The High Cost of Dying

Photo by C.J. Burton

Sometimes, a funeral goes as smoothly as a family could hope for:

Jack Sanders had talked frequently with his mother, Joyce, about her funeral plans. A frugal woman, she disdained high prices for anything. She wanted cremation and a simple burial with a graveside service and a few friends. No big fuss. No viewing.

So Sanders, 52, of New Sharon, Maine, arranged for precisely what she wanted when his mother died in August at age 68. Chuck Kincer, owner of a number of funeral businesses in Maine, did everything to specifications and charged $1,250. “It was perfect,” Sanders said after the graveside service at the family plot.

But other times, things spin out of control:

After her husband of 35 years died unexpectedly while working in Louisiana, Beckey Poplin of Lubbock, Texas, needed to use insurance proceeds to pay a local funeral home more than $16,000. She told local TV station KCBD that she wasn’t given a price quote before receiving the final bill, didn’t know how to read the contract and wasn’t sure what was included. Asked why she hadn’t requested a price estimate, she told the station, “You don’t do that at that time. You don’t really care. You have other issues to deal with.”

Two years later, Poplin said, she compared the prices in her contract with those at other funeral homes and concluded that she had been overcharged about $5,000. What prompted her to revisit her experience, she said, were allegations by a former employee of White Funeral Home that the container in which her husband’s body was returned from Louisiana had been reused to transport another body.

Poplin sued the Lubbock funeral home, alleging deceptive trade practices and other lapses. The lawsuit is scheduled for trial in January, and all the parties declined to comment.

For many families, the grief over losing a loved one is compounded by the stress of dealing with higher-than-anticipated expenses—and at a time when Americans can least afford it. Older Americans are particularly pinched. They’re facing historically high unemployment rates and steadily mounting medical costs, and their retirement savings and home values still have not recovered from the effects of the lingering recession.

Sometimes, the financial burden of a funeral is unbearable. Los Angeles County officials reported in July that nearly 700 bodies lay unclaimed at the county morgue in the first half of the year, often because families could not afford funeral costs.

No wonder that sticker shock is driving families to choose alternatives to a traditional funeral. Many are rejecting funeral homes’ comprehensive “packages” and buying only what they can afford. Increasingly, some are choosing cremation, a “green” burial or even a service performed by the family at home.

According to the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA), the average cost of a regular adult funeral in 2006 was $7,323, up 45 percent since 2001. That figure does not include a cemetery plot, burial, a grave marker, flowers or other items that can add thousands of dollars to the final bill.

What’s more, funeral prices will rise faster than living costs in the next few years, predicts John Fitch Jr., an NFDA official in Washington, because prices of caskets and funeral supplies are escalating.

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