Warning: The following short video contains language that some may find offensive.
Plenty of people are hurting. The commercialisation of death is now costing everyone . . . one way or another.
Households: The average cost of a funeral in NZ is now $13000. Few households can find that money.
Communities: Money spent on commercial-model funerals is money that is being taken out of school lunches, kids sports, mortgages, rents, heating, clothes, medical care and local charities.
Our country: Estimates are that between 50 and 70% of NZ Funeral Homes are now owned by overseas investment firms. They’re buying up the NZ operators because the industry is so lucrative. It is so lucrative because institutional obstacles gift the funeral industry a captive market.
Mothers: “Ten years later I’m still paying off my husband’s funeral”.
“When my 7 year old son died, I was landed with a funeral bill for $18 000”.
Fathers: “We asked them not to embalm. They did.”
“We needed her body taken back home – 200km. The funeral director didn’t ell us we could do this ourselves. It cost us $5000 on top of everything else.”
Sons: “The funeral director cancelled the funeral because we’d attempted to bypass their package deal. All we needed was the cremation”.
Daughters: “I rang up the council to book the cremation and was told I’d have to go through a funeral director. We didn’t need a funeral director – and as it happens, we didn’t have the money.”
“The media wouldn’t let me place a funeral notice for my Mother unless I had a funeral director”
“My husband’s family are Polynesian. When his Mother died, they ended up with a $10K bill which they couldn’t afford. They weren’t told they could take her home instead of paying for ‘viewings’, or that she didn’t need to be embalmed, or that the family could have done some of the other things themselves which would have saved money.”
Friends: “We never really got to say goodbye. I was told I could view him, but that it would cost $300. It was kind of hard to accept he’d died.”
Hospices: “I’m a palliative care nurse. The funeral bills we are seeing cripple families. We know many families would rather keep a funeral simple and donate to hospice.”
Society: Funeral poverty leads to stress, stress leads to poor physical and mental health.
