Stories from the Web
Mississippi Funeral Home Refuses to Provide Services to Married Gay Couple
By Sandhya Somashekhar for Washington Post For most of the 52 years he was in a relationship with Robert Huskey, Jack Zawadski doesn’t remember much in the way of anti-gay discrimination. Not while they were trying to grow apples on a farm in Wisconsin. Not during the decades they spent as ...
Continue ReadingA funeral home displayed a Vietnam vet’s body without a coffin over a payment dispute
By Brian Murphy for the Miami Herald A dispute over payment led to a deceased Vietnam War veteran’s body being placed on a gurney — not in a coffin — during his visitation at a funeral home in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, according to pictures posted by his family members. George ...
Continue ReadingWe’ve mastered weddings—but the funeral needs a lot of work
By Vanessa Quirk for Quartz April 4, 2017 The $20-billion-dollar death industry is ripe for disruption—and not of the zombie kind. A typical funeral service today is remarkably similar to one from 50 years ago. A funeral home will display the embalmed body, perhaps in an open casket, while a ...
Continue ReadingBringing the Funeral Industry into the 21st Century
On April 23, 2017 the Funeral Consumers Alliance of Princeton is hosting their annual conference featuring guest speaker, Josh Slocum, Executive Director of the National Funeral Consumers Alliance (FCA). He will deliver a talk on "Bringing the Funeral Industry into the 21st Century" which includes: Why is the funeral industry ...
Continue ReadingSorry, Nobody Wants Your Parents’ Stuff
Advice for boomers desperate to unload family heirloom By Richard Eisenberg for Next Avenue, February 9, 2016 After my father died at 94 in September, leaving my sister and me to empty his one-bedroom, independent living New Jersey apartment, we learned the hard truth that others in their 50s and 60s need ...
Continue ReadingFTC Covert Funeral Home Investigations Reveal Violations
February 15, 2017 via FTC News Federal Trade Commission investigators working undercover in nine states found failures to disclose pricing information to consumers, as required by the FTC’s Funeral Rule, in 31 of the 133 funeral homes they visited during 2015 and 2016. The FTC conducts undercover inspections to ensure ...
Continue ReadingUnlicensed West Philly undertaker sentenced to two years' probation
By Joseph A. Slobodzian, Staff Writer for Philly.com An unlicensed West Philadelphia funeral director whose mortuary was closed by the state in 2015 has been sentenced to two years’ probation and ordered to repay $5,000 to three families whose dead relatives were mishandled. Blair Hawkins, 54, of Laurel Springs, who operated ...
Continue ReadingNortheast Texas Cremation Costs Vary Dramatically
By George Hale • MAR 21, 2017 for 88.9 KTR In Northeast Texas, the cost of a cremation can be unpredictable. In Paris, for example, the Peaceful Rest funeral home charges $950. Go two miles east, to Bright Holland funeral home, and it's more than $2,000. Three others in Paris charge somewhere in between. In comparing cremation ...
Continue ReadingWhen is dying a laughing matter?
By Allie Shah for the Star Tribune March 6, 2017 Roy Cato is dying. But that hasn’t stopped him or his caregivers from finding a way to keep laughing. Whether it’s jokes about enemas (“the enemy,” Cato calls them) or his long-term planning (“I need a calendar”), he has embraced humor as a ...
Continue ReadingYou May Want to Marry My Husband
By Amy Krouse Rosenthal , featured in the New York Times March 3, 2017 I have been trying to write this for a while, but the morphine and lack of juicy cheeseburgers (what has it been now, five weeks without real food?) have drained my energy and interfered with whatever prose prowess ...
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