Asking Eric: Adult children object to parents’ burial plans

[fox]

Dear Eric: I am very much enjoying the second time around following a long and less than joyful first marriage. My problem is plans for burial.

All of our children are terribly against our marriage even though both of our spouses were deceased at the time we met. Our children have virtually no relationship with us now and if there is any contact it is ugly.

I have a cemetery plot out of state with my deceased wife. My wife has a local plot with her deceased husband. I would like to get a new plot for the two of us but expect that any such request would receive pushback and be ignored.

My wife’s mother is buried with her second husband using her last name at the time of her death and her father is buried with a subsequent wife so there is precedent for what I want but I know her daughter would require that her mother be buried next to her father.

How do I get what I want?

I have not discussed any of this with my wife. If I did and she brought it up with her daughter the reaction would be for the daughter to express her displeasure by keeping the grandchildren from my wife. She has done that for less. If I am to get a plot, I should do that sooner rather than later as they are in short supply.

While living I would feel great joy if I could know that I could count on being buried beside my wife for all of eternity. Am I being silly to not just take the easy route?

— Burial Conflict

Plans: You have every right to make a burial plan that suits your life and your love. And — this might be controversial — you don’t have to tell your kids. If you have virtually no relationship as it is, you certainly don’t need to bend to their wishes. It seems there’s no pleasing them, anyway.

In general, it’s better to communicate about final wishes and plans for one’s end-of-life in advance. This helps intentions to be understood and gets questions answered while you’re still around to answer them. But the conflict that’s roiling your family complicates things.

Without knowing more about the circumstances of your marriage, I can’t say your kids are completely wrong, but the punishment you mentioned is more than concerning.

Perhaps they’re struggling with acceptance because of unprocessed grief, perhaps there’s something else going on that I’m not privy, too. Either way, the stated conditions dictate that the burial conversation should happen only between you and your wife right now. Once you’re both on the same page, you’ll know what the next step is. That might mean purchasing a joint plot that makes you happy and appointing someone other than one of your kids as executor. (That last part is probably wise regardless.)

There would still be a lot of complications, of course. Namely, one of you will predecease the other and at that point, presumably, the kids would find out the plan. So, while you are working on doing what brings you joy, I’d also encourage you to get down to the root of what’s going on with your kids.

Comments

[fox]

"How do I get what I want?" is startling to me in its on-the-nose-ness. Wow.

Turns out I have a lot of thoughts about this. The quickest and easiest is this: If LW is cremated, he can have half his ashes interred with his children's late mother and half interred with his present wife. Problem solved?

Other thoughts in no particular order:

The fact that both LW and his* wife were widowed when they met is relevant but not entirely complete information. My own widowed mother began a relationship with a widowed family friend (so okay, the situations aren't exactly parallel as in this case the widowed individuals had met before I was born) less than two months after my father died, and my brother and I Were Not Happy About It. They haven't married and never intended to, but that relationship has continued to be important to her in a variety of ways; we don't have interest in or standing to "forbid" it, but the way it began will stick in my craw long after both she and he are also gone. LW doesn't say what underlies their combined children's objection to their marriage except that it can't have involved infidelity; but just as it could be something unreasonable or worse on the children's part like race, it could be something much more reasonable on the children's part like the speed with which they moved on from their bereavement and married each other.

*I do assume that LW is a dude and nobody's issue is with the gender of anyone involved in this question, but that could indeed be another dimension.

If LW and his wife are demonstrably, overtly happier together than either of them was with their children's deceased other parent, I can see the children resenting that. The parents' marriages aren't the children's business, but there is definitely a way in which we feel that we deserve a surviving parent to mourn a dead one and not describe a subsequent spouse as the love of their life. I'm not sure we do deserve that, but the feeling makes sense to me. Maybe the grown children are also being unreasonable! There are good and bad reasons for withholding access to grandchildren, and we have no idea from the text what's going on here. But LW's description of his two marriages is making me unsympathetic to him.

The thing is, though: Once you're dead you'll have no idea what happens to your remains. You can go ahead and make whatever plans you want and enjoy assuming they'll be carried out, and when the time comes, your next of kin (either your widow or your children - roll those dice!) can either do what you wanted or do what they want, and you won't be able to stop them but that's fine because you'll never know. Re my parents again: My mother's wish is to donate her body to science and then have what science doesn't want cremated. My father's was initially to be placed in a memorial vault. When they were discussing it, he simply couldn't bear the idea of having her body cremated, so they agreed that whichever of them went first, the other would do the best they could to reconcile their respective wishes and abilities [or a word like that; I can't think of exactly what I mean right now but I'm sure you get it]. If she had died and he had survived her, he might have donated her body to science, and then he'd have buried what was left without burning it. In the event, when he was dying, he told us about his vault plan and I couldn't stand it - I believe what I said was, sobbing, that I didn't want to put him in a drawer - and he modified his plan and arranged to be buried in the ground, which is what happened (in a plot that could take one casket and up to four urns, so when my mother goes we'll do as she asked and her cremains will be buried alongside his body).

