Plot Plunges & Adoptable Urns | 4M #184

Welcome to the hundred-and-eighty-fourth edition of Morticians’ Monday Morning Mashup, 4M #184, where we’ll serve up bite-sized, easily-digestible nuggets of the deathcare news you need to crush conversations in the week ahead. Bon appetit!

Pallbearers pillage platform

Chances are your snickering non-deathcare friends have shared this video with you, but just in case, here’s footage of the worst graveside service ever: 

Amazing adoption idea

To celebrate the 175th year of Erie Cemetery in Erie, Pennsylvania, the city is asking families to “adopt” one of the many cradle graves and stone urns, filling them with flowers they can nurture all summer. Participants in the Adopt-an-Urn program will receive education about the cemetery and its inhabitants, general gravestone cleaning tips, and free potting soil, plus their pick of an urn or a cradle graves — plots that connect a headstone and footstone with a border, creating a cradle-like opening in the center — to care for throughout the growing season. 

Double trouble

A funeral home worker in Houston is being accused of stabbing a family member who entered the facility to take photos documenting what they believed was suspicious storage of their loved one. Details are sketchy, but authorities are investigating whether there was actually any wrongdoing on the part of the funeral home in regard to the 10 bodies that were in their care, although some reports state that the building had no air conditioning. The brother and sister who entered the funeral home to take photos and videos told authorities that they located their grandmother’s body, although she was supposed to have been cremated a month earlier. When the worker discovered the pair, he or she allegedly stabbed the brother. Police described the wound as minor, and the suspect is claiming self defense.

Transparency questioned

Families and the deathcare community alike applauded the state of Colorado when it (finally) passed legislation last year to regulate licensing and other aspects of the industry. However, a local news station has found that while the law created policies and procedures to increase the frequency of funeral home inspections, at the same time it removed the public’s access to the reports stemming from these visits. A statute allowing these reports to be made available to the public was “quietly” stricken from the text of the legislation when it was updated, and now families (and the press) are wondering why.

Postal predicament

Could there be some glitches in the new USPS regulations that were designed to make cremated remains more visible in the postal system? An Oregon family is in limbo waiting for the arrival of the cremated remains — and the death certificate — of a family member who died while on a Caribbean cruise. The remains and the document were shipped by a US Virgin Islands funeral home via USPS Priority Mail Express 2-Day service on March 22, but had still not arrived by April 4. The family has tracked the package as it traveled from VI to Puerto Rico, then Miami, then four other mail facilities in Florida before they reached Aurora, Colorado and then Denver, where they were last located. The USPS says they’ve located the remains and are working to get them to the family as quickly as possible.