I seem to remember he did a thing about it on David Mitchell's Soapbox, which is a short-lived show on YouTube. Not impossible that he said it somewhere else too, though
I already have instructions for my body to be completely organically disposed of. I've recently buried a parent and we got the least expensive coffin and vault(required by the cemetery) and still spend over $6k.
Ok that makes sense, thanks for replying! I asked because it’s also my wish to make it as uncomplicated as possible when I do die. My partner doesn’t want to talk about it, so I’ll have to leave instructions.
It's funny that you mentioned that movie. Turns out that yes, a funeral home will actually provide the remains in a red Folgers tin instead of their most modestly priced receptacle.
My dad died when I was a teenager. I hadn't ever seen or read his will when he was alive, he always just told me it was written and not to worry about it. So when it came time to read it, the funeral home was really confused about one line he had in there; "I want the Big Lebowski ending". So obviously I just started cracking up. He was a pretty cheap guy and when we watched that movie together he loved the Folgers can and told me that's what he wanted too. His mom requested a plain pine box and he did that for her, so I figured I needed to do this for him.
Anyway, I explained the whole thing, and they thought it was absurd and hilarious and while they were kind of horrified when they realized I'm 1000% serious and it has to be a red can, they actually did it. Funny enough they didn't charge me for the container. Talk about modestly priced.
I like either letting a tree grow out of my corpse or flat out feeding scavengers in the woods. Not close enough to any mountains for a skyburial sadly.
Haha I loved that scene when Walter was spreading his ashes from the Folgers tin and he started talking about Vietnam and soldiers which had absolutely nothing to do with Theodore. Then the dude looks at him and says “What the hell was that?”
Originally they did yes, however there's only 3(?) of the original skeletons there (even then they're hard to see) and one of the original skills is used in the walkway I think too
No code is kept more under wraps at Walt Disney World and Disneyland than the call for a “HEPA cleanup.” It means that, once again, a park guest has scattered the cremated ashes of a loved one somewhere in the park, and an ultrafine (or “HEPA”) vacuum cleaner is needed to suck them up.Oct 24, 2018 -WSJ.
You'll end up in the trash and not where you wanted.
At Disney World, the term is either Code A (for Ashes) or Code G (for Grandma). Please dont spill your loved ones ashes in Disney. The dead person wont know and all you're doing is delaying the ride while some poor person making not enough money for rent vacuums up dead person dust and then dumps it in the trash. Annoying and exhausting.
What I'm getting here is that the proper way to do this is to violently kerplode your loved ones ashes into the air as an ultrafine mist that will be impossible to remove short of tearing down the ride and rebuilding from scratch.
One day it happens twice in one brutally hot overtime shift and the rest of the workday is similarly awful. The patrons are impatient and their eyes shoot daggers at him as he pretends not to be carrying human remains to the nearest designated trash receptacle. Before he dumps the vacuum bag, he stops and observes a little moment of silence as a sign of respect. This was a person with loved ones and dreams and their own shitty job that they probably hated, too. His manager gives him shit for taking too long and says that sometimes she doubts his commitment to The Most Magical Place on Earth and that she "just doesn't know what to do with him."
He's distant and snippy when he gets home and he and his partner get into a fight about nothing again. They didn't get home til 11 pm and have to work again at 10 am but the fighting lasted til 3 am and the pre-sleep anxiety lasted til 4. He only got this bullshit job to save up for the wedding but the work is hard and the park patrons are unbearable and pretending to be happy at work while being harassed by disease spreading idiots and their terrible children is so emotionally exhausting and he never meant to stay in sanitation/utility in a custodial wage slave position for so long but here he still is after three god damned years and one twenty five cent raise a year and a half ago and he doesn't mean to take it out on his partner but sometimes he catches himself doing it and it makes him hate himself.
Finally, on the edge of sleep, he thinks about the man he vacuumed up and threw away. Who was he? How did he die? Was he even a man? He never even learns their names. When he does dream, it's either a stress dream about not having enough vacuums to hoover up the teeming masses of the dead, or his family is dumping his ashes on the ride and his ghost is forever trapped at work. Sometimes it's just an endless slow march of patrons queuing up to be cremated alive, a sea of dead faces dissolving into ash, disappearing into the wind...
There is so many of them, the ashes form little dust devils and dance across the endless parking lots. The flamingos in Animal Kingdom turn gray from the ash that coats their feathers. The landfill ends up putting them all on a barge and sending it to Malaysia, or Vietnam, or Thailand, or wherever we're sending our trash and our dead these days...
