Since the last funeral I attended was some years ago (my father’s, nearly 30+ years ago) I’ve forgotten just how tedious and complex arranging a funeral can be. Here that task is made all the more complicated by the bureaucracy and sheer number of people who are involved and secondly, by the weather itself. Namely, winter. It’s a little difficult here, in the throes of winter to simply dig a hole in the ground. It’s usually frozen as hard as iron. Never mind, who wants to stand at a graveside in horizontal blowing snow, when it’s MINUS 30 outside. No one is the answer.

The chosen route is to be cremated, have a church service, and then, have the resulting urn of ashes interred either permanently in a viewing building or rotunda, or temporarily pending spring’s arrival for burial in a plot. If you have a plot that is. Land here, like anywhere I imagine, is at a premium.

Which brings me back to the bureaucracy side of things. First up is the funeral home and the several online forms that need to be filled out, and photos provided, along with a copy of the doctor’s initial dead certificate. The provincial one takes 4-5 weeks to be issued. So, no waiting around for that. Otherwise, no one would be buried.

For a church service, especially when you want to hold it in what is the local parish, namely, the Basilica, there are layers of people who need to be approached and paperwork presented, all of which each need an appointment for. Then if you want a choir to sing at said service and a priest to preside, both need a separate phone call and arrangements made. Flowers? You guessed it. Invites, death notices, printers …

Then there’s the cemetery as well, and whether you pay rental on a spot in the viewing room, and a downpayment for a key to said building. Which can run at $75 for just the key. Family plot? You need a gravedigger or two, a different priest (maybe) and all the while, costs are mounting up.

We think it’s hard in the land of the living to make ends meet these days, try thinking about the cost of your funeral and plan accordingly for those left behind so they won’t have a heart attack at the cost. Buy a life insurance. Even then, that’s a whole other story when it comes time to access said insurance and get a payout.

Some of you, sadly, will have already gone through this, and maybe more than once, and know what I’m talking about. How there are so many things that need to be attended to, sorted through, organised, and settled. It becomes all consuming. Thankfully, for us, we have numbers on our side, and it’s been a divide and conquer approach to getting everything organised.

I don’t doubt that, in the end, we’ll get there and my father in law will be laid to rest and the family able to pay their respects sooner rather than later.