With regard to your article about the cost of funerals ("Cemetery chief: Cost of burial is absolutely ridiculous", The Herald, January 7), I have just organised the funeral of my stepmother who, although from Aberdeenshire, died in a care home in Northumberland, just before Christmas.
Because Nanette had no living relatives (she was 90) we decided "not to have a funeral" as only my husband and I and someone designated by the home would have attended.
For a basic "simple" funeral – that is, no minister, no piper, no flowers, no newspaper announcement, no purvey, no funeral cars, no music, no printed order of service, no plot, no burial fees and so on – the cost was £3,000.
We thought this an incredible sum but it didn’t end there. When I called the local undertakers in Turriff, where she had grown up and where her grandfather had been provost for six years, to inquire about the possibility of her ashes being placed beside her parents in a local churchyard, the cost spiralled.
“It's now £385 and, whatever you do, make sure it happens before April 1, as last year the council put up the cost in April by more than 60 per cent, and if you want the ashes buried on a Saturday, it would be more than £500”, according to the undertaker; this for a plot that her family already owns.
Heaven forfend if we had had to buy a new one. I felt tempted to take a spade and dig the hole myself but the undertaker warned: “There are a’ sorts o’ regulations against that, it's nae a guid idea.”
I didn’t tell him I had done precisely that when my own mother died in 1998 – without informing the cemetery officials, naturally.
Sheila Duffy,
3 Hamilton Drive,
Glasgow.
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