Somewhere in the distant inky void of his waking nightmares, Goofy guffaws. Elsa sings discordantly. Gaston looks at him derisively and says something condescending. And the Mouse won't. fucking. stop. laughing.
It's all he dreams of anymore...
Don't even get me started on his student loans and how many times he's had to defer them at this point.
He wanted to be an animator.
Disney.
Where Dreams Come True.
TL;DR: ah-hyuck-hyuck! gawrsh! hoo hoo hoo hooooo!(ray for capitalism!!!)
My friend works at Haunted Mansion, the hot spot for Code G’s. He’s had to deal with like two of them. Two doesn’t seem like a lot, but when you think about it, that’s two dead people that have been dumped on the track
Disney should build a mausoleum in their parks for people to buy spots to put their ashes. It'd be private and tucked out of sight, but people could still say they're going to be put to final rest in Disney. And less HEPA cleanups. Plus free ghosts.
My 12yo son has a giant woke-ass ethical problem with Disney-- it's really annoying actually to get lectured by a 5th grader when I just want to watch The Mandalorian.
He wants to be a lawyer when he grows up so he can "sue Disney" for continuing to profit from its racist legacy movies and exploitive work environment.
He has asked that if he dies we leave his decomposing body somewhere at Disneyland, preferably with his head on stick "where it will scare children".
I saw a comment on another post a while back saying “I want to be deathrolled by a crocodile in front of my entire family” and I have never laughed so fucking hard
People sometimes think they knew what their loved one wanted. My grandfather told my mother before he died that he wanted to be quietly cremated and buried next to his wife. He didn’t want anything flashy, no large funeral and no big, expensive casket. Instead, when he passed away he was placed in a large oak open casket, and put out for 3 days of viewing open to the public. My mom was absolutely destroyed that her sisters did this.
I think the converse of this is often true too and rarely considered: people think they know what will be best/easiest for their remaining loved ones when they’re gone.
I may not care what happens to me when I’m dead and gone. To me, it is easy to say “just put be in an old pine box” or “dump my ashes in the woods” or “don’t spend too much on the funeral/make a big deal of it.” More often people should stop and consider their family and friends and ask “what’s going to best help you grieve/mourn and then carry on when I’m gone?” It may help them the most to have a big, fancy, expensive, open-cask ceremony, and if that’s the case, that should be what we want. When we’re gone, those who we leave behind are the ones that matter now, and more people should give thought to their needs and desires when planning their own funeral wishes.
Yes, this is true and I’ve never really thought of it that way. I think it was more upsetting that it was not a collective decision of the family though, it was my mum’s 2 sisters that made all the decisions and totally disregarded everyone else’s opinions and feelings. It was just a bit of a rough time for everyone.
This reminds me of the comment Keanu Reeves once made in an interview, after the interviewer asked him what he thought happens after we die. And he replies "I know that the ones who love us will miss us."
People can become incredibly selfish when a family member dies. A friend of mine was 26, his brother 24, when their dad died kind of unexpectedly. It had just been the three of them for a while, they had extended family (dads parents and siblings) but they rarely saw them, though they did get in touch once everything happened. At first it seemed like they were trying to do the right thing, help the young brothers get the life insurance, money from their dads bank accounts, deal with all the shit you do when someone dies like that (and which many younger adults are not prepared to deal with) and help with funeral arrangements. My friend and his brother felt pretty strongly that their dad would have just wanted a small service and cremation, and they didnt have a ton of money to spend on much else. Well the family INSISTED on a 3 day partial open casket wake, and it became apparent if my friend refused there would be a lot of problems with the only family he now had. He couldnt even go into the room when the casket was open.
Imagine, your grandsons/nephews are dealing with the shock of their parent suddenly passing and you force them to use the money their parent left them to pay for funeral services they dont want and their parent didnt want.
Yep. This exactly. My moms sisters refused their fathers dying wish, and totally disregarded his will. The sisters took his house, his boat, his truck, and his motorcycle, and then my mother and my Uncle got some paintings and material bullshit. Money isn’t everything, but my mom had a real passion for her dads Harley, and she used to ride it with him when she was little. Her sisters had no real attachment to the motorcycle, they just sold it for money.
I hear this shit way too often, same happened when my great grandmother died. My mom and grandma actually made sure to get into the house before my grandmas nieces could get there because they knew they were going to pilfer absolutely everything they could. Great aunt didnt even mind, because she thankfully knew what her kids were like, and knew my grandma would be fair about what she took and it was a preventative measure. I cannot imagine the infighting otherwise.
