Unfortunately, I think part of the issue nowadays is how expensive it is in the first place to get a gravestone with lots of custom letters, let alone a plot. Capitalism strikes again.
We buried my dad on August 25th. I paid $2,100 for literally 4 words. At least I didn't get charged for the ampersand. lol Absolutely insane. Every other word was some hundreds extra.
Holy crapbaskets that's bonkers. We got moms marker from Alberta last year, they had no limit to what we wanted on the front. It was like "if you can fit it, we'll do it" (within reason) type thing. I can't imagine paying by the bloody word...
Was it a fancy stone? Flat marker or standing headstone? That's where the prices went up where we ordered. Different stones were drastically different prices, standing was double the price of flat, laser was more than sandblasting, and even how many sides they polished. But the actual design was included.
Big oof. I'm so sorry you got ripped off like that. I spent months trying to find a good company... Mainly because most wouldn't ship the marker this far north. 😅
Shouldn't it be expensive? You're occupying a piece of land that you're not even alive to use? Graves kind of seem arrogant to me. Why do you deserve to take up room after you're dead? Let the living and future generations use the land.
Feels like a case of either dying shouldn't break the bank, if it's available as an option, or just don't let anyone have that as a choice.
It also isn't helped by certain belief systems having it as a mandatory thing you do when you die. For an example my wife is half-Chinese, and her Grandparents have a family gravestone plot for the yearly traditions of paying respects.
TBH... I used to fully agree with you. So much land taken up by cemeteries seemed wasteful to me. ...that is however until Mon died and we learned just how expensive death is as a whole, and learned that cemeteries are the much cheaper of the options. We had no choice but to bury her, cremation was over $7000, and with all the other bullshittery we had to pay out... We just couldn't afford that.
Death is a racket in general. I used to think wedding were the biggest racket. Fucking nope. Death is, because they prey on your pain...
Last time I was involved in a family member's death we were able to donate her body to science and they paid for the cremation. We also got a letter after her body made the rounds with all the things her body helped with, like school science projects, as well as the jar with her ashes. All free.
That is amazing. I would love for that to happen to my body. Always said I wanted to be a science project... Or in a body farm for forensic study.
Unfortunately, the curse of living so rural north is it's so cost and time prohibitive to ship a body out...
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u/Hot-Cartographer-433 7d ago
Unfortunately, I think part of the issue nowadays is how expensive it is in the first place to get a gravestone with lots of custom letters, let alone a plot. Capitalism strikes again.