From Spring Tea with Kerlin Walsh Law weekly Facebook LIVE video, recorded 4/16/21.
Welcome to Spring Tea with Kerlin Walsh Law. Today we are going to talk about funerals, burials, cremation. Yes, the disposition of your remains. We are going there! But I promise you, it will not be depressing. It’s valuable information that my clients ask me for all the time. You may even find it a little uplifting.
I can tell you that after 20 years of doing estate planning, grief is a debilitating state. When you pass away, your family will be in a position where they can hardly think. They’re confused. Concentration is impaired. So the more you plan in advance to prepare them, all they have to do is walk through the arrangements you made. You have given them a wonderful gift.
Let’s talk about those arrangements. First, think about how you would want your body to be treated, what would you want to happen after your death? Do you want your body to go to medical science? We still have clients who choose that. If that is what you want, if you have always been moved by service and giving, if you care deeply about science and medicine. If you’ve had a child who went to medical school and you saw how valuable those cadavers were, by all means, make that your choice. Find an organization or a hospital or a school that you want to donate to. Find out what their process is, get the paperwork completed, get it with your important paperwork, and make sure that your family knows. That is how you make sure that if that’s what you want, it is taken care of.
Another very popular choice is cremation, particularly in recent decades when the churches have become a little bit more lenient about allowing cremation to happen. So if you know your body is to be cremated, think about the distribution of your ashes and where you want to get that set up. I have had my clients say many times they would love their ashes to go with a loved one or with a pet, wherever they had their honeymoon, maybe back to their homeland. Once again, have a think about it, talk with your family, get those wishes into your estate plan, and get them with your important papers.
In fact, since 2013, our Power of Attorneys for Healthcare permits you to get those details in there, and it gives authority to whoever your agent is to be able to carry those out. That’s something to think about also.
There are also many ecological ways we now can have our body turned into a tree or go through decomposing, so there’s lots of options. The idea is to think about it and decide what’s best for you.
A very traditional choice of course is burial or interment. Probably the most expensive, but still a very popular, traditional choice.
All of these can be planned for in advance.
A responsible thing to do is plan for the payment in advance. It really has become quite popular, and maybe a bit sad in recent times, that there’s often a Go Fund Me if no arrangements have been made. It’s wonderful that a Go Fund Me is available, but with that sometimes I know families feel a little bit of shame or embarrassment. So if we don’t want to place families in those situations, let’s get the arrangements not just made, but paid for.
Most funeral homes will have a pre-made contract. You can go to the funeral home, determine what you want, and get the details. This is all governed by law. There is a Funeral & Burial Act in Illinois. There’s also a Cemetery Cares Act, so you are protected by consumer law. You don’t have to be concerned that, “What if I sign a contract with this funeral home and they just disappear?”
If you don’t want to be tied to a particular funeral home, think about a Funeral Trust. Remember what I always tell you, there’s a Trust for everything, and indeed there’s a Funeral Trust for those arrangements, also. The idea with a Funeral Trust is that the trustee is not the funeral home. The trustee is an independent party, a financial house, maybe an insurance company. There is more flexibility this way. The trustee can make sure that if you want to change funeral homes, you can do that. And they can monitor costs. In the policy for your Funeral Trust, if there’s more money in there, that can go back to your family. Some people believe that there’s more chance of that happening if there’s an independent trustee than if it’s just the funeral home making arrangements. I’ve worked with all of the funeral homes in our area of the southwest suburbs of Chicago, and they are exemplary. I have never seen anything that I would have ever questioned with those funeral homes. A Funeral Trust is a wonderful option for the payment of those costs. You’re protected, it’s something you can do in advance, and it can be revocable or irrevocable.
You might wonder why would we choose an irrevocable option, wouldn’t we want to change our mind? The revocable certainly gives you flexibility. You can move, and get almost all of your money back. However, for those of us who are in the position that we’re spending down our assets, in order to qualify for Medicare to pay for nursing home costs, a portion of that money can be used to pay for a funeral. But if it’s not irrevocable, they’re not going to consider that a good use of the money, so they do have to be irrevocable.
So we decide what we want, get it in the paperwork, decide how to pay for it, such as annuity, insurance policy, Trust, and get that all taken care of in advance.
Then, it’s time for the additional wishes. How do you want to be dressed? An experience with one of my very first clients has always stayed with me. This little old lady, who had pages and pages of wishes, all her hymns, her readings, the beautiful blue dress that she wanted to be dressed in when laid in her coffin, and the Flower of Scotland played at the service. It was so full of detail, so beautiful. I’ve had men say, “Throw me in the woods for all I care.” Some people are very detail oriented, some are not. Make sure that’s in your paperwork. In your paperwork you can say, “Here are my wishes. I very much want you to do that for me.” You can say, “I trust you to do what’s right for me, but here are my suggestions. Or you can just say, “You at that time are in the best position to do what’s right for me. I trust you to take care of everything.”
Let me tell you, the more detail that you want and the more you put in place, the more chance there is of it getting carried out. And we always talk about family harmony. Most families I know can’t even decide where to go to dinner without a little bit of an argument. So deciding something as sensitive as Mom or Dad’s arrangement, when everybody again, remember, is in that fragile state, is difficult. The more you plan in advance is a win-win. You make it easy for them, and you make sure that whatever it is that you want is carried out.
I want to make sure that any of you who have lost a family member to Covid, friends, someone from your church, in the last year, knows that recently FEMA has released funds for funeral reimbursement if the death was Covid-related. If someone died after January of 2020, and if either on the death certificate listed Covid as the main cause or even a contributing factor, you can have funeral costs reimbursed up to $9,000. That’s a huge help for those families so horribly affected by the pandemic last year and this. Go to FEMA’s website. If you have any questions, just call us at Kerlin Walsh Law at 708-448-5169 and we’ll be happy to get you the details.
We often will get those arrangements in your estate plan. People say to me, “Shall I put this in my Will?” And I say, “The Will is often not taken out until after death, and until after the arrangements, so get it in your Powers of Attorney along with your important papers, listing your doctors and your medication, the kinds of papers that people are going to be looking for before they’re going to be looking at the Will after death.
See?! That wasn’t too bad. I am going to leave you, with a quote. This one is from Washington Irving, for those of you currently in grief, for those of you who’ve been in grief, to validate those tears.
“There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power.
They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues.
They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition
and of unspeakable love.”
-Washington Irving
Thank you as always for visiting Spring Tea with Kerlin Walsh Law.
