Obituaries recycled to sell flowers
Families protest Quebec-based website
TORONTO •AnAlbertaman who, on the advice of doctors, is trying to keep news of his father’s death from his dementia-stricken mother, is the latest grieving family member to complain about a new website that reposts online obituaries alongside ads for flower deliveries.
His fear is that a bouquet and card will show up on his mother’s doorstep, and thus interrupt the delicate balance of what she knows about her husband, what she is capable of understanding through her dementia, and how it will affect her.
“I can handle it if she hears it from me,” Rick Laursen said. But finding out from a delivery would be needlessly traumatic. He has now put a sign on her front door directing any flower deliveries to a neighbour’s house.
Quebec-based Everhere. com, founded last year with the slogan “Where loved ones are Eternal,” says its aim is to create an “online database” of publicly posted obituaries, and to arrange them geographically by city. It also offers access to genealogical data.
“We are trying to connect society by providing a free extension of what funeral homes provide for families,” the website says. Its CEO is Paco Leclerc of Montreal, according to his LinkedIn page.
Earlier this year, the parents of an Ontario child who died of cancer said they were “absolutely gutted” to see their son’s obituary used in this way.
Similar complaints in Newfoundland led to suggestions from a lawyer that the practice of copying text from published obituaries violates intellectual property law, just as much as if Everhere had cut and pasted a literary short story.
The site offers the chance to post free messages of condolence, and it advertises flower deliveries through Bloomstoday, a florist based in Virginia that co-ordinates with local flower delivery services.
In the new Alberta case, Rick Laursen, who works in health and safety in the oil industry, moved into his parents’ house in Calgary recently to help when his father Erik, 83, was diagnosed with cancer. Erik’s wife and Rick’s mother Margaret, 92, has vascular related dementia, and would often ask about her husband. Rick would explain that he was very sick, but then she would forget and ask again. He found he was causing her fresh grief over and over again, multiple times a day.
After consulting with her physician and an expert with the Alberta health system, he settled on a plan of telling her that Erik was tired and needed to rest. Rick recalled the doctor saying the “best you can do is tell her he’s not here right now and eventually she will stop asking … You are causing her more harm than good by making her live (with) something she cannot process.”
She still does not know he died last week, and she did not attend the funeral on the weekend. She has never used a computer, so the online aspect did not bother Rick.
He gave details to a local funeral home, but then a modified version appeared on Everhere.com: “Sadly, on July 4th, 2018, Erik Laursen of Calgary, Alberta left us for a better place. Family and friends can send flowers and condolences in memory of the loved one …”
Much of the text had been copied word for word. Rick said they “completely stole from the real obituary.”
But that opening quotation was not only newly written, it also managed to misinform mourners about the dead man’s wishes.
“He would far sooner see the money go to a charity than see money spent on flowers for him,” Rick said of his father.
Kevin Rodrigues, a bioethicist with the University Health Network in Toronto, said this kind of deception about a spouse’s death would be a “last resort” strategy. Medicine has a negative history of paternalism, he said, and the default modern position is to treat patients honestly, including those who are incapacitated by dementia. But as someone becomes incapable of grieving, there comes a point when there is no longer any sense in initiating grief repeatedly, with no hope of resolution.
At that point, the ethics flip, the experts say. Truth becomes harmful, and deception becomes good, in this extreme, narrow medical context.
Laursen’s complaint is basically that Everhere. com has interfered with this delicate question about his mother by mining for obituaries on the internet to promote the sale of $100 flower bouquets with $20 shipping charges.
“What would be fraudulent (in the ethical sense) would be omitting the family’s explicit request not to have flowers,” said Arthur Schafer, founding director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba.
“Certainly it’s duplicitous.”