Funeral Directors

In my job I've worked alongside, and dealt with, many funeral directors. Some of them I would highly recommend, others I have been known to tell people to avoid. I've visited a few where the bodies have been stacked high on top of each other because their building doesn't have enough space, and others - this one I wasn't happy about as one of my wonderful customers had passed and was there - have been stuck out in garages; the day I visited I was dressing a wicker casket for a customer and the director told me there wasn't enough room for me to do it inside and asked if I was ok in the garage. I had no problem with that, assuming they would wheel the casket out for me to do what needed to be done, only for it to already be there with many others dotted about the place - I had to move several myself to be able to get to the one I wanted. I would never tell because space is at a premium and have never let on my reasons for not recommending them because I know how I would have felt if I'd thought my Dad had been shut out in a garage, or stacked atop/underneath others, and whilst I am aware they are already dead I still like to think they would be treated with respect. The people I moved that particular day I chatted with and apologised for wheeling them about a freezing cold garage. I chat to those who coffins/caskets I am dressing. I'm one of those people who will apologise if I have to walk across someone else's grave to visit another. They're not there, they don't know but I find it disrespectful not to - don't even get me started on people picnicking in cemeteries with their kids/dogs running around all over the place. Visit your loved one by all means but it's not a bloody playground.

Having said all of that what I read this morning about a funeral directors in Hull has had me reading words and staring at them in disbelief. Yes, some of the ones I've visited may not look after them how you think they are being looked after, but to keep the bodies in freezers LONG AFTER their family have buried/cremated them (or so they thought) is just beyond me. To make it even worse for them of the 35 bodies they have found, their family now has to go and identify them. I can't even begin to imagine how that would screw up your mind. If someone had told me a year after my Dad's cremation that his body was actually still in the funeral home, in a freezer, and that my Mum or a family member would then be required to identify him I think I would have lost it. What kind of people have you got to be to do such a thing? 

I do feel slightly different about them finding cremated remains as my Mum has always said she doesn't believe we get back our loved one as such - she still believes they cremate everyone together, or that they can't be that clean you always get back just your loved one - but even so; if we'd had my Dad's ashes to then be told they weren't his, I'd want the home office to refund what we paid to have them dug back up when the crematorium asked us for even more money to keep them there! 

It would be different if it was a recent funeral and they suddenly realised they'd buries/cremated the wrong person  but to have kept them for over a year it just doesn't make any sense. Why send some off to their funeral service but keep others? My poor little brain cell just can't work that out. Unless they were hoping to be able to sell them off at a later date to make money from them there seems no rhyme or reason as to why anyone would do such a thing. I understand serial killing a lot better than this. 

I hear there are calls for funeral directors to be regulated now, and that's a good idea in one way but it wouldn't have stopped this from happening, won't stop it from happening again, so isn't really worth the costs that would be involved. 

I often think there isn't much else in the world that can shock me any more, and then 'Boom' something like this comes along and proves me wrong!