Final arrangements: examining debt and distress

Abstract

Prevailing discourses condemn funerals as a costly distress purchase where funeral directors have greedily preyed upon funeral arrangers' grief laden vulnerability. They explain funerals as distress purchases and so debt as the outcome of irrational decisions made while emotionally overwhelmed. These discourses ignore how people might use funeral purchases in dealing with the experience of death as they obscure rather than explain the emotionally infused decision-making that incurs funeral debt. This paper aims to shed light on this aspect of funeral purchases through a New Zealand-based empirical investigation of how intense feelings connect with decision-making associated with funeral cost and debt. The examination highlights that arranging a funeral, rather than being a hurried, ill-informed, choicelimited, emotionally overwhelming distress purchase, is a complex socio-emotional process that crystallises multiple affects into the culturally sanctioned emotion of responsibility, itself mobilised on class lines embedded in existing societal attitudes to debt and socio-economic structures.

Emotions, deliberations, and end‐of‐life products

“…Study 1 Carr, 2012a;Carr & Khodyakov, 2007;Tennyson & Yang, 2014). As with our study, prior research also finds that EOL planning and purchasing are affected by such reasons as death avoidance (Kemp & Kopp, 2010;Kopp & Pullen, 2002), life expectancy (Luth, 2016), and financial burdens and lack of resources (e.g., Banks, 1998;Carr, 2012b;Fan & Zick, 2004;McManus & Schäfer, 2014).…”

“…Other studies demonstrate that prior experience, such as personal involvement with long‐term care‐giving and witnessing the death of significant others, impacts EOL planning (e.g., Carr, ; Carr & Khodyakov, ; Tennyson & Yang, ). As with our study, prior research also finds that EOL planning and purchasing are affected by such reasons as death avoidance (Kemp & Kopp, ; Kopp & Pullen, ), life expectancy (Luth, ), and financial burdens and lack of resources (e.g., Banks, ; Carr, ; Fan & Zick, ; McManus & Schäfer, ).…”

“…One area relates to evaluating industry regulations and consumer protection for EOL products (e.g., Kopp & Kemp, , 2007b; Quilliam, , 2008b). A second area examines costs and financial, as well as, psychological, burdens incurred from purchasing EOL products/services (e.g., Banks, ; Fan & Zick, ; McManus & Schafer, ). A third area addresses EOL planning and purchasing and death awareness from a communication perspective (e.g., Arndt, Solomon, Kasser, & Sheldon, ; Das, Duiven, Arendsen, & Vermeulen, ; Fransen, Fennis, Pruyn, & Das, ; Kemp & Kopp, ).…”

Cremation and Grief: Are Ways of Commemorating the Dead Related to Adjustment Over Time?

“…Second, some studies have focused more specifically on issues surrounding funeral costs, difficulties, and—sometimes—adaptation . McManus and Schafer (2014) investigated the complex process underlying bereaved persons’ funeral expenditure, and its relationship with personal reactions (there was no quantification of specific psycho-social consequences). Kopp and Kemp (2007) examined the processes a consumer undertakes in making expensive decisions in stressful circumstances such as bereavement.…”

Bodies and ceremonies: is the UK funeral industry still fit for purpose?

“…On the supply side, though the National Association of Funeral Directors urges its members to do their utmost to combat funeral poverty, it is unsurprising that they have not raised the possibility of families sidestepping them. More significantly, on the demand side, those at risk of incurring funeral debt are by definition economically insecure and therefore more likely to want a funeral that displays, through hardware, their social respectability (McManus & Schafer, 2014). Thus the legacy of the nineteenth century is a system that creates funeral poverty: an industry that depends on the sale of hardware and bodycare, and a culture in which the shame of the pauper funeral, or at least the need to 'put on a good show', haunts materially insecure consumers.…”