Final arrangements: examining debt and distress

Abstract

Prevailing discourses condemn funerals as a costly distress purchase where funeral directors have greedily preyed upon funeral arrangers’ grief laden vulnerability. They explain funerals as distress purchases and so debt as the outcome of irrational decisions made while emotionally overwhelmed. These discourses ignore how people might use funeral purchases in dealing with the experience of death as they obscure rather than explain the emotionally infused decision-making that incurs funeral debt. This paper aims to shed light on this aspect of funeral purchases through a New Zealand-based empirical investigation of how intense feelings connect with decision-making associated with funeral cost and debt. The examination highlights that arranging a funeral, rather than being a hurried, ill-informed, choice-limited, emotionally overwhelming distress purchase, is a complex socio-emotional process that crystallises multiple affects into the culturally sanctioned emotion of responsibility, itself mobilised on class lines embedded in existing societal attitudes to debt and socio-economic structures.

Keywords:

• funeral
• purchase
• debt
• distress
• emotion
• New Zealand

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the following financial and research support: BRCSS, grant number E5415; the University of Canterbury Social Science Research Centre for a research assistantship (Elaine Donovan) 2008/9; Professor Elaine McFarland and the School of Law and Social Science of the University of Glasgow Caledonia for sabbatical support April–June 2009. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes

1 Analysis looked for associations between yes and no responses in groups with a significant number of survey returns. If there was a relative equilibrium between yes and no answers, (±10 %) this was taken to mean that the background variable did not influence preparedness to go into debt for a funeral. If it was more than 10% variation, this was taken to indicate that this background variable could be theoretically important except in cases with a very low number of survey returns because small differences in responses generate disproportionately large variation in the results.

2 Here the respondent means completing as much of the general details as possible that would be already known – such as occupation of parents of deceased.