And in the midst of this grief, and probably exhaustion, they got to plan their child’s funeral, which is usually done with the funeral director. Funerals are a business, the person taking you through the planning process is a salesman (albeit usually a lowkey, sympathic salesman) and the planning stage is all designed to make you spend more. For example, the room you walk through to choose the casket doesn’t include the cheap cardboard/plywood option, but is filled with beautiful, multi-thousand dollar choices so you give your loved one an appropriately lavish sendoff . Someone told me last week that it now costs $10,000 for embalming – I hope that’s not true, but this is an industry with a good lobby. A cold funeral director could easily guilt a family into spending a lot more than seems reasonable – most people have little experience with funeral planning or resisting good salesmanship.
That a funeral home would do this to the parents of a young child is absolutely mind-boggling to me; one of my favorite YouTubers is a funeral director who does many of her facility’s services pro bono, or even at cost, for children. However, I see elsewhere that they were of Vietnamese descent, and I could totally see an unscrupulous facility taking advantage of that.
A lot of the costs are not controlled by the funeral director- the director can donate his or her services , and even the space for a wake or service but they aren’t going to cover other costs . Depending on which cemetery, a plot in my area will be somewhere between $5000 and $20,000. Just for the plot - there are other costs involved. And in this case , they flew people in for the funeral- how many and from where isn’t known. The family may have been extravagant - but they may not have been taken advantage of.
And that is something I totally left out of my mental calculations! Yes, I paid for the funerals of two relatives in the past decade BUT they were both cremated, so no cemetary expenses. That itself accounts for a huge chunk of what they spent, I expect.
Ditto on this.
Its easy to get into a mind set that equates the arrangements at the funeral to the love one felt for the person. If you loved your child more than anything wouldn’t you pay for there to be a violinist? I mean what’s $500 as compared to what Timmy meant. If you say no doesn’t that mean you really didn’t love Timmy as much as you could have…
Objectively this is a highly misguided view point, that leads no where good, but I can’t blame someone for falling into that trap any more than I can blame someone with PTSD for being afraid to leave the house.
Those two things don’t necessarily go together.
I recently cremated two relatives. And had both urns places in niches in the church’s “memorial garden” / urban style cemetary. Those niches in that wall of niches are not free.
If you brought grandma’s ashes home and left them in an urn on your mantle, or distributed them to family, that’d be no- or low-cost. But stuffing them into a niche in a dedicated storage facility costs money.
Not so much as a full body burial plot, but the cost of those things vary too: $0 on the family farm, $lots in overcrowded NYC.
I was appalled how much we paid to get my mom cremated. We had them use the “reinforced cardboard box” to hold the body going into the oven, and when I picked up the ashes (which we scattered on private land, for no cost) they gave me a large cardboard box containing a sturdy plastic bag of ashes, all held in a surprisingly nice tote bag. We went the low-cost route. But it was still a few grand.
I paid IIRC $1200 to cremate each body & deliver the ashes in some basic container to the church for the interment ceremony. The niches at the church were a couple grand each. The ceremony, flowers, musician, “honorarium” to the preacher, etc., came to another couple grand each. So bottom line all in, somewhere a bit above $5K each. In an expensive area of an expensive state.
I did not feel the cost unwarranted for the results obtained.
Columbarium. Another one of those pieces of useless knowledge stuck in my head.
I hesitate to ask, and I’m not trying to be insensitive, but… Did you keep the bag? I don’t think I could, no matter how nice it is. It would be too painful and weird. But still, I’m curious.
That’s a sick question! I was wondering too.
Agreed. Great word.
I just like the imagery of it being a high-rise condo for dead people compressed into little urns.
Yeah, but, that cold funeral director can estimate the family worth; why would he set up a bunch of services that couldn’t be paid for? “You want doves? I got a guy who will release doves, who gives me a kickback for recommending him.” Yeah, but “your guy” ain’t gonna kick back anything if he keeps not getting paid.
Someone needs to pitch that to Tim Burton. We’ll have the next stop motion animated blockbuster film in the works.
Because he too has heard about GoFundMe? 
Or because he can set up a payment plan with a 25% interest rate & make a bigber profit if it’s never paid off? Or they put the balance on a credit card so he gets paid for sure. Or he knows that people who don’t appear to have any money can often find it when they need to? Your question is interesting, but people buying funerals they can’t afford is fairly common so there must be a way because the funeral homes I’m familiar have been successful for a long time.
The Corpse Housewife
The protagonist would be a goth ghost with a heart of gold and an angelic singing voice named Ashley.
There was a local charity in my area for a while called Kennedi’s Kisses, which would reimburse families for children’s funeral expenses if they did not have life insurance (most don’t, for their children anyway). Most of them were for babies, but they would pay up to age 17 years 364 days. It was founded by a family who had donated money left over from “memorials made to the family” after they lost their own child, Kennedi, to SIDS, and couldn’t in good conscience spend it on themselves. The family would have to pay for the funeral, and then apply for reimbursement, and IIRC, Kennedi’s parents decided to dissolve the charity when they relocated.
I did refer two people to them, when they posted GFMs for lost children on their own Facebook page. Don’t know if they followed through.
I tried to give it to two friends (without telling them what it was) and both returned it. Yes, i still have it. I even used it once without trying to rid myself of it.
Our church has an alcove with one, and it’s beautiful.
But the real reason for it is that it’s so much cheaper: no plot, no coffin, not even an urn. Gramps just gets poured into a tiny file cabinet drawer. With a matte finish marble faceplate with the name carved, in Goudy Oldstyle, yet…
(I’ve told the pastor that when I go, I want a metal drawer pull attached to mine, so it looks like an old card catalog drawer… maybe labeled “Withdrawn From Circulation”)