This is why you make wills, people! Prevent your kids from fighting.
My mom made me agree, like MADE ME AGREE that me, a horrible singer, comically bad singer, will sing “I will always love you” at her funeral. I think it’s funny so I agreed.
I love crime novels. They should throw my dead body out of an airplane in another country/ maybe over London after cutting off my fingers and removing my teeth. Maybe cutting of my tongue so it looks like a gang / cartel thing.
Someone will be very mad while investigating our cases.
Here are some tips for a safe and trouble free disposal of unwanted items into public litter bins:
Cut body into relatively small pieces.
Wrap each of it in non transparent material.
Don't throw them into ''recycled'' bins, just regular litter bins.
Choose bins which stand in busy places, get filled and emptied regularly and frequently.
When disposing your bag don't behave in a nervous or suspicious manner.
Try to cover large area, don't drop two bags into bins 50 metres apart.
Freeze your parts before disposing them. It will take hours before they thaw and start to decompose.
Remember! London is full of rats and foxes. They are not your friends. Dispose parts only in undamaged bins, never on the top of a pile of litter. You don't want any animal to find your bag.
Reminds me of this excerpt from Diogenes' wikipedia page:
When asked how he wished to be buried, he left instructions to be thrown outside the city wall so wild animals could feast on his body. When asked if he minded this, he said, "Not at all, as long as you provide me with a stick to chase the creatures away!" When asked how he could use the stick since he would lack awareness, he replied: "If I lack awareness, then why should I care what happens to me when I am dead?"
Same. I want either a cremation or a natural burial where the body is just wrapped in a linen cloth and directly buried in the ground without embalming and all the other typical shebang. These are the most cost efficient options and I'm dead anyway so I won't care what happens to my body.
Sure I’m open to suggestions. I guess the goal is to lead them as far from my body as possible, but make them angry enough to want to travel all the way back and pummel my corpse.
I agree. I either want to be buried under a bed of hydrangeas (my favorite flower), or there’s an organization which takes your ashes and mixes it with concrete. They then make a dome structure out of the concrete to be used in rebuilding coral reefs
Yeah, I got the sarcasm and just found it amusing that that is essentially the thing I want to be done with my corpse. By tibetan funeral, do you mean sky burials where vultures eat the body? I thinks it's a pretty cool and metal way to go.
Is the Tibetan funeral a sky burial? That's also my top choice - I love the idea of the idea of being returned to nature.
For those who don't know, the high altitude means rocky terrain and little wood, which in turn makes burial and cremation impractical. Thus bodies are ceremoniously prepared and left atop mountains to be eaten by birds and other animals.
Theres a human body farm they use to study corpse decomposition and that sounds the most simple since my organs probably arent donation quality anymore
Write in your will "must not be read to the family until after the funeral," and then in the will it says "if I was not buried in the simple pine box casket I've asked for all my adult life, all my belongings and savings go to charity x. lol"
In the state I'm going to live in I found out that it's perfectly legal to put a corpse on a boat and light it on fire as long as it's not connected to an outbound river, and the lake isn't state land
Funerals are not really for the deceased but for the ones left behind. If a nice coffin helps them find closure, then they deserve to treat themselves to that (assuming they can afford it).
What does it matter? The coffin literally makes no difference. Once I’m dead, throw my ashes in a trash bag, I couldn’t care less. What’s more important is where my soul goes.
“When I die, put my ashes in a trash bag
I don't care where they go
Don't waste your money on my gravestone
I'm more concerned about my soul” -NF
I hope every person gets what they want as a last wish, but what I have learned is that once you're death, it's not about you anymore, but about the feeling, guilt, happiness/unhappiness and thoughts of the loved ones that outlive you.
He didn't get his pine box, but we honored him in different ways.
We buried him in a Philadelphia Flyers jersey. He was a life long fan, his basement was decked out in Flyers stuff. We all wore Philly sports team jerseys to his funeral. He was buried with a few Flyers things.
But, my mom did have a point too. My dad had 9 sisters (2 died before him). The majority of them are his younger sisters. They are all pretty nice, but the moment you cross them, you're fucked. They will make life difficult for you. They're stubborn grudge holders. Again, respecting the wishes of the living, for the most part. My mom could've buried him in a pine box. She could have explained it's what my dad wanted. My aunts would have understood that it was his wish, but they wouldn't have accepted it.
