This is everyone’s nightmare: your spouse passes away; it’s Friday afternoon and you want to have the Funeral Service on the holiday Monday. You don’t have cemetery lots but you know that you want to use one of the municipal cemeteries. You need to purchase two graves so that you can be interred someday with your spouse. You go to the local Funeral Home to make arrangements and find out that the cemetery portion of the funeral account will be:
| 2 Adult Lots | $2716.94 |
| Interment | 984.46 |
| Cemetery Licensing Fee | 10.00 |
| Registration Fee | 17.13 |
| Holiday Interment | 320.00 |
| HST | 522.78 |
| Total | $4571.31 |
The cemetery won’t extend credit when a purchase is made at the time of need because there is a lack of recourse after an interment has taken place. You have money invested but it will take a few days before it can be transferred or maybe you have an insurance policy but it’s going to take a few weeks before it is settled…what do you do?
Councilor Jim Brown of Ridgetown attended the cemetery meeting that I wrote about two weeks ago. He brought forth that very concern because it has been raised to him a number of times by families who were told by the Funeral Home that until the cemetery costs were paid they couldn’t bury their loved one. In those cases, on top of everything else that they had going on, they had to borrow money from someone and pay the Municipality before the days end. All of the Funeral Home representatives except for one who responded to Councilor Brown’s concern stated that they allow families to include cemetery charges on their funeral account.
At the Blenheim Community Funeral Home, we have always allowed and will continue to allow families to include the cemetery charges on their funeral account, even if that amount is $4571.31 because we believe in people.
