About Funerals

But regardless of how people choose to live financially (most living on credit more than earnings), with more and more living towards the ‘poverty line’ (often through their own poor choices), it is greed shown by people that appears to have increased dramatically and contributed to the demise of quality and in many cases, happiness. Time is not valued anymore. It is calculated. An example: In the last five years there has been an enormous jump in the promotion of funeral insurance (yes, a set market. We are all going to die.) But what bothers me is the prohibitive rise in the cost of burying someone. Do we honestly need a three thousand dollar coffin to be put into the ground? Or easier, cremated? You are dead (Seriously, it won’t be your problem), but the marketing is all centred on not wanting to leave your loved ones with debts. Debts? Surely it can’t be that expensive? Fact:Everyone is going to die. Now according to capitalist concepts, wasn’t mass production meant to reduce costs? At least that was what I was taught. So, if everyone is going to die, then shouldn’t dying be one of the cheapest things that is out there?

Although if that were true, then disposable nappies, which everyone seems to be using in Australia today (once again laziness rather than efficiency. Cloth was good enough for me, good enough for my son, it just meant having to work a bit). They should also be very cheap, but they’re not? Of course, there’s money to be made, because everybody wants them! Market supply and demand.  However, can anyone tell me what really costs at a burial? Or better yet, a cremation. I mean break it down. The body is dead. It gets collected. Gets a wash and a clean up. Put into a nice suit/dress which is provided by the family, not even provided by the undertakers and then put in a wooden box in a church/hall before being put into a high temperature furnace. So apart from hiring the big taxi to move you, which could cost around 800 dollars for the day (ever hire a stretch limo?) the hall hire costs are around 300 dollars  maximum. Ask anyone who’s hired a hall for a party (and you know you will be getting the bond back, funerals don’t tend to have marauding drunken yobs breaking furniture). Then maybe the electricity/gas cost for the furnace, well, my last power bill for three months was three hundred and fifty dollars, so lets put that down as the extreme. Undertakers, times two, for the initial collection at around fifty dollars an hour. We’ll round this out to four hundred dollars of actual work. I can’t see why it should cost more than around two thousand at the most. Let’s face it. You’re going to be burned up. Unless you own a burial plot now, you won’t be able to afford the rates or land value later. So you’ll be put into a box and burnt to ash. But the undertaker will probably try and sell you a ‘hand-carved African mahogany urn’ for your ashes at around $1,400. (Probably made in some small Philippines jungle community from felled rain forest timber, for thirty Philippine pesos or about 70cents Australian)

(Continued tomorrow)