BUT: If he'd insisted on the vault and we'd buried him in the ground anyway, he couldn't possibly have cared; we'd be the ones who had to live with knowing we hadn't done what he wanted (as my dad would have been with not doing what my mother wanted, in that eventually counterfactual circumstance - what he could stand would have been just that little bit more important to him than what she had intended, and there we'd all have been), and it sounds like LW's kids would be fine with that.

[dissectionist]

The fact that both LW and his* wife were widowed when they met is relevant but not entirely complete information.

I too assume that LW is a man, and knowing how common it is for men of a certain generation to move on to a new caretaker wife very quickly because they’re used to being coddled tended to and don’t know how to be alone, I too wondered if the “moved on very quickly” phenomenon might be the case. If it is the case, even if LW’s wife has much more distance from her own loss, LW’s wife’s daughter might be rightfully resentful of the fact that LW latched onto their mother as a new housekeeper cook spouse shortly after his own loss, because from the outside that would make all his motivations and professions of love suspect.

[melannen]

1. Don't do this without talking to your wife first, wow! I can guess one of the reasons your first marriage was less than joyful.

2. If you can't trust your wife not to talk to her kids when you've asked her not to, you have bigger problems than a burial plot.

3. If you don't have a good relationship with *all* of your kids (and/or they don't all have ok relationships with each other): you both need to have wills, you need to get a lawyer to help you make them and witness them, you need to make someone other than one of your kids the executor if you're predeceased by your spouse. You can use the lawyer! If you do this, you can tell the executor to do whatever you want about your burials. If you don't do this, I forsee the probate being a toxic mess regardless.

[cimorene]

3. Exactly this. I think a lot of people don't know they can do it - that might be the source of a lot of confusion (and drama) in many families.

But also, they should be cremated, and they should also realize that once they're dead they won't care. You definitely can hire professionals and ensure that your corpse is disposed of how you wish, but given that you won't be capable of caring and the only people who ARE capable of caring will be your kids, is it really worth a lot of money to you to circumvent their wishes? Maybe it is, because it sounds like you aren't getting along very well (and it sounds like the kids aren't blameless in that at the least), but on the other hand, you could spend that money on therapy. Or vacation. Or charity. Or taking your wife out to a nice dinner.

[melannen]

I think there is actual value in a burial plot for some people, speaking as someone who personally absolutely does not care, I do find value in having a place to visit to remember some of my relatives who do have traditional gravestones. (Of course, I find other ways to remember the ones who don't.)

(And the "once you're dead it won't matter to you" is true for some people, but either you believe in life after death, in which case: maybe it will; or you believe one life is all we've got, in which case the fact that it matters to you now, which is all you've got - or the fact that it might matter to other people after you're dead - is what matters.)

[cimorene]

There are lots of small plots especially for burying ashes here in Finland, where that is quite common. My in-laws visit the grave with the ashes of my wife's parents and grandparents frequently. I assumed this was done in the US too, though I have personally had little contact with funerals that included burial there. My grandmother was cremated and the ashes buried in a particular Jewish cemetery there, but perhaps it is rare? At any rate, being cremated would allow them to be buried in two places, if they really care to.

[jadelennox]

In a Jewish cemetery? searches Huh, I did not know that Reform cemeteries allowed interring ashes. Apparently it's a thing, now, though? I knew many Jewish cemeteries allowed interring interfaith families together but I didn't realise they allowed interred ashes as well.

In any case, I believe it's common in many secular and Christian cemeteries in the states.

Overall re: cremation though -- tons of religions disallow or discourage cremation (Jews and Muslims, but also many Orthodox and LDS, and I believe Baháʼí and I think several other branches of Christianity). Even if LW and wife aren't religious, it's very possible they come from a cultural context that frowns on cremation. Probably not, TBF, since in my experience that seems like something I'd expect to see mentioned in the letter? But possible.

[carbonel]

I am Jewish and I hadn't known that, either, until my brother died earlier this year. His wife decided that the two of them would both be cremated and would share a burial plot.

I am not a very traditional Jew, but the echoes of the Holocaust were enough of a part of my life that I prefer to avoid cremation. As it happened, my father and his brother had purchased a group burial area, and there was one plot left over that my father offered to me. So that's taken care of except for logistics, since it's in the city where I grew up and not the one where I live now.

[cimorene]

This was in the 1990s! But yes, certainly would be a reform synagogue. My grandmother was an adherent of the ethical culture movement and in the absence of their communities (due to moving further south) chose to hold celebrations with family only.

[magid]

Most traditional Jews avoid cremation. A lot. Made extra after ovens in concentration camps in WWII.

[fox]

🙋‍♀️

[princessofgeeks]

I agree with other commenters that this couple needs wills asap and executors who are NOT their kids.

FYI some people do not want to be cremated for whatever reason. One set of my grandparents was happy to be cremated and the other set wanted to be buried without cremation. So yeah, it's true that once you are dead you won't care, but people do have strong feelings about this.