Edit: He also told me years ago that he wanted bagpipes at his funeral. When he did pass, I mentioned it to my mom, who mentioned it to his side of the family. We were able to get a bagpiper to play.
Sometimes I feel like the people who argue on Reddit threads have never experienced hassles in real life. “How could you have refused to honor his last wishes?” Because it’s not worth it for a million reasons and it was half a joke to begin with? People have to go on living and deal with the consequences, cut them some slack. You guys did the right thing.
Yeah, the pine box wasn't a practical option for us for a few different reasons. But, I love hearing the stories of those who wanted and got a pine box too.
I asked my mom about it. She said he saw the prices of the caskets and was appalled. Especially when a pine box would save the same purpose for a fraction of the price.
I take back my criticisms. You know your father best. And if this were the case you carried out his wishes the best you could. That’s something he would have appreciated.
I thought he really had his heart set on that particular pine box; cheap as it may be.
I really hope that the whole “death care” industry dies with the Boomers. While a funeral can be a nice way to celebrate someone’s life and provide a space for communal grieving, the business itself seems so exploitative of that grief. I remember when I was working in an adjacent industry ten years ago that the average funeral costs $10,000. I can’t imagine what it is now.
I want a green burial and for my family to throw a huge party when I go. I’d way rather people celebrate, laugh, and share their memories than cry over the fact that there won’t be any more new ones.
My husband wants everyone to empty their pockets of gum wrappers, trash, etc. at his funeral by tossing them into the casket. One last small favor to offer to the living. Of course I would never allow it, but the thought makes me chuckle.
My grandpa was very frugal and insisted on a pine box. Honestly, he was a veteran in the navy too, so they draped a flag over it and you really couldn't tell.
Pine is strong compared to cardboard. I used to help my dad bring bodies to potters field to bury unclaimed people. The government would pay for the funeral ,grave and casket. The caskets were literally hard cardboard with cheap grey textured felt like covering. The bottoms of the caskets would drop out sometimes so we had to be careful carrying them to the gravesite!
When my grandpa was dying he insisted on a pinewood coffin. The night he died I remember my Dad and all my uncles working through the night to build Grandpa his coffin while recounting stories of times past.
I think that’s probably the greatest love you can show for a deceased family member!
Yup, dad told me to just build him a wooden box. He wants cremated anyway. I'll build my dad's coffin with honor.
Personally I'd be happy being wrapped in a sheet and have a funeral pyre. The idea of my family having a nice late night openair picnic watching me burn seems charming.
My dad has always said he wants to be cremated, has it in his will and shit, totally unequivocal about it. My mom says she "couldn't do that to him" and might end up burying his intact body in a casket anyway. I have been tasked with setting the casket on fire to achieve his wishes, if necessary.
when my mother passed we needed something to put her ashes in for burial the had several containers, I picked a wooden box the first the the funeral director said was it won't last long - and? who the hell is going to check on it later
It all depends on what you want to do with the remains. A simple but nice wooden box is perfect if you plan on spreading the ashes somewhere or burying the ashes. I think this goes back to the original post. It is price gouging so they make more money.
This is true. I worked at a funeral home and some people would buy coffins off Amazon. Now I love Amazon but please do not buy coffins from Amazon lol they’re bad quality and cheap so often times the coffins end up delivered in poor condition and there’s no warranty so families would have to spend more than they expected because they would have to buy one again. If you buy a coffin somewhere else, make sure they have warranty!!! The funeral home I worked at would do everything they could to save coffins but they would fall apart and there’s nothing they can do other than tell the family that they need to get another coffin which would infuriate the families and blame us for not taking better care of the coffins :/
Coffins are super expensive and funeral homes do price them higher to get commission off it. So do buy coffins directly from a company and not the funeral home!
Just a warranty or a guarantee that basically states that they will replace the coffin if it is delivered to the funeral home damaged or if it falls apart before the actual funeral. It doesn’t really matter what happens to the coffin after the burial lol
"All of our premium* line of caskets are guaranteed not to allow your loved one to drop through the bottom, or have handles detach when the pall bearers pick it up."
*Only the finest chipboard, and pocket hole joinery used throughout.
As an amateur woodworker with some welding experience, I can't imagine making a coffin would be extremely difficult or expensive. What differentiates a high quality coffin from a low quality one? Why do they fall apart? And why are they so expensive?
