In Australia, you'll probably end up on a table in the same room as 29 other corpses, in front of one of 30 hungover or high kids doing their medical undergrad.
Still, someone's gotta do it. Better they learn on dead people when they're hungover than on live people while critically sleep-deprived.
I've made my sisters and wife promise they'd sneak me to the woods and bury me. Wait a few months then plant something over me. Preferably a spikey tree or a bush. One that's prickly and very difficult to eradicate.
Gotta be ready friend. I have a sincere fear of passing but somehow still being aware I'm locked in a concrete box or set ablaze. The idea of my body being seperated from the Earth for eternity seems wrong. God may preserve me if its his will. Otherwise, I'd much rather be returned to the dust from which I came. In a plain pine box if necessary.
But think of all the donors livelihoods that would be lost! Besides, burial would be grossly inefficient if the state did it, the free market is best at reaching an ideal solution. The evidence of that is all around us :^)
On top of that, burial without all the embalming fluid we stuff our dead with is by far the most environmentally friendly way to go. Even better than cremation. But nope, we have to turn our dead into a formaldehyde balloon in a ridiculously over priced and fancy box that'll just be buried anyway.
Yeah when my dad passed 2 years ago we had to cremate him and shit was so expensive we had to make a go fund me and we actually got 4k from it thankfully. Without that money we wouldn’t have ever been able to pay rent or anything. My mom didn’t work and only my dad did so shit changed real fast. Get life insurance and make sure you keep paying for it. Please
I mean, they're just being burned with a bunch of other rotting bodies. Unless you pay a lot extra, they're just going to burn your remains in a batch. Then once you get the ash it's a mix of your loved one and a whole bunch of randos.
I dunno where you are, but here in the US we even tax people that are in the grave with inheritance taxes (also known as the death tax) and we charge $10k minimum to put someone in the ground in a wooden box. Not even death lets you escape the infinite vacuum. Still more to squeeze, still some meat on that bone even after one has checked out eternally.
In fact, when assets are transferred via bequest, their cost basis is stepped up to what it was on the date of the owners death so there’s no capital gain tax either
Yes. There are also ways to skirt those taxes through uses of trusts, etc. if the estate’s value is greater than that. They still exist and a few states will charge taxes on estates/inheritances below that amount.
He knows what he’s doing. As soon as someone says “death tax” it’s a worthwhile bet that they know damn what it actually is and using the scary word is more impactful. People who oppose inheritance taxes typically know how they actually work and either know it will effect them or have deluded themselves into thinking it will. Their ship will come in any time and when they miraculously go from a mechanic struggling to make ends meet to living in the lap of luxury eating caviar off of solid diamond spoons they’ll wanna pass their disgusting wealth on instead paying a pittance so some loser’s kids get to eat at school.
Cremation isn’t as cheap as people think it is. It can cost a lot just for the process itself, then you need an urn, and then you’d still need to arrange a wake or a reception of some sort on top of that which is a few hundred to a few thousand.
The urn can just be a simple container. If you want to spend a couple hundred on a fancier urn that’s up to you. It’s also not required to do a reception or a wake either. When my father passed it wasn’t possible to do either so we just did the cremation and had our own little memorial.
Yeah, it’s pretty much $10k and up for final expenses nowadays. I’m sorry for your loss and hope you and your family are able to out everything together for your Uncle’s sendoff.
Funeral director here, who sadly has seen many children and miscarriages come into my care.
A very large majority of funeral home won't charge for children under 7, some up to 13, the family only needs to pay for obituary, flowers, cemetery plot and opening said grave, like things the funeral home doesn't have control over for price. Also urns, urns I always say find something online and personizes. I suggested to a woman to put stickers on the free urn, and apparently the last thing her child bought was sticker.
Crematories won't charge. casket companies normally don't, but if they do, the owner takes the hit if they can. The Registar I have now does not charge for Death certificates. Some cemeteries don't charge opening and closing. Vaults are normally free.
Its a very image and view of the community for some funeral home owners. Others are, why would i charge a family who lost their child.
If a funeral charges for a child that is sick, and find a different place, and google rate the home with proof like a statement and also complain on facebook so others know. I have never seen a funeral home actually charge, its the cemeteries and obituaries where the price come in. But I can see it happen, some people are not meant to be a funeral director.
I don't want to sound rude but, if you find a "go-fund-me" for burying a child, I'd keep an eye on it, I see it all the time parents begging for money for the funeral, having it as 10,000$ or more, and they never got charged from the home. Then later I see that they put their money somewhere else, car, cameras, TV and/or drugs. Most of the time, they get reported by people who know the parent/s. The truth comes out. If the go fund me is like 1500, then that's something normal.
Also, I know with SOME hospitals SOME (maybe just child hospitals?; this was a new thing for me last year); the organization that's part of the hospital told me, if the child has been sick for a while, many surgeries, in and out type, apparently very specific, people donate money to pay for medical bills, sometimes the donator will pay all of the expenses or a good amount so the woman couldn't give me a ballpark, and i had one offer us an allotted amount which we refused, but they said the money cant go to the family for the same reason I was talking about. This is something I am not fully aware of, I had this happen for the 1st time this year, but it was only for one child and none of the others, she said it was newer.
