Tualatin Valley Funeral Alternatives

It’s a final act of love. Those who plan their own funerals give survivors a major gift, allowing them to grieve instead of agonizing over caskets, liturgical music and cost. “It’s going to take that pressure off people down the road who don’t know what you want,” says Paul Calvert, a funeral director at Holman’s Funeral and Cremation Service in Southeast Portland. Even if people can’t pay ahead of time, they should write down what they want, Calvert says. Funeral directors agree that one of the hardest situations they enter is a death for which there was no preplanned funeral. Here are some things people can decide on ahead of time. The first choice is whether to be buried or cremated. Catholic teaching allows for cremation, but the strong preference is that it happen after the funeral, so the body can be present. To help make that more affordable, funeral homes have two options. First is a rented outer casket for the funeral. The body is placed in a removable inner liner and never touches the rented casket directly. After the funeral, the body and inner lining are removed to be cremated. Renting a casket and purchasing the liner costs about $800. The second option is a casket designed to be burned. They start at about $300. These least-expensive cremation caskets may indeed look a bit cheap, but during Catholic funerals coffins are covered with a large cloth, or pall. Cremation is a cheaper option than burial, mostly because it removes the need for a burial plot and a burial casket, which will cost at least $700. Brown estimates that a traditional Catholic funeral with burial will cost $8,000 to $10,000 and up. The same rites, but with cremation and a niche for the remains, will cost about $4,000. Catholics should know that their church wants cremated remains treated with the same respect a body would be given, says Rebecca Tjaarda, funeral director and preplanning specialist at Mt. Scott Funeral Home in Southeast Portland. Tjaarda often speaks at Catholic parishes about Catholic practice. That means no scattering, no dividin...