Post 8--The Funeral Industry (1)

Post 8—The Funeral Industry (1)—An Unfinished Business 
  
The second post in this series dealt with remembering and honouring the dead. There is so much more to be said about related subjects, but all kinds of subjects are crowding me in more and more as I read the news media. I should probably quit reading and just finish off the subjects currently crowding me in. I’m afraid that won’t happen any time soon, since I am a news junky. But it means I have been jumping from one topic to another, occasionally promising to come back to it. 

It’s often said that two things in life are inescapable, taxes and death. It’s not true, of course, for there are any number of smart asses and loopholes that, with the help of accountants, somehow manage to get around taxes. But with death, there are no loopholes or accountants. 
Being a senior, I am, in addition to taxes, naturally interested in everything connected to end-of-life issues, including funerals and cemeteries. So, here I am, continuing on a subject related to Post 2, which dealt with remembering and honouring the dead. 

I am also intensely interested in everything related to oppression, cheating, fraud, gauging, taking advantage of the distressed. You’ll find these concerns pop up throughout this blog. It fits into my main thesis that everyone in this world is my neighbour whom I need to respect and defend. The actual and most powerful term is “love,” which is the key mutual obligation we all have towards each other.

So, then, what’s with the funeral industry? For one thing, it’s something we all face at one time or another, either for yourself or for a loved one. You avoid it only at your own peril or that of your loved ones. Making pre-arrangements and stating your intentions for the disposal of your own remains clearly in your will or other official document is doing a huge favour to those who will be responsible for your disposal. If all choices and decisions have to be made after you die, you leave your survivors with difficult decisions at a time they are most likely emotionally distressed. Funeral homes often take advantage of distressed emotions by talking their clients into expensive decisions that are totally unnecessary. 

Probably the best article I have ever read on this subject is the front page article of the Vancouver Courier of October 31, 2008, written by Michael McCarthy and titled, “Dead Reckoning” (www.vancourier.com). It deals with the local Vancouver BC situation, but I’m sure it is typical of almost any location in North America. Besides, it tells a lot of gory stuff about the large corporations in the business, the largest of which is said to be Texas-based Service Corp International. So, a local article but with tentacles all over the continent.  

All this introductory stuff and I haven’t said a thing yet, really. So, since you have a few days before the next installment, look up this article before you read the next post. Obviously I cannot leave it at this. But, I promise, one more on this subject and we move on to more lively topics--pun intended. 

Post 7--Knowing of My Heart: A Prayer-Poem

Post 7--  Knowing of my Heart—A Prayer-Poem  

By Trevor Hooper Kilian  

Today, a prayer-poem by a friend of mine. Please enjoy and mull over it.  A few comments after the reading.

Awaken the senses of my heart,

so that my heart will speak louder than my head.

Awaken my heart to Your Eyes,

so I will see You more clearly, in all that I do.

Awaken my heart to Your Voice,

so that I listen, understand and be still.

Awaken my heart to Your Word,

so I may speak with great clarity, confidence and compassion.

Awaken my heart to Your Touch,

so that I feel Your Presence around me and know I am never alone.

Awaken my heart every day,

Knowing I rise with Your Grace to serve and love others.

Help me surrender my heart to You always,

Trusting that Your Will, not mine, is The Way.

Trevor Kilian is my chiropractor in downtown Vancouver.  He has this prayer-poem on the wall in his waiting room. I so appreciate the prayer-poem for its content not only, but also that he has it on public display. So, we’re back to prayer. Vancouver is a deeply secular city, where it is not politically correct to bring religion or spirituality into your business.Trevor is taking some risk in hanging this on his office wall. You cannot predict how some secular resident will react to it.

The central theme in this poem is the centrality of the heart in our lives, a thesis that also will underlie these blogs.  Marxists place economics in the centre of things; humanists and other secularists give that place to reason; but in Christianity it is the heart that directs the affairs of all of us.  The meaning of this thesis will become clear as we proceed. You will see that it is a powerful thesis that has been defended in Canadian courts and, at times, accepted, at least as to its implications. 

