The Grief Economy
Capitalism, Mourning, and Why Closure is a Myth by Kaelib Reece
Sydney’s funeral industry used to be a battlefield. Two American-owned giants circling like vultures over a patchwork of family-run homes. They came with glossy pamphlets and international branding. They swallowed up independents one by one, replacing soul with slogans and grief with revenue streams.
I worked for one of the last holdouts. Australian-owned. Modest. Ethical, mostly. No commissions. No corporate creep. No pressure to sell weeping families things they didn’t need. My boss, a blunt man with a soft edge he rarely showed, told me on my first day: Don’t upsell. If they want the shiny walnut casket, fine. But tell them the MDF one is just as strong. Tell them they don’t need gold handles or white doves. Tell them the dead don’t care.
He also told me, and this stuck: Never say "my condolences." It’s insincere. You didn’t know them. You never really will. Don’t perform grief. Don’t act like you understand. You’re not there to mourn. You’re there to guide.
And so I learned. You don’t offer comfort by pretending you're part of it. You offer it by being steady. Kind. Quiet. Informed. That’s enough. It should be.
And it was. I offered it the day I held a mother’s hand while we zipped her son into a body bag. I offered it when I dressed a stillborn baby girl in a crocheted blanket stitched by nuns, laid her gently in a casket the size of a shoebox, then stepped back into the corridor and vomited in silence. I offered it when a man refused to collect his brother’s ashes, saying, "He got what he deserved." I offered it again when another man sat in that same chair a week later, tears leaking from somewhere deep, asking if he could just hold the urn for a while before deciding what to do.
And I offered it again for a boy named Thomas. Just twenty-two. Overdosed in Phnom Penh the same night a bomb went off in Indonesia. It took every ounce of negotiation I had to get his body home. DFAT was slow to act. The explosion made headlines. His death did not.
When he finally arrived, the embalming was poor. The heat had taken its toll. His face was swollen and bruised, the skin darkened to a purple that didn’t look like sleep. But his mother wanted to see him. She needed to. She sat with him for a long time, her hand resting lightly on his. I stayed beside her. Not as a friend, not as family, but as someone willing to stay in the room.
Later, I chased the Vietnamese authorities for months to retrieve his belongings. Four months after the burial, I knocked on her door in Rushcutters Bay and handed her a box. She led me to her sitting room and opened it slowly. She lifted out each item with care, but it was the camera she clung to. She did not let it go once she had it in her hands.
A few months later, she emailed me. Attached were the final photos on that camera. The last images of her son alive. Standing in the light. Grinning. Half-drunk. Whole. She wanted me to see him. Not the boy we buried. Not the puffed eyes and bloated cheeks. The son she remembered. The one they never got to bring home alive.
And none of that cost her extra.
There was no invoice for the hours spent on the phone with DFAT. No surcharge for managing a body in that condition. No after-hours fee to sit beside her while she said goodbye. No admin charge for chasing the foreign consulate to release a camera. No delivery fee to return the box, by hand, to her door.
Because good funeral homes don’t bill you for basic humanity.
They don’t monetise grief’s aftermath. They don’t convert compassion into a product. They simply show up. And they stay.
But the industry at large is built differently. It’s built to extract. It’s built to turn every interaction into income.
I remember when my own parents bought interment plots at a cemetery in Western Sydney, owned by the same company that manages Rookwood. Years later, I asked if I could transfer their plots. Move them from one site to the other. Same company. Same service. Same ground. Just different dirt. And still, they charged. There was a fee to move ashes from one patch of grass to another, owned by the same people, maintained by the same staff, managed under the same banner. A fee for the paperwork. A fee for the transfer. A fee for the privilege of asking. For now my mothers ashes sit on the mantle of our family home, waiting for my dad to join her.
Of course there was a fee. It’s the funeral industry. There is always a fee. There is always a way to turn ritual into revenue. Even if you never use the plots. Even if no stone ever gets laid. You still pay for the idea of rest.
And make no mistake. It’s not just the idea of rest they’ve commodified. It’s the entire infrastructure of death.
The Australian funeral industry is still dominated by American corporate interests. InvoCare, the largest funeral operator in the country, owns hundreds of funeral homes, cemeteries, and crematoria. Their brands are everywhere: White Lady Funerals, Simplicity Funerals, Guardian, Le Pine. What once felt local is now centralised. And as of 2023, InvoCare is no longer Australian. It was bought by TPG Capital, a US private equity firm based in Texas and California. The biggest decisions about how Australians are laid to rest are now made in American boardrooms.
Their main competitor, Propel Funeral Partners, is based in Sydney but publicly listed. Its loyalty lies with shareholders. Not with the families they claim to serve. Over 130 smaller, family-owned funeral homes have been acquired by them since 2012. The language stays familiar — same chapel names, same signage — but the spirit is gone.
These companies don’t just run funeral homes. They own crematoria. They own cemeteries. They control coffins, florists, urn supply chains, embalming chemicals. This is vertical integration of death, and most people never see it. You think you’re dealing with a local chapel. You’re not. You’re dealing with a brand. A holding. A quietly efficient machine that turns loss into dividends.
You should know that.
You should know that when you bury your mother at a cemetery in Rookwood or Northern Suburbs, chances are you are funding foreign shareholders. You should know that when a funeral director offers you a “value package,” it was probably designed by a strategist in another hemisphere. You should know that the same company handling your father’s cremation is also tracking key performance indicators for upsell conversion rates.
Most Australians don’t know the funeral industry is barely regulated. State by state, the rules shift. There are no national standards for pricing. No watchdog with teeth. Anyone can start a funeral company. There are no qualifications required to handle the dead. No consumer protections that mean anything when you are sleep-deprived, shell-shocked, and holding your mother’s jewellery in a ziplock bag.
This is the grief economy. A multi-billion-dollar system designed not to support the grieving, but to manage them. Shape them. Milk them. And keep them from asking too many questions.
Even companies like Bare, who promise to disrupt the system, are entering a space already soaked with exploitation. I see their ads. I like the simplicity. The promise of honesty. The stripping back. But I worry. Death without ceremony is fast. It is efficient. It is cost-effective. But it can also be lonely.
A good funeral doesn’t need bells and whistles. But it does need presence. It needs people who will not flinch. People who will not vanish after the last flower is thrown. People who understand the awkwardness of mourning that refuses to follow a script.
I remember a man who placed a single cigarette on his brother’s coffin and muttered, "You still owe me twenty bucks, dickhead." I remember a woman who played Common People by Pulp and danced alone in front of her wife’s urn. I remember a daughter who broke down reading a eulogy that was half rage, half love, all truth. None of it fit in a package. All of it mattered.
I no longer work in funerals. But funerals still work in me. They linger. They interrupt. They rise up in the smell of roses and disinfectant. They remind me that death is not the end of love, only the start of a different burden.
So I say this to the living: You do not owe anyone closure. You do not need to sanitise your sorrow. You do not need the expensive coffin to prove you cared. You do not have to make your grief look good on paper.
You just have to survive it. And if you can, remember truthfully.
Because the real economy of grief is not in dollars. It’s in memory. It’s in ritual. It’s in resistance.
And that — finally — is something they cannot sell you.