When a family has lost a loved one, attention in their loving discussions generally turns immediately to burial. If the wishes of the deceased have not been made clear to the family, official papers are searched to uncover clues as to where the family member should be buried (or even whether the body is to be buried. It is often the case, of course, that cremation has been requested and that the remains are to be scattered over some special place), and burial extras are planned. A wide variety of accessories that can be exceedingly important to burial are important to consider during this time of great need for a family. These burial extras are available in a vast array of styles, designs and even prices from retailers across the world on websites that offer surprisingly friendly and efficient customer service. They include headstones, caskets, flowers, and memorial gifts of all types. And, yes, they even also can include cremation urns – because one of the many options for what to do with cremation urns is to simply bury them in traditional graves. In this article we offer a general overview of what burial extras are available to the grieving families of people who have lost their lives. And, further, we offer a few important tips on how families can secure the burial extras that they need most without paying for unnecessary products and services.
Cemetery Burial Extras
Most burial extras end up ultimately being used at cemeteries, so cemeteries play an important role in burial extras. Before we delve into a rundown of what cemetery burial extras are available to families who have suffered a loss, it is important to focus on a few consumer-related matters that effect burial extras used in cemeteries. These matters all center around the idea that, though cemeteries often make plenty of burial extras available through the retail portions of their own business, they also are competing in these sales with other retail establishments that may be able to offer better service and lower prices. Families in the market for cemetery burial extras should understand that, despite things that they may hear to the contrary, they are never under any legal or moral obligation to buy their cemetery burial extras directly from the cemetery in which they are doing business, the establishment that will be taking charge of perpetually caring for their loved one’s remains. Though their loved one will be buried in a grave plot at a particular cemetery, all of the burial accessories – burial extras, if you will – may certainly be purchased elsewhere, and the cemetery staff is required by law (and without penalty to the customer) to make their grave site open to products sold by their competitors. The good news for consumers about this is that, no matter what you may hear from a sales person who works for a cemetery, burial extras such as caskets and headstones may be installed from other retailers in just about every case. And, while the cemetery can (and often does) ask for an extra “setting fee” in order to handle the outside product, federal anti-trust rules prohibit the firm from less for such fees from their own customers than they ask from those who purchase the items elsewhere. This means, for example, if a cemetery regularly prohibits self-installation of headstones and asks that everyone who has a headstone installed on their property pay a fee of, say, $450, the company cannot legally waive that fee for those who order a headstone directly from them. To do so would constitute an unfair competitive advantage over the companies that do not offer cemetery services but do offer some products that happen to be used by families in cemeteries. This is a very important consumer protection afforded by lawmakers and court decisions alike that all too many people who find themselves in the market for cemetery burial extras are unaware of. Hence, unscrupulous cemetery managers and their sales staff can all too often be found guilty of taking advantage of the families they serve being ignorant on this matter. An important thing to note in regard to cemetery burial extras is that families should not expect that cemetery sales staff will have their own best financial interest at heart as they make their sales pitches about products they recommend to accompany the burial site they are purchasing (or have already purchased) for their loved one.
Common cemetery burial extras are products such as headstones and burial vaults. In fact, these are the most common burial extras sold for use at cemeteries. It is ironic that, in most cases, these products are actually considered by families as must-haves for burial rather than as extra’s, but, technically speaking anyway, they are generally optional extras. Headstones are considered extras because they are not physically required for burial, but the fact is, many cemeteries today require that their customers sign contracts agreeing to install a headstone within a few months or years of burial or face charges for the automatic installation of a generic headstone. This is done, of course, to protect the integrity of the cemetery and is generally considered legal under most laws of the United States as well as local jurisdictions that have authority over cemeteries. So, because of this, it is debatable whether headstones are actually deserving of the title burial extras. Those words imply that the product is optional, but, under such rules, the product is not exactly optional. This discussion may be considered fruitless by many people, however, since few people patronizing cemeteries in today’s memorial products industry purchase a grave plot with no intention of eventually installing a grave marker or headstone over it. The two products seem to be complementary, and even mutually exclusive, in every sense of the word, but they are nevertheless not, in most cases, technically linked together sufficiently to leave headstones off the list of cemetery burial extras.
Burial vaults are even less optional, in many cases, than headstones. These cemetery burial extras are probably the most controversial of all memorial products sold on today’s market because a good number of modern experts have and will testify that they are entirely useless for their intended purpose – and many people even question the intended purpose. The fact is, however, that just about every one of these burial extras that are purchased in the United States today is done so because a cemetery requires such a purpose of all its customers under the (controversial) notion that a cemetery burial vault will help with cemetery landscape maintenance by providing a protection from large divots that may be created by the ground falling in around a buried casket. Though many scientist, and even experts in the landscaping industry, say this claim is dubious at best, the rule remains a legal requirement of many cemeteries despite the fact that consumer activists point out the more likely reason that cemeteries require burial vaults is that the vaults are exceedingly profitable, often costing as little as $800 and generating $400 profit for the cemetery on minimum sales. It is often the case that families required to purchase burial vaults will find themselves making an emotionally charged decision to, so long as they have to buy a vault anyway, spend several thousand dollars more than the minimum vault would cost to buy an elaborately designed, impeccably crafted burial vault to line the grave in which their loved one’s casket will rest. Consumer activists regret that such options are made available to vulnerable families, who often unwisely go into great amount of debt to cover the cost of this burial extra purchase. Nevertheless, the sales of elaborate burial vaults – at prices sometimes reaching $20,000 or more – remain fairly common at cemeteries across the United States and elsewhere in the modern developed world.
