Post Morbus

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a burial plot.” – Me, with apologies to Jane Austen

Once the dust had settled on the condo closing we turned our attention to other things. The priority – since our life circumstances had changed – was to update our wills to reflect the fact that we no longer owned Balconville. We also needed to update the executors and since The Eldest turns 18 in March, we wanted something that would acknowledge that she will be a legal adult. The next priority? Pre-planning our funerals.

I guess I am a pragmatic person and while I do have a lot of superstitious thoughts rolling around my head (“Great! Watch us now die in a fiery wreck on our way home!”) my more practical inclinations tend to win out. My logic here was to prevent the kids from having to scramble to make arrangements for us under duress. If we pre-planned and pre-paid, then the kids would know down to the letter what our wishes are. Our final gift to them would be removing that burden. This way, the choices were already made and they just have to show up to the celebration of life with some sandwiches.

Location, location, location!
I used to imagine that I would be buried alongside my maternal line in the east end of the city. It is an old cemetery full of history and many of my family members are buried there, including my grandmother who I was incredibly close to. But when I sat down and thought about it, since I am estranged from that side of the family it made more sense to create new traditions and let the past be the past. Also, it is a Catholic cemetery and while I was raised in that faith, Mr. Tucker was raised in the United church and while he didn’t care either way (“Why would I care! I’ll be dead!”) it felt weird to me to make him go to a place that reflected more of my history than it did our shared life together. So, Mr. Tucker and I made the decision to strike out on our own and choose our final resting place to reflect the area we spent most of our lives in. We ended up choosing a place closer to our home, in a nondenominational cemetery.

Both Mr. Tucker’s parents and my patrilineal side have plots (at what once was…) out of town, on the edge of the city. It is also nondenominational (scandalously – my father’s parents were of different faiths, so when they got married only one Catholic priest in the city would agree to marry them!) but alas, it is way too far out of town. It’s also a super inconvenient spot to get to and quite frankly, should the kids end up moving out of the city I want them to be able to come back and visit our graves close to the area they grew up in. They may not even visit our graves but I still wanted to make it as convenient as possible. Conversely, I have a friend who bought plots in the country, nearby to where her father grew up because the area is important to her. We all have a different thought process for our final resting place and there are no wrong answers.

The process
To be fair, neither of us have ever planned a funeral or purchased a plot before so when I reached out to the Remembrance service, we agreed to meet up to discuss. There is a lot that goes into planning your BIG DIRT NAP but most falls into two categories: the arrangements and the plot itself. Both can be as simple as you’d like or as complex as you’d like depending on your personal tastes and your budget.

We met up on a weekday to discuss our plans with a Funeral Director named Michelle. I have to say, she was incredible. There is this notion that somehow all funeral homes are out to squeeze as much money out of you as possible but this couldn’t be further from our experience. Most places have their pricing listed right on their website so you can comparision shop fairly easily. In fact, once we had the basics down, she gave us the simplest option as possible for a cremation: two urns, a small headstone and a Celebration of Life. We could have gone with a flat plaque or a pillow style of marker but I did want a headstone that was upright.

A pillow is on an angle, a bit off the ground

A plaque is directly on the earth

The services and the service
Mr. Tucker and I don’t want an elaborate religious service so we opted for a two hour Celebration of Life where family and friend could come pay their respects. The internment itself would be limited to family afterwards. The entire process from picking up the body, to dealing with remains to the service is $6336.63 per person and is broken down by the following choices:

The taxes excluded portion
$895 – Staff/Professional Services
$400 – Administration
$575 – Transport
$475 – Documentation
$395 – Shelter
$700 – Reception
$425 – Visitation Staff
$685 – Basic Urn
$5147.15 (4555 +592.15 taxes)

Taxes all-in portion
$52.28 – Municipal Death Registration Fee
$75 – Coroner’s Fee
$1062.20 – Cremation
1189.40
$6336.55 – Grand total for the services for both of us

Plotting our forever home

“Oooh! We get cremated in a pine box!” Nick said.
“Not even,” Michelle countered. “It’s fiberboard.”
“Works for me!” he said.

Originally when Michelle priced it out, she did the cheapest area with a headstone which was my requirement as Mr. Tucker had no opinion (“Why would I care! I’ll be dead!”) in a place called the Urn Garden. It sounded good to me and was placed up some lovely rock steps under a giant tree. It looked lovely in photos so it seemed like that was what we’d go with. Michelle encouraged us to go have a look when we were leaving to give us an idea of how the layout was. The plot itself had space for two urns and was approximately $11000 bringing the total to a little over $23000 for both of us.

When the meeting ended, we left the main building we headed up to the Urn Garden to have a look at the space. It was a gorgeous area even in dark and dreary November. But there were two issues from my point of view that made it less than an ideal choice: the plots were so close together that you couldn’t even turn a wheelchair around, or even go and pay your respects without being right up against someone else’s gravestone. Finally – and this probably seems like a weird one to most people – the only headstone colour choices that were allowed here were pink and grey.

