Check out the March 16, 2009 Newsweek Magazine story on families looking for a dignified send-off that won't bury them in debt. Writer Matthew Phillips does a great job laying-out simpler, cheaper ways to get to the great beyond.

SEE OUR NOVEMBER  UPDATE HERE

4/3/2009 - Boulder Weekly ran a feature story on the bill, highlighting the sponsor's consultation with industry - but not consumer groups - in drafting this bill. FCA did have a productive conversation with the executive director of the Colorado Funeral Director's Association, which resulted in many areas of agreement on possible amendments (though not total agreement). Here's the letter we sent to Rep. Nancy Todd with suggested amendments. She appears to be refusing to communicate with us; why a lawmaker would ignore pleas from a consumer group while drafting "consumer protection" legislation with the aid of a business lobbying group is a mystery.

3/5/09 --- An anti-consumer bill is working its way through the Colorado legislature, and FCA is fighting back with the help of its Colorado chapter, the Funeral Consumer Society of Colorado. HB 1202 purports to better protect consumers by requiring regulation and standards for funeral businesses, but the bill's sloppy language would outlaw private, family-directed funerals and stifle competition that could bring lower-cost funerals and cremations to Colorado families. The bill looks to be the handiwork of the Colorado Funeral Directors Association, and it has all the hallmarks of a lobbying group using lawmakers to circle the hearses to protect funeral industry profits.

Click here to read FCA's critique of the bill.

FCA Executive Director Joshua Slocum will discuss the bill on KGNU Community Radio on March 5, 2009. Click here to stream the live broadcast at 8:00 a.m. Mountain Time.

Author Max Alexander has written a moving account of the family-directed funeral of his father-in-law, contrasting it with the conventional and costly mortuary affair for his own father. Here's a sampling from the March, 2009 article in Smithsonian Magazine:

One was buried, one was cremated. One was embalmed, one wasn't. One had a typical American funeral-home cotillion; one was laid out at home in a homemade coffin. I could tell you that sorting out the details of these two dead fathers taught me a lot about life, which is true. But what I really want to share is that dead bodies are perfectly OK to be around, for a while.

I suppose people whose loved ones are missing in action or lost at sea might envy the rest of us, for whom death typically leaves a corpse, or in the polite language of funeral directors, "the remains." Yet for all our desire to possess this tangible evidence of a life once lived, we've become oddly squeamish about our dead. We pay an average of $6,500 for a funeral, not including cemetery costs, in part so we don't have to deal with the physical reality of death. That's 13 percent of the median American family's annual income.