Dealing with Aging Parents - Funerals - Part 2

This is part two of my postings on funerals.

What happens when your loved one dies is the funeral home is contacted to carry their body to the funeral home. You can talk with whoever comes to pick up the body to arrange a time and day to meet with them to plan when you want to have the visitation and the funeral service. When you go to this session, bring your already written obituary, plus the name of the cemetery where the burial plots are and the name and contact info of the main speaker at the service. The young man we dealt with each time was very professional and caring and helped us greatly making sure we hadn’t forgotten anything in our planning the service. They’ll let you know what all needs to done to prepare for the funeral. My advice is to let them handle as much are you comfortable with. You’ll have plenty of other things to deal with.

Another thing that you’ll do at this meeting is tell them how many official death certificate copies you need from the state. You’ll need these for all sorts of things from claiming life insurance benefits, to accessing bank accounts and various other dealings. I’d tell you to order at least eight to ten and they’ll cost you six to seven dollars each. It will take two to four weeks for you to get these.

Finally, like any service you buy, the funeral home is going to want to arrange for payment. My advice is if at all humanly possible (and of course the money is available) is to have the money set aside somewhere that can be accessed easily – either by the surviving spouse or the children. I realize this is not always possible and you may have to wait for an insurance policy to pay out. Keep in mind you’ll need that death certificate to even file to even start this process. And it takes some time for the insurance company to process and pay this out. If you can’t pay at the meeting, somebody will have to sign a document promising to pay in thirty days. We got the death certificates for mom in two weeks and I hand walked it to the hospital (where she worked and had the policy) to process mom’s life insurance policy. We got the payout just two days before the thirty days was up. With dad, we put the money aside before he passed away and I was able to write a check on the spot.

We are still in the middle of two more issues as far as my parents go. One (which we are almost done with) is getting a headstone and preparing their funeral plot. The second is probating and settling their estate(s). I had no idea the amount of work that is required after your parents pass away. One tends to think that once the funeral is over "that is it". But, I can tell you "it is most certainly not it".

I hope these posts are of some value to you. When the two above issues are done, I will blog about them as well.