So, read this poem over a few times and mull it over.  “Awaken my heart, knowing I rise…to serve and love others.”  Serving and loving--again, a theme of this blogspot with its title of “My World—My Neighbour.”  It would make a great new year’s resolution, don’t you think? 

Post 6--2014 AD -- The Year of Our Lord

Post 6   2014 AD—The Year of Our Lord   

During the last few months of 2013 I was head over heels into writing projects, all of which had claim to some urgency. Well, I finished most of the work on them and I am now waiting for various odds and ends on each one of them, some of which will be done by Fran, my wife, while others require the input of “outsiders,” So, from here on those projects will be slow going, but in the meantime, I can pick up my blogging again with every intention and hope of being more regular. In fact, that’s one of my new year’s resolutions that I will take seriously.  

I have not been an ardent new year’s resolutionist over the years, but this year I decided to make some and to see if I can stick to them. One is actually a prayer, the Serenity Prayer which goes like this:

          God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to      
          change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. 

How can a prayer be a resolution? There are many different kinds of prayers. Some you just pray them; others, like this one, if they are to be answered by God, must be incorporated in your life style. If you just pray it but do nothing towards its fulfillment, it will not be answered. So, in this case, both the prayer and resolution are the same: I pray that I will develop it into my basic attitude. 

You may be objecting that this is a pretty lame resolution, but for a guy like me, it’s an entire turn around in my life. I have always had the macho attitude that if we humans created a condition, we can change it. I have had brazen courage like few others to try to change things and have sometimes berated people who thought it couldn’t be done. But over the last decade or so I have slowly come to realize that not all things can be changed, at least, not the way you’d like to see them changed. That has introduced a kind of freedom in my spirit; I no longer have the urge that no matter what the condition, I can and therefore must try to change it. 

On the other hand, may this not lead to a false kind of passivism or quietism on my part so I just fold my hands. But, I guess, at age 76 one is allowed to occasionally just fold your hands and pray!

Happy New Year!

Post 5--Senior Discounts (2)

Post 4--Senior Discounts (2)

I am slightly deviating from the subject I promised to deal with today, though only slightly, for I am still in the same realm of finance. I am appealing to another and earlier promise that many of my posts would react to articles in the Vancouver Sun. 

Yesterday, the Sun featured an article about the discounts Canadian seniors are getting at every front. The writer, along with writers in other publications, questioned the need and morality of these discounts. The conditions that led up to them have changed, especially the economic  conditions of most seniors. To be sure, there are the poor among them, but it can hardly be said that seniors as a whole constitute a poverty-stricken class today.  In spite of that, lobbyists for seniors, especially CARP--Canadian Association of Retired Persons--demand that the practice continue. CARP officials allegedly claim that they must advocate for the poor among them. Indeed, but that does not mean for all of their members, for the poor among its members are a minority.

I was sufficiently annoyed with CARP and their ilk that I did what comes natural to me: Write a letter to the editor. Herewith I reproduce it for your edification:

My, my, my! Where has the spirit of Canada’s parents and grandparents gone? Are we no longer (grand) parents and have instead turned into an egoistic lobby group to squeeze the most out of our system for ourselves?  Amazing! Shameful!

At a time:

       when wages are on a downward spiral and workers supporting families—our      

                   children —are having a tough time of it;

       when young secondary and tertiary graduates—our grand-children—cannot find   

                   jobs suitable for their skills;

       when single mothers—our granddaughters-- are squeezed to death;

       when school children—our grand- and great grandchildren-- come to school 

                   hungry;

       when the pool of wage earners supporting seniors is dwindling due to seniors 

                   refusing the responsibility of raising families, 

 

we seniors are demanding continued privileges for ourselves instead of our needy families!  And that not because we are necessarily poor—many of us are not—, but because we are seniors.

