CHARLES WOOLEY
The term “the dearly departed” might be used to describe a deceased loved one but it also most aptly describes the high cost of dying.
Dying is generally a bad experience for all involved except the undertaker. In Australia disposing of the dead is a billion dollar industry with the highest of profit margins.
Two thirds of Australians opt for cremation as the cheapest and simplest means of dispatch but even then, according to Choice magazine the “no frills” version starts at about $4000.
My mother Ella died at 100 last year and had actually wanted to be cremated “with no fuss” so I wasn’t off-loading the old girl on the cheap. She had threatened me with her imminent death on many occasions over the past 20 years but had always failed to follow through. Despite her lengthy ruminations on mortality she failed to do what the death business likes to call “end of life planning”. Like 86 per cent of Australians she had made no provisions. That’s a huge untapped market out there. No wonder there are so many TV advertisements with oldies cheerfully telling one and other that they “won’t be a burden” because they have bought a funeral plan. But even with funeral insurance there is still a chance of being “stiffed” as it were. A contact in the departure business has told me of cases of old folk paying insurance premiums over time worth twice the cost of the funeral.
Soon after death, the aged care home helpfully told me they would notify the undertaker, if I wished. This is standard practice and in grief such details are something most people don’t want to bother with. Now you might reasonably wonder on what basis the management of nursing homes might provide particular undertakers with business and is there a “spotter’s fee”?
Details will no doubt emerge in the course of the Royal Commission into aged care but I assure you, when your old mum has just died, you are not a shrewd consumer and not up for shopping around. It occurs to me now that the great business advantage of being in the death industry rather than real estate or the motor trade, is that you get to deal with people at their most vulnerable and least likely to quibble about price. Later at the undertaker’s premises I was a little surprised to learn the cost but it was a bit late to argue. Ella’s body was already in cold storage. Whatever the price I could hardly put her back in my car. She had been dead a day and would have been even more unbending now than she was in life. But she would have certainly given the undertaker the rounds of the funeral chapel if she knew that it cost almost $6000 for her to be done and dusted (we got a few hundred off for paying upfront). Though since she “passed” as the unctuous cliche has it, I haven’t heard a word from her on the subject. Just as well I think.
All of which reminds me a year later, I still have to collect her ashes. She would be furious but now that she’s gone I can admit this without fear of any reproaches. Her husband Charlie, who shuffled into the void at the tender age of 92, is in a small green box on my bookshelf but Ella is still at the undertakers. I must collect her soon. I cannot explain why I have been so remiss. But I am not alone. I remember a now deceased undertaker (he would’ve got mates rates) and a one-time familiar at the Shipwrights Arms Hotel, telling me that a large percentage of his clients never collect the ashes of their loved ones. “Death,” he pronounced lugubriously. “Is something no one wants to think about. Collecting the ashes is always an awkward footnote to the whole sad process and understandably is so easily put off.”
Ella’s instructions were that her ashes were to be mingled with those of Charlie, her husband of almost 70 years. Their collective dust was to be cast upon the waters of a particular highland stream in a particular glen in their native Scotland. (That should put some interesting “body” into the whisky of the downstream distiller).
I have yet to honour those instructions and my friends constantly remind me, this is a melancholy duty yet to be fulfilled. They are keen to join me on what my medical mate Dr Syntax calls The Ashes Tour of Scotland. And my old pal, the one-time legendary and abrasive 60 Minutes executive producer, John Westacott reckons it would make a great segment for a story “The High Cost of Dying”. He’s not wrong. I don’t want to be Scottish about this but add the return airfares to the old country, the high cost of converting Ella to carbon, the attendant whisky bill for friends and rellies and the hire of the piper and the old girl is indeed dearly departed.
Westy is so keen to accompany Ella on the ashes tour he has already written my last pronouncements as her dust drifts on a heather scented breeze into the foaming bright waters of that wee Scottish burn:
“Well Ella, it only cost us ten quid to get you out from Scotland. But it’s cost a damn sight more to get you back again.”