Money really talks these days! Just heard on our local news that a local funeral home in Wheatland,Missouri dumped a returned a dead body to where the picked it up due to lack of funds for services. People came home to find a large bag on the front steps. Now funeral home is about to loose their permit, and rightly so. Does this stunt take the cake? Soon as they open I plan to give them a call to express my opinion. Here, the county will pay for such, but I guess they just did not want to mess with any poor folk. Don

-- Don (dairyagri@yahoo.com), October 09, 2001

Answers

Response to State of things

I dont think a funeral home should be required to provide services for free, but just dumping the body is wrong and I am betting illegal (abuse of a corpse)

-- Gary (gws@redbird.net), October 09, 2001.

Response to State of things

My guesswould be that somewhere in the directions to that funeral home there is the phrase: "Turn off the paved road....

-- mitch hearn (moopups@citlink.net), October 09, 2001.

Response to State of things

Just read that story on the web. Guy was a WWII vet. Family did not have the $1200 bucks so Holman- Hathaway Funeral home dumped the unimbalmed body on the steps a week later. Luckly, another home came and took care of things.

-- (speedstar5558@yahoo.com), October 09, 2001.

That is truly one of the most disgusting things I've ever heard. That poor family.

-- Rheba (rhebabeall@hotmail.com), October 09, 2001.

Thats pretty bad! Funeral expenses are outrageos and we plan to buy our own caskets, and hopefully if I can talk dh into it, putting some land aside for a family cemetary, maybe even bypassing the whole funeral home thing altogether, currently, we still can in Tx. I don't beleive we have to have the vaults or air tight caskets, they're not guarnteed air/water tight anyway. My soul will not be in my body when I die, it will be an empty shell, dust to dust.

-- Carol in Tx (cwaldrop@peoplescom.net), October 09, 2001.

I have thought of donating my body to a medical school. I had an Uncle who did and from what I remeber it was no big deal.

My Mother always wanted me to go to College maybe this would make her Happy!

-- Mark in N.C. Fla. (deadgoatman@webtv.net), October 09, 2001.

Check out the book, "Caring for Your Own Dead"---covers every state in the USA.

-- Anne (HealthyTouch101@wildmail.com), October 09, 2001.

There is some realy good information about low-cost funerals and buying your own coffin in the archives. I found a link to lots of web sites and mail order coffin builders. You can buy a truly beautiful solid wood coffin for $600 plus a couple hundred shipping. I don't have these sites bookmarked, but I found it all in the "Older Messages" here at Countryside. Carol, I thought about having some oif our land be set aside for a family grave yard, but there are some laws such as that the area has to have a road to it and be accessible to the public, that I though was a bit strange. In other words, you can have a burial ground on your property but then it nearly becomes public property. And I think you have to allow others to be buried there as well. Strange.

-- Elizabeth in e tx (kimprice@peoplescom.net), October 10, 2001.

I think the rules about "family" burial grounds being public is so that someone doesn't get it into their head to bury a relative and still collect a social security check.

What I don't understand is why the family did not contact the VA to get the benefits that were due this veteran. Also, I think by law the family should have been able to get the price for a rock-bottom cheap funeral/cremation whatever. It does not have to cost $1200 for a cremation.

When you buy "extras" like viewings (seems creepy to me but I know those who actually take pictures of the dead in their caskets) that really ups the price. Most people actually think you HAVE to have the body embalmed. If it is being flown back east for example, yes, but not if it is a local burial.

For two views of the funeral business, read The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford (older book but just as true today in viewpoint) and The Loved One (fiction) by Evelyn Waugh (there was also a movie made with many celebrity cameos), which was a spoof of places like Forest Lawn and other "memorial golf courses".

-- GT (nospam@nospam.com), October 10, 2001.