Okay, the recession has officially struck beyond the living: the LA Times reports that times are so tough people are leaving the bodies of their relatives with county morgues to be cremated on the public nickel.
In LA what this amounts to is paying $352 for collecting the ashes from the coroner after an unclaimed body is cremated. As opposed to $466 for collecting them from the morgue.
(Apparently they’re different entities. Who knew?)
To put this into perspective, claiming a body from the LA county coroner will set you back $200. Then there’s the $1000 for cremation in a private facility or a minimum of $7300 for the most basic of funerals & burials.
Personally, while I find it fascinating to visit graveyards, read the headstones & imagine the lives represented there, I’m not particularly interested in what happens to the body once the anima has departed. But I understand that I’m in the minority in this regard, & that having to decide between honoring your loved one in a way suitable to your beliefs or buying food & paying the rent is a heart-rending choice no one in this country should be forced to make.
So I’m sure these people will take comfort in the good news that the major banks whose crack-brained lending practices caused this whole mess have reported such good financial news that they’re able once again to splash out on extravagant corporate jollies & obscenely large bonuses for management.
(At least the Times had the grace not to serve up the ads for caskets on this story’s that appeared in the report about Farrah Fawcett's death.)
No comments:
Post a Comment