If there were any love, charity and sense of justice in our hearts, we seniors would lobby for our children and grandchildren as well as for the poor among us. CARP ought to be ashamed of itself. A bunch of well heeled and well organized egotists! This is the reason I have never joined them.

Post 4--Senior Discounts (1)

Post 4--Senior Discounts

I promised to continue a topic related to Post 3. Sorry, but I am changing course, though only slightly.

In yesterday's Vancouver Sun there was an article about the discounts that Canadian seniors get all over the place, no matter how poor or rich they may be. Just because they are seniors! The subject is discussed more often lately and is thus of general interest. It is also of interest to me. After all, I am a senior.  However, my take on the subject may not be what you expect, for it is not in my immediate personal profit.

I quite annoyed with the senior lobby, represented especially by CARP--Canadian Association of Retired Persons--that demands the continuation of this privilege. So I wrote a letter to the Vancouver Sun that I share with you below:

Re;

My, my, my! Where has the spirit of Canada’s parents and grandparents gone? Are we no longer (grand) parents and have instead turned into an egoistic lobby group to squeeze the most out of our system for ourselves?  Amazing! Shameful!

At a time:

       when wages are on a downward spiral and workers supporting families—our children —are

           having a tough time of it;

       when young secondary and tertiary graduates—our grand-children—cannot find jobs

           suitable for their skills;

       when single mothers—our granddaughters-- are squeezed to death;

       when school children—our grand- and great grandchildren-- come to school hungry;

       when the pool of wage earners supporting seniors is dwindling due to seniors refusing the

           responsibility of raising families,

we seniors are demanding continued privileges for ourselves instead of our needy families!  And that not because we are necessarily poor—many of us are not—, but because we are seniors.

If there were any love, charity and sense of justice in our hearts, we seniors would lobby for our children and grandchildren as well as for the poor among us. CARP ought to be ashamed of itself. A bunch of well heeled and well organized egotists! This is the reason I have never joined them.

Re;

Post 3--Your Dough

POST 3—November 15, 2013

Your Dough

What kind of a trip am I on? you may well ask. Blog 2 is about death and now about dough, meaning, of course, money!  It’s a subject that lends itself to all kinds of moralisms, warnings, finger wagging, guilt trips and reams of more negative stuff. Why such negative topics so early in this blog?  Should you move on to more positive ventures?

Well, no! I told you the choice of topics I will be discussing is often, if not mostly, picked from current events and issues. November 2013 happens to be Financial Literacy Month in Canada. Not just literacy. That gets its own month, at least, in British Columbia (BC), my province. This one is about financial literacy.  Literacy campaigns try to overcome illiteracy and ignorance; financial literacy tells us that there is serious financial ignorance. The Canadian government has discovered that such ignorance has reached alarming levels in this so-called advanced country and is using this campaign as one of its tools to overcome it.

The Vancouver Sun highlighted the campaign with an article featuring a secondary school teacher who had fallen into the debt trap. A secondary school teacher. In other words, an intelligent person. I can find only one word adequate to describe his financial behaviour as he personally describes it, but I am loathe to use it, since some of my grandchildren have been forbidden to use it: stupid. He “over-indulged” his children with “the very best designer cloths and toys,” all the while living “from month to month.” He managed this stupidity with a whole raft of credit cards, “all maxed to the limit.”

Fortunately, he came to his senses when he reached bottom and now “shakes his head and wonders how his spending habits could have become so skewed. He wonders how he strayed so far from a path of responsible spending established within his family.”  He was, in the words of Yvonne Zacharias, the writer of the Sun article, “swept up in the debt tempest” that now has Canada worried, for his is an increasingly typical situation. 

Canadians are slipping “deeper into debt,” with “the ratio of household debt to household income” having hit “a record high of 163.4 per cent,” a level “alarmingly” similar to America’s just before the 2008 crash. No wonder different levels of government are taking steps to bring some rationality into this mess—and responsibility.