When I saw that, I balked. Mr. Tucker of course didn’t really care either way (“Why would I care! I’ll be dead!”) but I was unhappy. I wanted the option for a black headstone and to have a more traditional spacing for the plot. Also, I wanted to be as close to the end of a row as possible. I have memories of traversing the cemetery my family is buried in every year on Mother’s Day for years as we always forgot the locations of my grandmother and great-grandmother’s graves. I wanted it to be as easy to find as possible.

We went home and emailed Michelle and asked her for other options. She got back to us with pricing for three traditional plot options we could look at and we made an appointment for the following week to go drive around the cemetery to look at them.

I want to be clear – there are MUCH cheaper options available from a Remembrance Wall to just taking the ashes home with you and spreading them somewhere. But I did want something a little more traditional which is why we started at the Urn Garden. You could bring this far under the prices I am quoting here.

The next step up were traditional plots which had the option for two caskets/four urns or six urns. You could get whatever 30×30 monument in whatever colour you wanted but the options started here at $21651 for the new section, $25493 for a middle section and $28092 for a plot in the older section of the cemetery.

As we drove around I noticed that all of the sections had decent options. Michelle would get out of the car with her giant laminated map and stand outside where the headstones on various plots would be and then she’d indicate the size of the space. She was an absolute trooper doing this over-and-over again in the rain.

Michelle’s map of plots

Alas, channelling Goldilocks, I was dissatisfied with the first two options. The new section was right next to a parking lot and they were looking to expand the crematorium so we didn’t know what the future held for that section (too cold!). The middle section you’d have to hike around to the back and there weren’t many trees around so in the summer there would be no place to really get any shade (too hot!). Naturally, of course, the older section was juuuuuust right. There was a lovely plot right up on the top of the hill, at the end of a row, about 10 feet from the cemetery’s ring road and banked by trees at the foot of the plot (“The perfect place,” I thought to myself, “to put a bench up against the trees.”[1]). Mr. Tucker also weighed in at this point and said he didn’t want to be right next to a parking lot or a place devoid of trees. So as it turns out, he did care – at least a tiny bit – about his final resting place! He, too, preferred the older, treed section.

Here is the breakdown of the Goldilocks plot

Plot, burial and accessories
$10,080 – 2 grave lot side by side
$6,720 – Care and Maintenance (one-time fee)
$1,100 – Burial Fee for Urns $550 each
$6,000 – 30X30 Monument with base (Black)
$960 – Concrete Foundation for Monument
$28,091.80 Grand Total ($24,860 + $3,231.80 taxes) for the plot

So many options – and fabric options, too! You could really get cozy in there!

We went back to the office where she asked us what we wanted the headstone to say and what type of design and etching we wanted. It will come as no surprise that there are a plethora of options including etching photos with a laser right onto the stone. It’s a wee bit too uncanny valley/bad family tattoo for my tastes so we chose a more traditional option with some flowers down the sides and a plain font. She actually took a picture of the stone to attach to our file and then drew out how we wanted the writing to go, what we wanted it to say, and in what order and what style. I suppose it makes sense to plan the entire thing out, after all the point of pre-planning a funeral is to alleviate all of the decision-making from your loved ones while they are grieving.

What I learned
To be honest, I found the entire process to be fascinating and to be an absolute relief. It was the last nail in the coffin (har har) for us to move from this stage of our lives into the next one. Is it an eye-wateringly expensive endeavour to pre-plan it like this? Possibly. But I would rather do it now and get it over and done with. I just have to leave the kids one thing you cannot pre-plan: the catering for the Celebration of Life. It’s the one thing they don’t handle because it’s unpredictable.

Michelle did mention that they manage almost all of the administration for notifying the government about your death. She said that the industry started doing that when it was discovered that many widows were missing the deadlines for claiming the $2500 death benefit from CPP. You only have 6 months to claim it after a death and since historically many women didn’t touch finances or administration for their families, they were missing out on this money they absolutely could have used. So funeral homes took it over. Now they notify everyone: Service Canada (CPP/OAS/GIS), cancel your driver’s license, cancel your health card, as well as register the death, get the coroner’s release etc. Although this can vary, they provide surviving heirs 15 copies of the death certificate (with access to more as needed) for banking, insurance etc.

They also offer a 12-month, interest-free payment plan for both the Funeral Services and the Plot. We put a deposit down on the plot and took them up on this offer for the balance. When we pass, all the surviving spouse or relatives have to do is call the funeral home’s 24-hour line and they will set in motion all of the things we planned. There will be no difficult choices made out of guilt or assumptions about what like or don’t like – it’s all on file and it is all paid for (except the catering).

The money we pay today is held and invested by a third party company. So on one hand, we lock in at 2025 prices. On the other hand, could I probably have chosen to just invest it all and made more money and then just leave the kids detailed instructions? Possibly. People who try and optimize for every dollar will probably go this route. But with my luck I will die in a market downturn and the kids will struggle with getting the documentation they need to release the funds in order to pay for things. This is a classic example of my mantra: THROW MONEY AT THE PROBLEM. I think the lack of stress & worry will be worth any gains I could have made on this money. So for the next year we will replace the paying we typically have to pay for the mortgage/condo fees/insurance/taxes and transition that into a new piece of property: THE BIG DIRT NAP.

[1]Of course I priced it out. $3800.