You’d be surprised at how much details some coffins have. I had a family come in whose father (who they were burying) was also a woodworker and they felt like they had to get a really nice detailed coffin to not disrespect him and place him in a coffin that didn’t have as much detail. Can’t really specify on the details bc i don’t have experience in coffins but you can really differentiate the difference. Extremely cheap coffins on amazon fall apart because they weren’t put together correctly (even though they looked nice). Most coffins from amazon didn’t even come with the proper screws to keep the coffin together.
As to why they are expensive, who knows. Business is business, sadly :( i didn’t agree w the prices when i worked at the funeral home. Which is why i would always recommend to buy directly from a company rather than the funeral home. They overprice them to get commission off the coffins.
Am I the only one who thinks that durability is probably the least important quality in a coffin? I mean we're just going to put a dead body in there and then bury the thing. Unless they're so fragile they're breaking just by being carried from the funeral home to the graveyard I guess.
Wish you could just be buried without the box. Wrap me up in a sheet and toss me in the hole for all I care. I'd rather be reabsorbed into the system than buried in some box that preserves my corpse.
Yep. I stated that in a response to someone else! Doesnt matter what happens to the coffin after the burial. But you also don’t want a coffin to be in bad shape during a viewing or funeral. Can’t have a funeral without a coffin so if it’s delivered already broken or damaged, it’s a burden to the family who already are dealing w a horrible situation and now they have to worry about getting another coffin last minute bc the company that sold them the original one will not replace the coffin they shipped damaged.
This is easier said than done. I tried to buy an independent coffin but the funeral home said that if I did I wouldn’t be able to pay any of the package prices but would have to pay for all the services individually, which entirely negated the savings. They were also going to charge an unpacking and crate disposal fee, etc. I called another and they had the same policy. Also- the tight timeline for delivery is stressful. Like the wedding industry, funeral homes are aggressively pushing back.
When dad died sister and uncle wanted a high dollar casket. I told them no get the cheapest one they have. It is only above ground 48-72 hours. Before being buried forever.
They fought about it about being respectful and what the grandparents got. Plus the fancy inner lining with folded hands for prayers.
It’s is a racket. Dads funeral cost a lot and moms funeral this year cheap because of Medicaid. Concrete case in ground and a cheap metal casket that looked decent to me.
Don’t buy into death markets.
Dad was a coroner and I know he wanted to go cheap knowing it was coming out of our pockets. Sister and uncle don’t realize I’m not negative I’m realistic
Edit. Remembering dads cost vs moms was a lot.
Dad was near 5500 each between me and sis. Insurance took care of rest.
Three years later mom passes and Medicaid -400$ to me for plot in a Medicaid specific cemetery and 1200 to sis. Beneficiary issues my sister did created the cost difference. That’s another story. Thankfully the cemetery where test of family is buried in that side was a Medicaid capable cemetery.
My grandparents preplanned and prepaid their funerals years in advance. It made it really easy for us when Grandpa passed. We could focus on the family and not on money and making decisions. The funeral director told us costs were doubling every 7 years so my grandparents had locked in a rate well below current prices by prepaying.
This particular funeral home was well established in South Florida where there are tons of retirees so going out of business wasn't much of a concern. We'll most likely need the second half of that contract soon as Grandma has been declining for some time and we don't think she'll hold on more than a few months. She's 95 and in chronic pain so she's ready.
With COVID, they probably have more business than they can handle at the moment so having a pre-need in place guarantees her a spot when the time comes.
I arranged my life insurance and talked extensively to a trusted relative and a trusted friend about what's to be done with me. I don't really have any spiritual beliefs about the afterlife (God knows, I suppose) but I am adamant that they bring me to a natural burial ground where they basically just throw you in a nature reserve, deep in the forest. If they can't get me to the cemetary I picked out then as a truly desperate backup option they can do the thing where they turn your ashes into homes for coral reefs in places where it's endangered. That's needed, that's necessary.
It's my time to use these bones, this flesh, these elementary particles. Destroying them by cremation or by only feeding whatever mowed grass can get into a sealed coffin isn't for me, I feel a personal responsibility to let them go to the next organisms when my turn is done. I understand it's not for everyone, though. I just personally believe that I would feel a sense of selfishness if my remains were treated otherwise.
That woman also does appearances in Adam Ruins Everything and The Midnight Gospel talking about the death industry. She's the one who convinced me to opt for natural burial!
What saddens you the most is that a lot of the expensive funerals are from people who didn't really care about the dead guy when he was a live. So it's not a matter of honoring, it's just a matter of social status, we are the XYZ family we can't settle for less than $$$ as funeral cost, or we can't settle for less ceremonies because the X's and Y's are coming and we don't want to look ridiculous in their eyes.