By means of this and occasional subsequent blogs I hope to contribute to the government’s campaign, but promise not to make it too heavy or dreary. In the next blog I will share a few similar situations I have come across myself, along with a few comments. I’ll move on after that, but fully intend to get back to the topic now and then.

In closing, a little smile.  I came across a cartoon by Jeff Keane under his rubric “Family Circus,” in which a boy seeks his father’s advice: “Daddy, I want to help the ‘conomy. Should I spend my nickel or save it?” There you go!

But before I go, congrats to our intelligent secondary school teacher for having dug himself out of his hole. 

(The Vancouver Sun material in this article is from Yvonne Zacharias’ “Climbing a Mountain of Debt,” November 2, 2013.)

Post 2--Remember and Honour

Death....

For only a second posting on a blog that aims to talk about "My Neighbour," death seems like a morbid and ominous way to start the day. But apart from birth, it's the only thing that all of us share, even more so than taxes. 

There's a good reason I have chosen this topic today. For one thing, it's Remembrance Day in Canada, something I always take very seriously, for I am old enough to remember and visualize the day Canadian soldiers marched through my Dutch village back in 1945 to liberate us from the German Nazis--our immediate neighbours next door. I will go to the cenotaph in downtown Vancouver today to join the crowds in paying homage to those who have fallen on my behalf during World War II as well as in Canadian peace keeping efforts subsequently. I remember and honour them. 

There are more reasons for the choice of this topic today. Yesterday I came home from a memorial service for a sister-inlaw. The new widower, my brother, chose to call it a "celebration." As such events go, it was kind of a family re-union. It took place in the same facility in Mission, BC, where my sister Elly and husband Fred lie buried. So, quite a number of us, including Fred and Elly's children, now grand parents in their own right, used the opportunity to visit their grave. 

We shared about whether anyone of us ever visits their grave. Even their children confessed they never do, for, it was explained, there's nothing of significance there. The important thing, their souls, are with God; the physical part has returned to dust and is no more. So, why visit? Do what? Most just shrugged their shoulders. Remembering and honouring their parents? Of course they do, but you don't have to come to an empty grave to do that. It's the same attitude an already passed-on brother-in-law expressed.

Though I do not criticize their attitude, for I know them well enough to know that they do remember and honour. But I do confess to be baffled, for to me remembering and honouring includes occasional visits to the graves or just the name plates of loved ones gone ahead of me, or perhaps some other kind of shrine dedicated to them, at least in so far as distance does not make that too difficult.  I know: to each his own and mine may be no better than theirs. 

In fact, over the weekend, together with my wife, Frances, two children and their "significant others," and four grandchildren, we also visited the graves of my parents in a nearby cemetery in Abbotsford, BC. Whenever we go to Grand Rapids, MI, where Fran is from and where I met her during our college days, we never fail to "greet" her parents and one sister, who are buried in Cascade, a Grand Rapids suburb. Depending on the time of the year and weather conditions, we may even clean up the site a bit and perhaps leave some flowers. That's our way of remembering and honouring them.

Halloween 2013 is still fresh in our memories. It is a time when the Mountain View Cemetery in Vancouver tries to counter "the macabre tones" of that "celebration" when "the dead are depicted as something grotesque and frightening." The cemetery turns it into an opportunity "to honour our ancestors and understand and appreciate where we came from and acknowledge the role the dead play in our lives every day." "It is a wonderful way for families to spend the evening and introduce the concept of mortality to the kids," explained a spokeswoman (Gerry Bellett, Vancouver Sun, October 26, 2013).  I might insert some other elements into this programme, but I deeply appreciate the attempt on their part of, if I may put it this way, bringing the dead back to life for ourselves and our children.

Remember and honour. Reminds me a bit of Jesus' invitation to "remember and believe...." That goes one step further.