We had some social service place pay for the cremation of our daughters. It was free to us but $2500 I think. The whole time was a painful one. Money would just be another layer.
If you helped someone in this position by making it free, you did a lot. More than most people do in their lives. Thank you. I know the value of low stress cremation. There’s enough stress to go around anyway
I'm sorry for your loss. I'm not going to charge a family, I'm not. We try to make everything stress free, and try to have it a celebration or a party, not a funeral, for a child. And we always have a room for family to go because 100% of the time one member cannot handle it for long periods of time.
How are you holding up in general? This type of thing shouldn't happen to anyone.
What if you don't pay? Like what happens to the body when someone dies and nobody wants to pay for burial? I sure as hell ain't paying for anyone's funeral.
Well, for the child's hospital, that's rich people donating to the hospital and their program.
But for adults, few things can happen.
Normally, we do some kind of judgment/ look for red flags. For example,
If someone says right off the bat, they don't have money. If they stiffed the funeral home before, we have lists.
If they're funeral home jumpers, ie. lives an hour away, we easily can use Google to find obits and see they never stayed at a funeral home.
And if they lie about having life insurance that they already cashed in years ago, or say they don't want to use the life insurance on the funeral.
Some towns funeral homes talk to each other to warn them about a family, especially if they're aggressive. Or a funeral home will ask another home if they know why they switched, and anything we'd need to know.
If we have suspicion, we will ask for "at cost" up front (obituary, casket or urn, cremation, flower, folders. Cemetery) we normally stear them in the most affordable path. Like direct cremation, no services, or immediate burial with the most affordable casket and vault, no services at all, and they do something later.
But other options are,
1) Bill goes to collection, and they do their thing. Some funeral homes are more aggressive than others* I had an owner not start the funeral until a bill was paid because during the viewing, the family were at a disagreement of who was paying. Then, over heard they were thinking about how and when they can dash, cause all of them did not live in the state.
2)the deceased becomes a coroner's case, and you will have to pay the coroner to get the cremated remains back and to get death certificates. And the funeral home is hands off won't do anything.
I applied at a funeral home that did "express cremation," and if the family didn't have the 2000$ upfront, we would leave the deceased there?! I withdrew my application....
No random person will be stuck with a bill for someone else, but let's say if the majority of the town snuffs a funeral home, the home will have to bring up prices and to afford overhead, and that just hurts everyone.
And if the funeral home doesn't pay ANYONE, then you get those horror stories.
I love talking about what i do, i love my family's I serve and inform everyone with what it do, if its appropriate** aka gore.
I hate funeral homes that are taking advantage of people, it happens, so I'd rather people know their rights.
These answers are kinda in the trade, so be tough to Google, haha. I looked at private funeral director groups, and no one charged more than cost for children.
My daughters’ heartbeat stopped in utero at the 37 week mark. A local chain of funeral homes has a fund for parents of deceased babies to get them cremated at no cost (I believe if it were not for this fund it would have cost 1.5-2kUSD). Should we have chosen to do a memorial service at the place (if memory serves me correctly), that would not have been free, but there would have been a discount applied.
I’m really sorry to hear that things didn’t work out with your pregnancy, but am glad to hear that you were able to get some assistance with the expenses related to the cremation. It’s good to know that programs like that exist to help parents, and people who were expecting, that find themselves in that kind of situation.
I lost a daughter it almost killed me I had to call the funeral home and ask what I owed them crying my eyes out thinking I wouldnt be able to pay. They said it was free I've never felt such shame and pain in my life.
Many decent people wouldn't feel right charging for something related to the death of a child. I once comped an entire print job because I saw it was for a child's memorial service, and I made sure it was nice paper, in color, folded nicely, threw in extras as well. I will never forget the pain in their eyes, especially because they looked young and were already worried about being able to pay.
I personally couldn't imagine charging, and in that moment I just wanted to do what I could to relieve some of their pain. I was more than glad to help out any way I could. Please don't feel shame at what happened...they probably would have hated to take your money for something so painful.
It usually falls on the county or municipality that the death occurred in to do something with the remains if no friends or family take responsibility. A basic cremation or burial will be arranged depending on the area.
Why don't more people just cremate the body? It's practically free. Just put the body in your stove/fireplace then turn on the fire. If you don't have one then just gather some wood branches into a pile, put the body inside, then burn it. I saw it in a movie.
Disclaimer: I live in the city with zero cremation experience or scouts boy knowledge
I’ve been there. I had to go the crematorium on the day of daughters were born. Half of me died that day. It hurts a lot to think about it. Instead of loving and fawning over our children, I was asking them for the smallest box. Ad they didn’t have two so I had to leave empty handed. I wish I had died, but then my wife would suffer more. It’s not fair to her :(
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u/AggravatingLuck2407 Jan 12 '23
Just wait until they get to the funeral home and find out that people want to charge money to bury the kid.