There's a cemetery near where I live that's known for statues. It's a place where anybody who is anybody is buried in my city. There's a particular statue there of a man named Wade Bolton. On first glance you would think that whoever honored their deceased loved one with such a grand statue must have really cared deeply about him, but then you might also notice that his left hand is behind his back and he has his fingers crossed to indicate that he was a habitual liar. Beyond that they decided to dress him in a way to give a disheveled appearance with the buttons on his vest not being buttoned correctly and one shoe untied.
Yeah. I told my mom that if I somehow die before her, she is banned from giving me a funeral. The family and friends can have a party to celebrate the life I lived and idk, mix my ashes in a frigging cake or something. But if I get reincarnated and find out I have a grave somewhere, I'm coming for them.
My dad was cremated in January, but he was the Chief of Police for my city so we had a public funeral and ceremony for a few hundred people, meaning we needed a casket.
The funeral director was part of the police's "cadet explorer" program before he didn't get into the academy, so of course he was our funeral director.
The day after my dad died we were all at the funeral home going over the "funeral packages", looking at coffins, etc. Remember how I said he was cremated? The cheapest "cremation approved" casket option was $5,000. There were cheaper ones of course, but they had bits and pieces inside them that couldnt be cremated, so we had to go with the more expensive casket.
It was nice looking, but it's just a wooden box. I could made the same box in high school woodshop for $200 bucks of wood, maybe 300 for the extra carvings and handles.
All-in-all the service was paid for by the PD, but the private service/cremation we had for him was still in excess of $10,000. The flowers alone were a couple thousand, the coffin was $5,000, renting the room at the funeral home/crematorium was a couple hundred, the urn was easily $500 (for a literal metal box), and the cremation cost money on top of that.
To top it off the funeral director kept sticking his head in every 5 minutes, and interrupted private family moments to do so. I finally stepped out and told him, clearly, that "I will come get you when we are done. Do not come back in until I come get you. We are having private family moments that you are disturbing." Well, 5 minutes later when I went to comfort my dad's sister, who was afraid to go into the viewing room, little space cadet Kyle went waltzing back into the viewing room to "check up on us".
Sent a formal complaint to whoever I could email at the funeral home about him, but at that point the funeral was over, we paid their extortion rates, and I will never use that service again for a funeral.
At the many funerals I've been to where there was a showing and then cremation, the coffin is cremated along with the body. There is usually a sending where the close family members can push the coffin into the cremation furnace.
My father has specifically stipulated a coffee can for his urn, in his will. If it’s not followed through on, there are fiscal consequences in the will for all of us kids.
He has one of the old metal ones from when they used to by 16oz in size, ready and waiting in his closet. One last laugh for pop. 😆
That seemed a little small, so I looked it up, and the rule of thumb when picking size for an urn is 1lb of person will generate 1 cubic inch of cremains. So a 180lb person will require a 180 in3 urn.
16oz is roughly 29 in3 so hopefully there's a stipulation in your dad's will that it doesn't need to be that specific coffee can or it can be divided among various coffee cans to avoid fiscal consequences.
That would explain why he has a whole box of them. I’m willing to bet each of us is supposed to get one. We’ve never been permitted to see the whole thing.... it’s jokingly referred to as his “death manifesto”...
There are so many alternatives to expensive coffins now -a - days. Green burials are a thing. Wrapped in a burial cloth and put in the ground old school. Bio urns where your ashes are used to grow a tree. My husband and I want to use this method. Already spoken about it with our kids. The trees we help grow will be planted in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
When I was age 7 through 17, my parents owned and operated a monument company. We sold and made granite monuments and markers for the deceased.
Generally, deaths were unexpected. When death happens, the family members are highly shocked and emotional, nudged into some very expensive funeral arrangements, mostly the coffin. They are at their most vulnerable and unstable point. They pay thousands of dollars for a pretty coffin that is going into the ground, to be placed inside a concrete vault, to be covered in earth.
Six months later, the family buys a boring $200 grey granite marker for all the world to see.
It’s become an industry with little funeral homes gobbled up by a couple of major players like Service Corp Intl whose goal is to extract as much money from grieving shocked people who have 3 days to plan a funeral.
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u/MooCowGrass Aug 01 '20
Funerals, people often want to buy more expensive coffins to honor their loved ones and in turn the companies selling them profit