The following information was taken (not always verbatim) from Caring for the Dead: Your Final Act of Love, by Lisa Carlson, former executive director of the Funeral Consumer's Alliance. An excellent resource book in funeral law for the consumer, it includes pertinent laws from all fifty states and the District of Columbia. It is available for $29.95 (plus $5.00 shipping/handling) from Upper Access Books, PO Box 457, Hinesburg, VT 05461. To order a copy visit www.funerals.org/bookstore/index.htm

No states have laws regarding the kind of container in which you can or can not be buried.

By federal law, the funeral home must accept a casket of your choice, regardless of where it's purchased.

If you want to use a family built casket or purchase one elsewhere, it is illegal for a funeral home to charge a handling fee for your doing so. Occasionally, a funeral home will state that the casket must be "deemed suitable" by the funeral director. This is manipulative and illegal because the funeral director may not refuse your choice of a casket.

Seven states -- Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Virginia -- permit only a funeral director to sell caskets. However, The Federal Trade Commission's Funeral Rule says customers in those states may order a casket or coffin shipped in from another state, and a mortuary may not refuse it or charge a fee for handling it.

No amount of embalming or any casket (even sealed ones) will preserve a body in a life-like condition forever. Furthermore, a funeral provider may not lie about state laws or claim that embalming or caskets preserve the body.

Regardless of how well sealed a coffin may be, decomposition is to be expected, even when a body is embalmed. The rubber gasket on a so-called protective (or sealer) casket adds about $8.00 to the cost of making the casket. But, it may add $800.00 to the price paid by the consumer.

Protective caskets will not stop the decomposition of the body. Instead of the natural dehydration that occurs in an unsealed casket, the body will putrefy in the anaerobic environment of a sealed casket.

No state law requires a coffin vault or grave liner, but a cemetery's policies may.

A grave liner is usually assembled at the grave-site from several pieces. It costs about half the amount of a coffin vault and serves the same purpose -- to prevent the grave from settling. Neither coffin vaults or grave liners have any significant effect on body preservation.