[manaboutown]

When my father died in his 90s during the 1990s in a small town in Washington State my brother and I went to the funeral home together. As I understood it the family owned funeral homes in the area had been gradually bought up by a large Canadian company and they had raised prices and upsold hard. Anyway, my father had told us he wanted to be cremated and to spend as little as possible because he wanted the assets of his modest estate which he worked so hard to accumulate to go to his grandchildren (bypassing my brother and me as we did not need any of it), not a funeral home. They tried to upsell us hard. I soon told them my father was thrifty and had directed us to pay as little as possible for cremation and internment in a communal urn where his wife's (our mother's) ashes were at their church. You should have seen the looks on the employees' faces as three were in the room and heard it all! Lol. But they complied. My father would have been proud of his sons at that moment.

My brother and I were there maybe 20 minutes.