Christina Nall sat in the hospital parking lot gasping for air.
Four hours earlier, her father, Bill Burke had been alive. He’d eaten Golden Grahams for breakfast and wrapped his grandkids in tight hugs before school.
He was putting on his shoes to leave the house when Nall, 33, found him slouched over on the couch. Doctors said it was a blood clot. He was 56 years old.
Now, outside the Zephyrhills hospital, a fog of grief hung over Nall as the funeral director’s words cut into her. To get her dad back to his home in Missouri would cost upwards of $2,000. The service and burial he wanted would cost another $6,000.
Nall didn’t come from money, and she certainly didn’t have thousands to spare.
But this was her dad.
For many, end-of-life arrangements come with sticker shock. Last year, the average cost of a full-service cremation in the U.S. was around $6,300, according to the National Funeral Directors Association, an 8% increase from two years prior. The average burial cost was $8,300, up 6% since 2021.
Without preparation, these major expenses can leave families to do cruel math, weighing how to honor their loved ones against the realities of their budgets. The cost of dying becomes heavier amid the rising costs of life.
These difficult decisions must also be made on a ticking clock: Most funeral homes require full payment before the time of service. And there’s a finality that adds a weightiness to the choices. You can only make them once.
Industry experts, and those who have felt the financial burden, say there’s no way to totally alleviate the discomfort of the responsibility. But having conversations with loved ones about end-of-life arrangements and making plans could spare pain and panic when the moment arrives.
From the parking lot that March day, Nall struggled to think. As she broke the news to her mother over the phone, she felt the world around her blurring. Still, one fact was crystal-clear: She would have to take on debt if she wanted to bury her father.
What dad wanted
The day before her dad died, Nall and Burke had gone to the beach and looked at the clams clinging to the buoys.
They’d stopped by her favorite Mexican spot for lunch and talked about plans for the upcoming weekend: a trip to the renaissance festival with the grandkids, and maybe a movie night.
It was special to share time with just the two of them. Burke had come down from Missouri a week earlier so he could recover from recent hip surgery in the sunshine rather than the cold. They were taking advantage of the days they had together.
Burke was a quiet man, easily pleased. He liked a good meal, reading presidential biographies and watching WWE.
Though he poked fun at the people he loved, he was a softie who had made a career as a professional caretaker. He worked as a licensed nurse practitioner in prisons and substance treatment facilities, but his favorite jobs were at nursing homes.
It broke his heart to see elderly people abandoned by families, left to live their final years alone. While working in hospice, Burke took it upon himself to fill the gaps the best he could. He became an adopted son to the dying, holding their hands and comforting them as the end drew near.
Throughout his life, Burke had been a bit of a wanderer. He’d moved his family from Missouri to Florida, Louisiana to Texas, like he was searching for a place to belong. But in the end, Missouri always called him back.
That’s why he wanted to be laid to rest there — in a cemetery in his town of 4,600. And it’s why Nall knew there was no question she would do whatever it took to get her dad home.
“I have about a week to raise roughly $2500 to help transport my daddy,” Nall wrote on a GoFundMe page she created to seek donations after his death. “Any little bit will help…”
Then she called her brother, and together, they took out $6,000 in loans.
Rising costs
Scroll through the fundraising website GoFundMe.com and you’ll see thousands of pleas like Nall’s. A mother asking for help burying her child. A teenager seeking funds to cremate his grandfather. Co-workers asking for donations to help the family of a deceased colleague arrange a celebration of life.
The website is used so frequently to raise money for burials and cremations that there’s a special tag designated for funerals. Since the beginning of the year, in Florida alone, more than 4,000 online fundraisers were started by people who needed help covering memorial costs.
Not all death arrangements look the same, and the price point can vary dramatically depending on the funeral home and selections. But the cheapest option offered — a direct cremation — hovers around $1,000 on the low end. That’s just for the ashes and doesn’t include any type of service or an urn.
“It can be very, very difficult for families to come up with that quickly,” said Andrew Clark, chief customer officer of Foundation Partners Group, a Florida-based company that owns and operates more than 60 funeral homes and cemeteries in the state.
Clark said the cost of funerals is high because the process of caring for the deceased is intricate, lengthy and riddled with regulations to ensure safety and respect for all involved.
Funeral homes aren’t immune to inflation, said Clark, who sits on the board of the Florida Cremation and Funeral Association. For example, as the cost of gas rises so does the cost of operating a crematory. Higher shipping and material costs affect the prices of caskets and urns, and a shortage of licensed funeral directors and morticians means that wages of staff have increased to attract quality workers.
The infrequency with which a person interacts with a funeral home can make the costs all the more jarring. The average person, he said, only makes two or three arrangements in their lifetime.
“It’s not like when you go to the grocery store every week and see milk going up little by little,” said Clark. “A funeral is not a purchase people make regularly.”
Let’s talk about dying
On a Tuesday in April, Archibald Allen walked into a restaurant in Clearwater and set up a pop-up presentation screen in front of three gatherers munching on salads and shifting in their seats.
“Good afternoon,” he began. “If you’ve experienced death in your family, then you know that we rarely wake up and say ‘let’s talk about dying’ before it happens.”
