http://www.taphophilia.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=321
Fascinating article. Google is a wonderful place. An exerpt:
George Lemke, the executive director of the Casket and Funeral Supply Association, said that shape more than weight determined whether someone would require an oversize coffin. But for people of average height, he said, those above 300 pounds are likely candidates.
Many families are unaware their relatives will need a special coffin until a funeral director measures the body and informs them. Some then face difficult choices. Grace Moredock of Evanston, Ill., said that in 1999, when her mother died weighing 340 pounds, the family could not afford an oversize coffin and opted for cremation. "Because of our faith and our religious belief we would have preferred to have buried her," she said. Moredock herself weighs 400 pounds and she said the experience had affected her own funeral plans. "I'd prefer to be buried," she said. "But I wouldn't say to my family, 'You have to bury me,' because I wouldn't want them to be in a bind if they couldn't afford it."
For the severely obese, though, cremation may not be an option. Jack Springer, the executive director of the Cremation Association of North America,
said most crematoria cannot handle bodies over 500 pounds.
One way that some companies have responded is by reducing the thickness of their coffins' sides and the profiles of their handles, so they can hold larger bodies but still fit in a standard vault.
Cemetery owners have less flexibility. Many cemeteries were plotted years ago, and in the more crowded cemeteries, burial vaults are lined up wall to wall, not unlike seats on an airliner, to maximize potential sales. And just as on a plane, it is impossible to buy an extra half a seat.
"If we have someone who is oversized we may have to go larger than the actual grave space permits," said William Wright, the vice president of Fairlawn Cemetery in Hutchinson, Kan. "The family would have to own it."
The issue can be especially complicated when the deceased has prepurchased a site, but cannot fit in it.
For funeral directors and grieving families, discussions over the deceased's weight can be especially awkward.
Tim King, an undertaker at the Tufts-Schildmeyer Funeral Home in Goshen, Ohio, said, "When you tell a family that just lost a loved one that their loved one is too big for a casket, what they hear is you saying, 'Mom or Dad is fat,' " he said.
King said the weight issue had given rise to a new euphemism. "We say, 'Mom's not going to look comfortable in that casket,' " he said. "The family knows we mean, 'Mom won't fit.' "
Families that have buried large relatives say it is important to compare funeral homes, since some funeral directors with more experience burying the obese can perform the task at a lower cost. Lois Kehrer, whose brother-in-law John Kehrer of Loveland, Ohio, died last spring at 52 of heart failure at 696 pounds, said the first undertaker the family spoke to said Kehrer would require a custom casket, a custom burial vault and two funeral plots, which together cost $20,000.
The Kehrers eventually found another funeral director who could fit Kehrer into a ready-made coffin from Goliath, and a local cemetery agreed to fit the coffin in a single plot, by positioning it slightly off center. The cost of the funeral came to $7,921.74.
"People need to be aware there are other options," Kehrer said. "We kind of lucked out."
Hazelett, the coffin maker from Indiana, said he expected the coffin industry to continue courting the oversize market.
"The economic opportunity exists until the country changes," he said. "We're just reacting to the supersizing of America."
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