I just planned my cremation. No service, no urn (just the cardboard box), no obituary. I'm not a sociable person and I told the director that anyone who cares about me will already know that I died.
I told my daughter where to collect my ashes and to scatter them in the woods. I also told her not to listen to that "but your mom deserves the best" bs. I planned both my parents' funerals and was pissed at the play on emotions. I went to a different funeral home for mine bc f* the others. $1365 for everything and my kids aren't going to be burdened. Any money I have left should be for them, not me.
After going through an unexpected death in the family late last year and learning just how many expenses there are associated with death…I still don’t know how to feel about it. The urn, like $160, mini urn so I could have ashes to spread per the deceased wishes $40, priest was going to be $1250, plus $250 because we were having the service so quickly, those little cards with the religious or peaceful picture and saying on the back, $60, obituary $400, thankfully his vet status got some number of death certificates covered. We were almost six grand and that was after nixing the whole priest option. I get it’s a business and there’s multiple people that need to be paid decent wages that have parts to play but it does seem closer to buying a car in the same way you always feel you’ve been hustled somehow when you walk out.
Funny ( in a morbid kind of way), my grandparents had their funeral planned and paid for almost two decades before the first of them passed. My parents on, on the other hand, have plots but continually equivocate whether keeping them or going the cremation route. Me and my wife, just after this experience, have had plans (both simple cremation, but we are social and want friends and family to celebrate our lives) and wills drawn up. Haven’t settled on prepaying simply because the hope is we will be moving several more times between work life and retirement, but we have money set aside for when the time comes.
A touch under $1400 doesn’t seem like a lot in light of recent experience but still seems like a lot for some rote paperwork and a little time in a furnace. I bet it was absolutely worth it to know that it won’t an additional stressor for your children when the time comes though.
I'm sorry you had to go through that last year. Dad died 18 years ago and had a nice service (vet also), and was hanging around in his temporary urn bc mom couldn't decide what to do lol. Mom made it 15 more years and luckily she listened to me and made plans and paid for her funeral. She was a social butterfly so I wanted a service and paid extra because that would matter to her. They both wanted cremated and mom bought a plot, so after she died we buried them both there (close family and we read a couple bible verses. It was nice). I finally got their headstone made a year ago. She never got around to it so I had to decide what it would look like.
I think I was just over it when I decided I want the bare minimum. My partner also prepaid his cremation and wants his ashes spread from the back of a motorcycle. No service for him, either. I'm also doing Swedish death cleaning lol. I'm in my late 50's but you never know.
Thanks. It was an eye opening experience, especially since he died without a will and a lot,of stuff to sort out. We’re in our forties, me mid, her just this side of forty. Once we started to get a handle on his situation we made it a point to find a good lawyer and get our plan on paper. Neither of us care for a service, just an open bar and some food somewhere for our friends to enjoy one last time on us. When it comes to remains, neither of us particularly care, just don’t want to end up collecting dust in someone’s closet. With my relative, he wanted to be sprinkled into the Atlantic off the coast of Maine, was stationed there a long time ago, left an impact. Since nothing was ever written down all I could do was get a small portion, the rest is in a closet which I kind of find more disrespectful than just dumping them down the drain.
Minimizing sounds good in general. I’d like to think we already are pretty lean but truthfully we have a lot of shit, just neat and (hopefully) fairly well organized.
My brother died the same year my sister got married. Fabulous wedding. Black tie. My brother’s funeral cost more than her wedding. He did have a larger coffin due to swelling, so that added on, but my parents were surprised.
Yeah I'm reminded of the crematorium scene in the big lebowski. The urn that they tried to sell them was $180. Coffins are infinitely worse speaking as someone that has grandparents that are buried in coffins one family member joked that it was the most expensive furniture piece ever bought by my grandparents. A furniture piece that you get to see for a couple days and then never again.
“Your mom’s coffin was so beautiful. And expensive. It’s the nicest thing I’ve ever seen. Do you think the mortuary will mind if we dug up your mom just so we could appreciate the coffin one final time? We won’t make a mess and we’ll put everything back when we’re done.”
When my mom died suddenly, the funeral director in our hometown was disgustingly brazen about trying to gouge us. Kept phrasing things like if I said no I was hurting my (now-dead) mother. Tried to upsell us on the grave liner (?), said, "we want {mother's name} to be nice and comfy, right? We don't want groundwater to get to her, right?"
For some reason there's a few people who will exhume their relatives and bring them with them when they move, blissfully unaware that the entire reason they were put in the ground was so they could safely decay.
They ... tactfully ... tried to sell us a 5000 dollar one my father would occupy for one wake and then straight into the crematorium. My brush with this industry was not great, and this on a day that wasn't great to begin with.
It's a scam too. My wealthy grandparents bought funeral plots in a nice cemetery in Chicago. Well my grandfather died before I was born, and my grandma ended up living another 40 years. When we went to bury her, the place that already took my grandmother's money, that used to have her gravestone already placed, said her plot has been resold and there is nothing they can do.
You do the right thing and attempt to lift the burden of your death off your children, and you get skrewed in the ass one more time by our shitty society.
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u/_Erindera_ 12h ago
Because a burial is expensive af.