Dale-Time

There’s a topic that I think needs to be brought up here on this blog. For lack of a better term I’m going to call it Welfare Funerals. I use the term welfare because it’s what public assistance was called back when I first got into the funeral business. Since then the government agency that handles that kind of stuff has changed names several times to Social Services to Family Independence Agency, to Department of Human Services. The name may have changed but it still serves the same purpose in regards to my business.

They provide financial assistance to families that have no assets for funeral expenses. The State of Michigan runs these agencies and sets the figures. The amount of dollars that they provide for families varies by the amount of assets the family has and what type of services they are planning on having. At the present time they provide $365 for a Direct Cremation, $600 if you have a memorial service and a direct cremation and $700 if you have a burial. And those amounts have decreased quite a bit  since I first started in the funeral business 30 years ago. Back then they would provide $1700 for a burial. As state budgets have grown tight, the amount has been lowered. While our costs, just like your living expenses, have increased with inflation.

We typically handle 15 or so welfare cases a year. We reduce our fees to help the folks in need. I know that most funeral homes do the same thing. I also look at this as my way to give back to the community. In dollar figures this amounts to nearly $50,000 a year in services that we provide at no charge. I know that hospitals, doctors and lawyers sometimes do the same kind of thing.

Unfortunately we have had an increase this year in the number of people needing assistance. I’m sure the economy has a lot to do with that. But what’s been terribly disturbing is the attitude some of these folks have when they come to see us. There is a huge sense of entitlement. Typically their deceased family member has been living on government assistance for years and has no assets to speak of. So family members think that the “government” is going to pay for everything. When we inform them that the figures listed above are all that they can get from the “government” and that we require the family to pay additional funds for us to take care of things they are shocked. “What???  We’ve got to pay?? We haven’t got any money either” Yet they seem to drive in nice cars, have cell phones, smoke cigarettes, and carry soda bottles in with them. (yes, I’m stereotyping a bit but this is a true description of what I have seen dozens of times) They obviously have money for those things. Yet they have no sense of responsibility for the final care of their loved one. They expect the funeral home just to do everything they want for free. And all we are trying to do is recover enough funds to cover the cost of what we are doing.

Here are two examples from the last few weeks. A man died with no local family, it was medical examiner case. We transferred the body from the place of death to our cooler. After a week the brother from out of town arrived. He stated that he wasn’t willing to contribute any funds beyond what DHS would provide. Plus he didn’t believe in cremation and refused to sign the authorization form. They had a small gathering on their own and then he left town, abandoning the body in our cooler. We had to file with the state and the medical examiner to get authorization to cremate finally after 3 weeks of paper shuffling and legal hassles.

In another situation a women who was on disability died. She was living with her brother and had 3 adult children and one child living at home. Her brother and mother came in to make arrangements. They wanted to have a memorial service at our place. I told them I needed $700.00 in addition to funds that we could get from DHS and that they would have to pay for newspaper obituaries too. That’s less than 1/3^rd of what I normally charge for the services they wanted. But they refused to pay anything. The mother said her daughter was an adult and made her own choices and that she wasn’t responsible for how her daughter ended up. The brother said he was on unemployment and couldn’t pay anything. Nobody in the whole family was willing to provide a dime towards the cost of what they wanted me to provide. Yet they went to the newspaper themselves and ran a paid obituary and then had a service and reception on their own somewhere. I’m sure they paid the newspaper, the gas station and the grocery store full price for everything they got. But yet they expected me to do things for little or nothing. Why is that??

I really don’t mind helping people out. But at what point do you draw the line? At what point should a family step up and take some responsibility? Plus an additional challenge is that once I have possession of the body, I’m stuck with it. I can’t give it back to the family. I can’t take it back to the morgue. In Detroit this year there have been hundreds of bodies abandoned at the county morgue by their families because they are unwilling to pay a funeral home for services. The state needs to figure out an equitable way to handle this situation. I’m willing to do my part, but it is not my responsibility to pay money out of my pocket for the final disposition, when everyone else involved gets paid in full for their part of the process.

I’m Dale Clock. Thanks for listening.