A few weeks before R died, a friend of ours and the very last person in the world anyone would take practical advice from advised me to take a few thousand pounds out of the bank and buy a small safe. I didn’t. I didn’t because I didn’t then know that on the day someone dies (or very soon after) all their accounts are frozen and in an old-fashioned marriage (such as that of our friend’s mother) a widow is left with nothing but the loose change in her purse.
Luckily, R and I didn’t have that kind of a marriage and I had my own bank account. We had the kind of marriage which has more to do with impending death duties than with a need to feel comfortable about living together, which we had been doing happily for forty long and precious years.
It was a shock to think of the number of married women, fortunate enough never to have had to think much about money, suddenly finding themselves – albeit temporarily* – penniless.
What about those women and men who don’t have any money in the bank? How do they find the four thousand pounds plus which, I was to discover, is the price of the average funeral?
For a funeral, and for that purpose alone, money can – where it exists – be extracted from a partner’s frozen account. But not, in my case, extracted fast enough. To my surprise, the funeral director wanted to be paid in advance. To his surprise – and mine too, I had been far too preoccupied in the weeks leading up to R’s death to keep a check on my bank balance – the cheque that I gave him bounced. I am happy to say there were no recriminations from the recipient, but my dealings with the bank throughout this period were a source of additional stress that I could have done without.
I was left wondering, do the many people unable to borrow or to organise crowdfunding find the money to bury their dead?
The answer is that they don’t. The State steps in and provides the modern equivalent of a ‘pauper’s burial’.
*The average time for Probate to be completed is nine months.