Funeral Home Burial Extras
But cemetery burial extras are just the start. Funeral homes typically offer their own burial extras too. Chief among these are caskets. Again, as with burial vaults and headstones, many people might argue with the notion that caskets are, in fact, burial extras. In today’s modern death care industry, caskets are still, for the most part, a requirement for any burial. (Though consumer activist groups have begun in recent years to attract a great deal of attention and support for their cause of promoting “truly direct burials” in which a body is covered in a very simply covering and then buried directly in the ground without benefit of an outer container such as a casket – and certainly not a burial vault. This environmentally friendly, very inexpensive manner of burial is proving increasingly popular with consumers and families of loved ones who have passed away, but it faces stiff competition from funeral home and cemetery marketing departments – and lobbying organizations – who see the practice as a great threat to their profitable sales of caskets, burial vaults and other related products. Industry experts have a great deal of vested interest in assuring that customers believe that “truly direct burials” are either illegal or impractical – though they are neither in many regions of the United States and the world). Caskets are typically sold by funeral homes even though they are used in cemeteries. The reason for this is a complex matter that involves a review of anti-trust laws and court decisions in the United States, and that discussion is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that caskets are a very profitable and integral part of the funeral home industry and that, as with the cemetery burial extras discussed above, consumers should be aware that they have many options that might not be available from the funeral home they are working with. In all cases, families who have lost a loved one are more than welcome, legally speaking, to require that a funeral home use a casket they have purchased from an outside source in a funeral service or a memorial ceremony it is planning for the family. Long gone are the days in which a family finds itself at the mercy of a funeral home that requires all customers to sign a contract agreeing to use only the caskets that are provided and made available by the funeral home itself.
Flowers are yet another burial extra that can be purchased from most funeral homes in the United States. As with all of the burial extras we have discussed so far – and even those we have not discussed – it is important that families who are grieving the loss of a loved one for whom they are planning a memorial service remember that they are not at the funeral home’s expensive mercy in regard to flowers to be purchased as a burial extra. Many flower shops in any given area are able to provide beautiful “funeral sprays” that serve as excellent décor for a loved one’s casket, and, though a family may understand, intellectually, that the flowers will quickly decay into an unrecognizable form once they are buried atop the casket of the deceased (as is the traditional practice), feeling emotionally comforted at the thought that those flowers that played such an important role in a loved one’s funeral service will be spending eternity with the loved one himself can be as up-lifting an experience as a grieving relative can feel.
Cremation Burial Extras
And, finally, we turn our attention briefly to cremation burial extras, those products that are of benefit to families whose loved ones have been cremated but whose remains will be buried in a traditional cemetery plot – an increasingly popular practice as cremation itself becomes more and more common each year. For a detailed comparison of cremation and traditional burial options, see Cremation vs Burial: A Comparison of Each Memorial Service.
Once again, we find ourselves in a situation in which an “extra” is, in fact, required. Though it is physically possible to bury cremation ashes without the use of any urn, most cemeteries that allow ashes to be buried require that the remains be housed in a cremation urn. This may seem wasteful to many people – and consumer advocates continue to argue against this as a practice that is common to most cemeteries in the United States. And critics of the rule are not impressed by “scattering gardens” that many cemeteries have begun in recent years in which ashes are allowed to be distributed above ground without benefit of an urn. The reason these are not exactly a consumer advocate’s top recommendation is because, quite simply, the cemetery company typically charges more for the privilege of having ashes distributed in a scattering garden than it would for burial services in a traditional plot. Many articles have been written across the internet addressing the question of why a family would agree to spend more for less – as they do if they purchase “space” in a scattering garden. And the answer always centers around the concept of emotional spending. Many families in the midst of their grief will agree to spend much more money than they might otherwise think is wise just so they can feel comfortable that they have done all they can to properly pay tribute to the beloved memory of their precious family member or devoted friend. This is of course what leads to the belief, often documented on the internet after a family has paid for a funeral service and burial expenses, that scoundrels in the funeral home and cemetery business have gotten the better of them. And this is why those who are active in the death care industry continue to face strong criticism from public officials and consumer activists alike. They are often accused of taking advantage of the weakened emotional state of the families they serve to sell goods and services that are not necessarily needed (or even appreciated) at prices that are artificially inflated by the very fact that the people who buy them are less capable, from an emotional perspective, of saying no to them – or at least negotiating a more reasonable price for them.
The bottom line to burial extras that we intend to convey in this summary of them is that families who are considering buying them be wary that, though they are talked about as being options, they are often not optional at all – unless the customer is willing to stand strong and hard to get the type of funeral, burial and memorial that he or she wants and needs. Many who have fought hard for their right to say no to burial extras such as those we list here (and many others) have testified that the effort was well worth the thousands of dollars of savings that can often result. And that can be a great emotional benefit in the long run – even if it puts a family at risk of short term emotional terminal in the grief-filled days that immediately follow a death and precede a memorial service that can be as emotionally charged as any event in a family’s life together.