of nature became common. I think it's related to our culture's emphasis on youth and beauty, and a general denial of the inevitability of death and its own kind of beauty.
You can't change the culture overnight, but it is changing. There are now 33 natural burial cemeteries in the nation, and other options are available. If you study the funeral home survey from the Funeral Consumers Alliance, look for cemeteries that don't require a vault. My wife and I will be buried one day at Holy Angels Cemetery in south Leavenworth County, which doesn't require vaults.
You've written about the deaths of close friends.
Yes, and being present during their final days confirmed for me that death is natural. Death is a time when feelings about spirituality become more acute, and faith manifests. I believe that we're going to go on living in some form.
I think that more than death, it's the dying process that unnerves us. If we have witnessed someone's last days, we may have noticed that dying often is not exactly a pleasurable happening. Often, it's downright brutal.
How brutal was brought home by the deaths of two close friends in three years. One was the youngest, strongest, and healthiest of our group of close friends. She was diagnosed with a particularly virulent form of breast cancer at 59. The other was the eldest of the group, at 75, who had several major surgeries for heart disease and cancer before death finally took him.
A lot of extended praying goes on at times like that. The time comes when you stop praying for restored health and start praying for death. Such is the suffering involved.
So Marcia and I remain apprehensive about our deaths. We know our turn is coming. We realize it is in our best interest to prepare ourselves if we can. We don't wake up in the morning and say, "Today let's prepare for death," although I'm surprised Marcia hasn't suggested it. She's such the planner.
You seem to live in the present moment.
We've got a beautiful home, basic financial independence, the game of golf, time to play and pray and work. Time is one of the greatest gifts of retirement, especially that 60 to 90 minutes first thing in the morning with a glass of juice and a cup of coffee. We spend it with such luminaries as Oscar Romero, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, Diarmuid O'Murchu, Houston Smith, the Buddha, Ronald Rolheiser, Ed Hayes, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul. I've actually read the Old Testament, the whole thing. What a luxury that time is, especially the 15 or 20 minutes of silence before finally ringing the bell and blowing out the candle.
We've also got our faith. Why shouldn't we? It should be easy to have faith when everything is going our way. But there was a time years ago when my faith was tested, when our son, Chris, was battling cancer. It seemed forever, the time he spent in chemotherapy treatments for the stage 2 Hodgkin's tumors in his chest. Finally he had exploratory surgery to determine the results. He got a good report and we were all relieved.
Then, wham, he was back in the hospital with a partial paralysis of his legs. I visualized the demonic cause as cancer invading his lower spine. I became enraged. I began banging on heaven's door. Actually I was in my car, a pale yellow Cadillac about as big as my ego, its 425-cubic-inch engine powering through the night with me banging on the dashboard, demanding to be heard, praying a prayer of rage.
Then, to my shocked surprise, I was heard. I felt a presence in the car with me such as I had never felt before. It was so intense, so powerful, that I wouldn't have been surprised if the Cadillac had lifted off in flight. It was the presence of God, always present anyway, but now intensified so there could be no doubt.
No words were spoken, but there was no doubting the message: "Just calm down. I am here with you and I know about Chris." Chris recovered and hasn't had a problem since. Now he runs marathons.
How do we reconcile our good fortune with the fates of all those people on the obituary page every day? We don't. We can't. We can only express gratitude for our charmed lives. We know our death notices will appear sooner or later.
Meanwhile we continue the journey and pray for the grace to handle what lies ahead. We take comfort in the wisdom of mystics down through the ages. They have made us more aware of the unity of creation, and the uniqueness of life on this planet.
Sometimes I joke that the woes of the environment, of the economy, and of war are all God's fault. God made us this stupid. We just don't know any better. So I pray for the environment in terms of the need for a rapid evolutionary leap of human awareness on a scale that would give us the collective vision to see what needs to be done.
Today we have signs that the means for such an evolutionary leap are more and more available. Information technology is shrinking the size of our world, making us more aware of each other, and science now controls human evolution. But it won't be God who suddenly makes everything right. God doesn't operate that way. It still will be up to us.
Placed in that context, the pending earthly departure of two happy souls tucked in Johnson County seems rather insignificant, doesn't it?
You are a lively man, but you're realistic.
I hope so. Ten years into our retirement, one thing cannot be denied. Marcia and I have arrived at the autumn of our lives. Maybe it's early autumn, maybe late. We don't know. We have stepped up the pace of our health practices in hopes of extending our time in this mode of existence.
We sometimes joke about which one will depart first, and what the survivor will do with the nest egg we have managed to put aside. Recently I told Marcia not to expect me to wait a year after her departure before I start dating. She, on the other hand, warns me not to expect her to lead a frugal lifestyle if she wins the longevity contest. She intends to spend all of our money any way she sees fit.
The joking is an oblique way of addressing the real issue. Both of us know the exaggerations ring untrue. Yet we know this cataclysmic personal event is coming. What we are really saying, with smiles on our faces, is that when one of us is laid low by death, the other will be laid low by the loss.
Getting involved with the Funeral Consumers Alliance
Funeral Consumers Alliance of Greater Kansas City
PO Box 7021
Kansas City, MO 64113
Phone: 816-561-6322
E-mail: fca.gkc@gmail.com
Web: www.funeralskc.org
- The alliance is looking for volunteers to help with the 2012 edition of the area's funeral price survey and other projects. Offer your help through the above contact routes.
- To receive the alliance newsletter electronically, send an e-mail address—or a mailing address if you do not use e-mail and desire the newsletter in print.
- The organization charges no dues, but welcomes donations.
