Not a Good Look: “Dysfunctional Death Care System” becoming an issue in Chicago mayor’s race

October 9, 2026/Cremation, Regulations/

In August of this past summer (2026) 56 decomposed bodies were found improperly stored in a funeral home in Chicago. It’s not the first time or the first place something like this has happened, but when cases like this hit the news it does paint the Death Care profession in a bad light with a broad brush.

Funeral Director Daily, for the most part, does not make our daily article about one of these instances as we like to purpose ourselves at helping funeral homes, cemeteries, and their employees and owners with practical business advice and trends to help them move our profession forward in what we can do for the consumer public.

However, just last week I noticed that ABC News out of Chicago aired a new short segment titled “Death Care Dysfunction” which brought up this incident and also gave a platform for current State Controller and current Chicago Mayoral candidate Susana Mendoza to propose reforms to the current system. You can view the 3-minute news story below.

Mendoza stresses in her interview that regulations are not unified in Illinois and that funeral directors are regulated by the Department of Financial and Professional Regulation and crematories are regulated by the Illinois Office of the Comptroller. The news story infers that that that “split oversight” must change because a “bad actor” in one system can still be licensed in the other.

In further research I also uncovered that Illinois will have a law taking effect in January that grants the Comptroller more power over crematories. However, there does not seem to be anything currently happening to combine the regulatory agencies.

Tom Anderson
Funeral Director Daily

Funeral Director Daily take: It saddens me every time I see news of this type — that paints funeral homes and funeral directors in a bad light. It hurts because I know that these are isolated cases and that almost all funeral homes and funeral directors I know bend over backwards to avoid situations that could end up like this.

And, it is this “broad brush” theory that gets to all of us.

To be fair, an Illinois funeral director is interviewed in the news story and does indicate that it is a miniscule percentage of funeral homes that have these problems. He does point out that some of these “held” cases stem from a period of time after the funeral home has taken custody of the body and then the family is “dysfunctional” in their responses to how or who might pay for the services or disagree on how they want the services handled. He points out that when those cases happen, Illinois law has no recourse for the funeral home to give the body back to the coroner or place of death.

I sympathize with that situation. Many times in my 45 years of funeral director licensure I’ve been asked “What is the biggest change that I have seen in my career?” I usually answer with this response “The family dynamics of the bereaved we are working with.”

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