Allen’s job is to change that. On this day, at a free informational luncheon for people interested in making end-of-life arrangements, he hoped his attendees would oblige.
“Death is inevitable,” Allen continued. “Pre-planning never hastened its arrival.”
Pre-planning services are offered by most funeral homes to alleviate the financial and logistical burden that families face in the days after a loved one’s passing.
The process is exactly what it sounds like: A person can go into a funeral home, meet with a director, and outline their wishes, all the way down to the flowers they want displayed or the cookie they want served at their memorial.
Then, they can set up a payment plan so that the cost of arrangements are handled in advance. The financial benefit to doing so is twofold. First, it allows one to pay over time and spares loved ones the hunt for funds after a death has occurred.
Second, it locks in the prices. If the person who has these plans prepared dies 10 or 40 years down the line, the cost remains the same as the day the plan was signed. And because most payment plans are set up through insurance systems, many also guarantee that if the person passes before finishing payments, the selected services will still be covered.
“The reality is none of our deaths belong to us,” Allen said. “They belong to the loved ones that we leave behind.”
By strict definition, Allen is a salesman. He sells services to families on behalf of cemeteries and funeral homes. But this work, he said, is also a form of ministry.
In fact, it was his past work, as an ordained minister, that led him to this job in the first place; seeing congregants struggle, time and time again, to navigate decisions after loss and to afford remembrances.
Now, Allen said he gets to educate families ahead of time and help them prepare.
Doing so, he said, makes space for people to focus on mourning when the time comes. Still, only 17% of people 40 and older have arrangements in place, according to the National Funeral Directors Association.
More often than not, families are coming in after a death has occurred.
Hard choices
The scramble can make it difficult to grieve.
That was true for Alexis Balsamo, a Hillsborough County teacher who lost her dad in a car accident earlier this year. The death was a gut-punch and making hastened plans added to the turmoil.
“You almost have to put your grieving on hold while you figure out how you’re going to pay for everything,” Balsamo said.
In a perfect world, Balsamo said she would have buried her dad in a casket, but her family opted for cremation because of the price.
For Melanie Robinson, in New Port Richey, the sudden death of her husband, Antwon, 48, left her in a similar position. Robinson had to dip into her retirement savings early to afford cremation and a service for her longtime partner.
“It’s been horrible,” Robinson said. “I was crushed and then right away had to go through this confusing process that I’d never been through before.”
Robinson’s husband died suddenly of a heart condition, and there had been few warning signs before his passing. She said they’d talked casually before about what they wanted after their deaths and had both agreed on cremation.
“But then in the thick of it all you’re like, ‘OK, I think that’s what he told me, but am I remembering right?’” Robinson said.
In January, when Jordan Parker, 25, unexpectedly lost both of her parents in the span of two weeks, she knew — as the oldest of three sisters — that she would need to make the arrangements.
Both of her parents wanted to be cremated, she said, which cost about $1,200 a person. But there were major travel expenses that added to the financial burden. While Parker lives just north of Tampa, her sisters live in Seattle and Los Angeles.
The three needed to be together while they were mourning.
“One sister is in pharmacy school and has no income, and the other is 18,” Parker said. “So it’s really fallen on me. I’ve drained my savings. I’m just a bundle of to-do lists. I’m not a human right now.”
Parker used to work in life insurance sales and said she’s had countless conversations with clients about their end-of-life plans. She had tried to engage her parents, she said, but they always shied away from the conversation.
“They thought they were too young, then they died at 47 and 48,” Parker said. “Even if you’re 30 years old, you need to have your ducks in a row because death pops up whenever it wants to, and somebody on this side of the universe is going to be left behind to deal with it.”
Payments come due
What’s even more painful about Bill Burke’s death is that he’d tried to be prepared.
In the days after he died, Nall learned her father had taken the step of visiting a funeral home in Missouri and laying out his final wishes. He’d picked out his casket, his burial plot, the music he wanted to be played.
Burke had a life insurance plan that he thought would cover everything, but he passed two weeks before the policy took effect.
“He was trying to be responsible, then he died too young,” Nall said. “He would be devastated to know that his life insurance didn’t pay anything.”
On March 18, Nall and her husband drove to Missouri where Burke was laid to rest with the funeral he’d wanted. There were about 50 people in attendance and Nall gave the eulogy.
It was beautiful, Nall said, and what she needed to do to honor her dad.
But in its aftermath the costs are eating at her family.
Missing work for the service, and traveling to and from Missouri, has meant lost income for Nall at a time of high spending. And though her earnings are modest — she runs an online shop and her husband works at a Walmart distribution center — Nall said she’s better off financially than her parents were.
Now, without her father’s paychecks, she worries about whether her mother and brother — who live together — will be able to stay afloat, especially while burdened with high-interest debt. Her brother took out a $4,000 pay-day loan with a 37% interest rate to help with the funeral. It was the only thing he could get when they needed it.
Recently, her husband has taken overtime to help catch up on bills. Last month’s mortgage hasn’t been paid yet. There are utility payments past due. And back in Missouri, Nall’s mom, who works with people with disabilities, has logged almost 20 extra hours a week to make up for the lost cash.
“In short, I guess we’ll just work ourselves to death until we make up the debt,” said Nall. “It’s been really hard. But what is money when you’re trying to honor your loved one?”
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