Roger Rabbits with Jim Bunny

You wake with symptoms incompatible with life – no pulse, hair and nails have stopped growing; you have cold, pale and mottled complexion. Looking like death warmed up, some might say.

But when you check the cost of dying, burial fees, you’ll be jolted back to life faster than a defibrillator can do it. You’ll jump off your death bed with new life and vigour.

Of course, you have no control over your end. It will come apparently. And if dying wasn’t inevitable, it would probably be prohibitive. Because suddenly we discover we can’t afford to live and we can’t afford to die. Where does that leave us? Pottering around in purgatory until we have enough coin to be dispatched. Lovely!

Councils around the country have hiked burial fees, some by double digits. We’re told one in two New Zealanders will go into debt for a funeral. Oh dear – while some of us Methuselahs, we old farts, have only hoary old existential issues to wrestle with, others have to worry angst about the cost of dying too. That’s just too much. I like to think that from the moment of expiration, the cost of dying is no longer my problem – I will have bequeathed that issue to friends and family. Good luck with that.

Logging off

It’s been recommended that us folk in that corner of the paddock where The Grim Reaper is doing his recruiting, having a conversation with loved ones about how to fund your logging off. Well, excuse me kids – I am too busy with the vicissitudes of life and death to worry petty things like dollars and cents. You sort it.

I have had my allotted three score years and ten – plus four freebies for which I am grateful. Some things have fallen off, some things have stopped working, and other things need CRC or replacing. So if I’m not in the Reaper’s paddock, I’m probably just on the other side of the fence. And I suspect if I dumped the cost of a funeral on the kids they’d probably quote my wisdom back at me – take ownership of your  problems. Deal with them. In other words get off your deathbed and go back to work because we don’t want your passing eating into the estate.

Here’s the rub

A 2023 report puts the cost of a “very modest” funeral at $7500 for a cremation and $10,000 for a burial. What does “very modest” mean? No sausage rolls, no flowers, no bagpiper, no nonsense. Perhaps just a shroud and funeral pyre at the bottom of the garden? Then the neighbours would complain because they’d just put their washing out.   

It’s what they do in Kathmandu where I just happened on a cortège. Poor old “Nagnath” was wrapped in a white shroud and borne shoulder high by mourners through city streets and cremated right there on the riverbank. The smoke drifted across the cafes as Nagnath drifted off into eternity – and his ashes cast to the slow fetid current of the Bagmati River. Now they know how to strip the costs out of a funeral.

That’s why I’m toying with natural burial – environmentally sustainable – a shroud, a shallow grave, under a tree, a living memorial, in a wee copse. No embalming, no funeral service, no celebrant, no venue hire, no palaver, no asparagus rolls, no dry sherry, no funeral notices. Simple, clean, cheap. Dust to dust, no fuss.

It’s my party! 

What about the mourners? There’s the remote possibility someone might want to celebrate my ending. Don’t they deserve the opportunity to grieve? Well, it’s my party so let’s do it before I pop off – then we can both laugh and cry. But bring your own beers and don’t stay all day. And whatever the family chooses to do after I’m gone is none of my business, I won’t be invited.

I’m reminded of another living funeral I went to. What a boohoo that was! Two colleagues who lived with fag in one hand and a beer in the other, were dealt terminal diagnoses the same time. Their big pre-end bash was hugely funny, tearfully sad, irreverent, cathartic. And beautiful. For them. For us. Then I said: “Thanks guys, it’s been great” and shook hands. Heartfelt stuff. I had given it a lot of thought. They smiled and said: “Thanks for coming”. They’d obviously been thinking about it too. And that was it. Never saw them again.

Are the burial increases because we’re running out of space? That would figure. Or is it because the wily chief financial officer is always scratching around for ways to top up the rates take? There’s nothing as certain as taxes and death, so as they watch us Baby Boomers coming on tap, they must rub their hands.

Buried with the ex

Suggested to a colleague she might like to share a burial plot with her ex – save land, save space, save cost. Just save. She haemorrhaged at the thought – loathed him when he was alive, she said. So why would she condemn herself to eternal damnation by sharing a burial plot. Fair enough – rumbling around in the confined cold, dark and damp with the ex might be too much.