Straight talk on funerals

When I woke up on June 29 I wasn’t expecting to attend a meeting about funerals, but I found Josh Slocum’s guest commentary “Funeral advocates ready for questions” in the Faith in Memphis section intriguing.

Slocum, executive director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, gave a great presentation about subjects no one likes to discuss — death and funerals. His insights into the industry were eye-opening. He observes that we don’t like to say someone died. Instead we say, “they passed, we lost them, they went home” and so on.

I had a firsthand experience with the industry in 1981 when my 37-year-old sister died and her (then) 15-year-old daughter steered the choice of vaults away from the “lifetime guaranteed, waterproof” to a plain cement one. Seven years ago my husband of 38 years died of cardiac arrest, and within six hours of kissing him goodbye I was on the phone with the Yellow Pages pricing direct cremation. The prices at Memphis area funeral homes ranged from $600 to almost $3,000 for the exact same services. Needless to say, I followed my niece’s lead and went with a low price. We had the visitation and Celebration of Life at St. Luke Lutheran Church where we were members. It was comfortable, familiar, personalized and perfect for our needs. We later spread his ashes in several of our family’s favorite places.

Since then we all have talked about and agree with my desire, which is to donate my body to the Genesis program at MERI (the Medical Education and Research Institute) in Memphis.