[fox]

people do have strong feelings about this

I do myself, as it happens. Call it racial memory or whatever you want, but the idea of being reduced to ash gives me personally the creeping horrors.

[princessofgeeks]

That makes perfect sense to me.

[adrian_turtle]

I agree that this couple needs wills and executors who are not their kids, but funerals can happen before the will is read. Jewish funerals always happen in a great hurry. I don't know the timeline for others. But a very, very, plausible scenario is that LW's second wife dies 9 years from now. And 10 years from now LW goes to the hospital with pneumonia. When he dies, the hospital looks in their record system and says, "Whoops, his family contact in the computer system is his wife, too bad she's gone. Is "LW, Jr" related? Let's call him." And then Jr says he knows dad always wanted to be buried next to mom, see this cemetery plot they bought years ago. And 3 weeks after the funeral, when they read the will...are they going to dig him up?

[melannen]

If one of them dies, the other one needs a next of kin/power of attorney who's not their kids, too :/ Before they die. And if next of kin isn't clear, iirc these days, absent a reason to rush, they usually leave the corpse in the morgue until it's clear who has the right to decide. (But also yes: when there's been a big struggle over an estate between various sets of kids who hate each other, there've been times when Mom got dug up.)

[mrissa]

This is why you tell the executor in advance if it's important to you, and you give them a copy of the will, and you pick someone who will put their foot down hard if they have ANY room to do it. Not a perfect solution, obviously, but as you note, there is no hard and fast timeline for when a will is read...which means you can give it to someone who will present it and push hard if at all humanly possible.

Could that person be vacationing off-grid in Bali when you die, sure, there is no way to cover EVERY contingency. But you can at least make a go of it.

[princessofgeeks]

Well, yes, but if the couple are observant Jews perhaps they will be embedded in a community, people who will have visited them in the hospital, people who know their wishes, perhaps when they went into the hospital they would give their religious preference, perhaps be visited by a rabbi? So that when they were dying their wishes could be known and the Jewish practices would dovetail with their will?

On the other hand, I am not Jewish and my grandparents who did not want to be cremated were not Jewish either. We did what my dad wanted for them and I assume he knew their wishes. They had bought cemetary plots but I do not know if their wills spelled out their wish to be buried and not cremated But apparently my dad knew their wishes and that's what we did.

[joyeuce]

My father (UK, very definitely Christian) had strong ideas about what he wanted for his funeral, which we followed as far as we could (you can't actually force people into not-black clothes), but left no instructions at all about what was to happen to his body. We decided to do what he had done for his parents, which was cremation followed by scattering ashes in a particular place. I was surprised that some people seemed to think this was a cause for concern - "what if it's not what he wanted?" My response was that, if he had wanted anything in particular, he should have said so, and that if we ever meet in any kind of afterlife, I would hope the disposal of a body he was no longer using will not be a concern.

[princessofgeeks]

Yes, you would think that if he had strong feelings he would have left instructions, or told someone. My own parents have made their wishes known to several relatives. Apart from their wills.

[ethelmay]

I tend to think that funerals and burials and so on are for the survivors, not the deceased. To the extent that the survivors want to do what the dead person might have liked them to do, great, I might express some wishes to my relatives, friends, etc. (e.g., I absolutely don't want to be embalmed). But I think of those arrangements as very much up to them.

If LW and spouse already have prepaid arrangements, that's probably a sunk cost - I don't think you can typically back out of those? But it's not something I have ever investigated.

[mrissa]

A word of warning from experience: prepaid arrangements do NOT always cover the cost of those arrangements. My grandma's eldest sister thought she was leaving everything handled so all the family would have to do was show up, and oh my goodness was that not the case, not even the basic disposal of her body was fully covered.

(In ?some? ?fairness? to the mortuary, eldest great-auntie died three weeks shy of her 105th birthday, so the effects of inflation on the total cost vs. what she had paid should not have surprised any of us. But she felt sure that when she paid "in full" in 1980 or so, that would keep covering the matter in 2017, and that was not what she actually signed.)

[sporky_rat]

Oh hey this is my industry.

The LW and the spouse need to go into a funeral home and do right of disposition paperwork with someone who isn't their children, and make sure that their trust executor and the funeral home are solid.

(They'll want a guarenteed pre-need burial plan, which means that no matter what inflation does, the cost of the arrangements are covered bar cash advance items [that would be things like the death certificate, because you can't completely predict that cost, you can only put what it is right now ]).

Don't, for the love of dogs, put your burial plans in your will. Wills are for your possessions, not your body.

[princessofgeeks]

Voice of experience.

[redbird]

I can't tell whether LW is worried about pushback only from their children, or if he's not sure what his wife wants. It ought to be possible for him to say something like "my love, there's something I want to talk about, and please don't tell the children." If she's barely talking to her daughter except about the grandchildren, that should be doable.

If LW doesn't think he can talk to his wife without her then telling her daughter, who she has "virtually no relationship with," the problem is larger than the funeral arrangements LW wrote in about.