Indigents have little choice dealing with loved ones’ funerals

She wanted to be a good daughter and carry out her mother's dying wishes.

But the family was penniless. Her mother's recent death left the 19-year-old alone to care for two young siblings. That meant the good daughter was forced to accept an indigent funeral arrangement.

It's the kind of story Hites Funeral Home counselor T.J. Clark hears more often these days as the recession rumbles on and increasing numbers of residents are compelled to seek help in a time of economic crisis and personal grief.

"Actually, they would like to bury their mama," Clark says. "She was totally against the cremation thing. But the rules (in Clark County) say she has to be cremated unless there's a religious preference. Now mom's gone. The daughter has to step up and be the mom, and figure out a way to take care of everything."

Indigent burials and cremations have jumped 22 percent in the past fiscal year, according to county statistics, from 741 to 904. That upward trend figures to continue, Clark County Social Services Director Nancy McLane tells me.

The reason is simple.

"I think it's just that we have more people who are dying without resources, or their family members don't have resources to provide burials or cremations for them," McLane says. "I would say that it's relatively close to the other increases in service demand we're experiencing."

Rental assistance requests at the county, for example, are up approximately 30 percent in the down economy.

Clark County Coroner Michael Murphy concurs.

"Our investigators have indicated to me that they are seeing more families that are clearly strapped financially when they're meeting with families and doing the notifications," Murphy says. "They're saying, 'What are we going to do? Where are we going to go to get the money for this?'"

In a cost-cutting measure, the county several years ago changed its policy on indigent funeral services. In previous years, poor families were given an option between burial and cremation. Now cremation is the rule instead of the exception. Indigent burials are given only for compelling religious reasons. (Homicide victims aren't cremated for legal reasons.)

Cremation is cheaper: just $425 compared to $1,827 for a modest traditional burial. But it is the time it takes to approve the indigent status you might find surprising.

The county's overwhelmed, two-person staff is charged with doing all the research and making a good faith effort to determine everything from next of kin to whether the deceased died with a military pension or small burial policy.

The process can take several weeks, funeral home officials say, and that delay can add to the family's grief.

It's also true it adds to the time the bodies in question must be stored at the seven local funeral homes that work with the coroner's office.

It's common, says one source, for each location to properly store two dozen indigent corpses at a given time while the paperwork is sorted out.

Clark recalls a recent example in which a wife married more than 50 years lost her husband. Destitute, she was forced to seek indigent status and has found it may take six weeks before she can have a funeral service.

"That's just devastating, but there's not anything we can do about that," she says. "I think the county doing what they do is a wonderful thing, but they're bombarded and have only two people to do the work. What they do is also hurting because of the length of time it takes."

With the local economy showing few signs of recovery, there's little to indicate the trend will change any time soon.

"We're definitely seeing an increase in the number of families seeking county assistance," Palm vice president of mortuary operations Theresa Correa says. "They literally have no funds. In a lot of cases, families have lost their jobs. They may be going through foreclosure. They may have had an unexpected medical illness that led to death with no life insurance and no other funds available. That's why Social Services is there.

"Some families come in, and they don't know how they'll pay the rent or mortgage or where they're going to live now that their loved one has died."

When you're struggling just to earn a living, there's little time to consider the cost of dying.

John L. Smith's column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. E-mail him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call (702) 383-0295. He also blogs at lvrj.com/blogs/smith.