You're reading: A nation too poor to die

High funeral costs burden grieving familes

sing cost of living now face an even grimmer nemesis: the sky-high cost of dying.

According to the Kyiv City Ritual Services Department figures, the average cost of a funeral has reached Hr 350, three times the average monthly salary and almost 10 times the state pension payment. Unofficially, it can cost much more than that just to locate a burial plot. Stripped of the social safety net that used to underwrite some funeral expenses, grieving relatives of deceased Kyiv residents are resorting to such strategems as pauper's burials and quick-and-cheap interments in the surrounding villages.

“For the average person it's very difficult to bury someone,” said Leonid Matuseyich, the Ritual Services Department's deputy director.

Galina, a Kyiv resident who declined to give her last name, is 72. She recently helped with the funeral of her daughter's mother-in-law, and wonders who will help when her turn comes.

“It is impossible to be buried now,” she said. “The state can't help poor people, they have to pay themselves for the coffin, the bus, the bearers, and then for the reception afterwards.”

Galina's only daughter has emigrated, and the only remaining close relative she has in Ukraine is her sister, also a pensioner.

Galina has good reason to worry. In decades past, neighbors and friends would take up collections to help pay for funeral costs, and the plant or enterprise where the deceased worked would also chip in. But the decline of state-run enterprises along with with the general economic crisis have made burial expenses much harder to cover. The Ritual Services Department deals with over 1,000 deaths per month. Matuseyich's office is besieged by anxious relatives clutching the papers they need to secure burial plots for their loved ones in cemeteries all over Kyiv. It is a complicated affair, since many of Kyiv's 29 cemeteries are now closed to all but war veterans, invalids and those who already have a family plot.

Land around Kyiv is scarce and expensive, limiting funeral options for those without money or influence. Most burials take place in the North or South cemeteries several kilometers outside Kyiv.

As with almost every industry in Ukraine, the business of handling funerals and burials is rife with corruption. Relatives and friends complain that the real cost of dying is far higher than that quoted by city officials. “Officially it isn't so expensive, but in practice each person you apply to tries to earn money on your grief,” said one man waiting to present his papers at the Ritual Services Department.

He and his companion Anatoly, both of whom declined to give their last names, could not estimate how much money they would eventually have to spend to bury their loved ones, only that it would be more than they can afford. “It was easier in the Soviet Union,” said Anatoly. “Pensioners can't even pay for their apartments, and they have to buy basics to eat like milk and bread and potatoes. They have nothing to save for their funerals.” The government provides an allowance of approximately Hr 140 for funeral costs, according to Anna Grachova, head of the Ritual Services Economic Department, but this does not come close to covering the total cost. A plot in a cemetery is officially free if one can be found, but all other services, including transport, gravedigging, embalming, washing and dressing of the body, require cash up front. Unofficially, a place in a closed Kyiv cemetery can be bought for up to $1,000, said one stonemason who asked not to be named.

He works with his father and brother in one of Kyiv's older cemeteries, engraving and erecting gravestones. Although the cemetery is supposed to be closed to all but those with family plots already there, new, expensive marble graves from the last couple of years line the lanes. All the work his family does at the cemetery is “unofficial,” and has been ever since his father started work there 25 years ago.

“Everything can be done here unofficially except for actual burials,” said the stonemason. “Some people are on staff here and they have orders from administration, but of course they are eager to earn money from private jobs.” The monthly salary for official cemetery workers is Hr 36. Relatives have to wait a long time for shoddy work if they go through official channels, said the stonemason, and most workers, such as bearers and gravediggers, demand an extra fee of up to Hr 50.

The stonemason said he can earn around $700 on the side for preparing a gravesite and making the stone, a job which takes two days. Business is good. The stonemason estimates that he engraves around 10 gravestone portraits each month, at $100 to $200 each. Racketeers have encroached on the lucrative business, he said, adding that he must give up 20 percent of his earnings to them if he is seen setting a stone.

A growing number of private firms have also appeared to take a cut of funeral costs.

“Of course if people are rich enough they may organize what they want,” said Grachova. “There are cases where people can't pay, but in Kyiv it's a comparatively small number.” Rich people can turn to a small number of private funeral homes. One such, Skorbota, has set up a whole range of shops, and has an affiliated insurance company where clients can take out insurance policies to cover funeral expenses.

Such schemes are new in Ukraine, and still unpopular. “It's very rare that people think about death in advance,” said Skorbota Director Vladimir Bodnya. “People have no chance with the level of life in Ukraine now to save money for funerals. Not many people believe in insurance; they are afraid of being cheated.”

Skorbota's shops are divided between those for the very rich and others for the very poor. The elite shop provides funeral items such as hearses, coffins and flowers for bankers, consuls and Mafia bosses, said Bodnya, who estimated that Skorbota gets only two or three such clients a month. Coffin prices range from Hr 335 to Hr 7,400. At the other end of the scale, poor people can buy Skorbota coffins, sometimes made from processed sunflower seed husks, for as little as Hr 70.

People who cannot afford a funeral at all usually die alone and are unidentified. They are buried at the expense of the state in the North cemetery outside Kyiv, or else cremated. “We provide the cheapest coffins and urns and bury them,” said Kyiv Crematorium director Alexander Ivashenko, who estimated that between 10 and 15 percent of cremations fit this category. He would not comment on whether the number of people unable to pay for funerals was increasing, but it is only this year that such bodies have begun to be cremated; before that they were buried.

In Ivashenko's office, which looks out over the sail-like concrete curves of the 1970s-built crematorium, a coffee pot sits on a shelf between two funeral urns. The similarity between the two shapes is disturbing. “We cremate Muslims, we cremate Jews, we cremate Christians. … We are looking for jobs,” said Ivashenko jovially. The crematorium averages 700 cremations a month, about 40 percent of the total deaths in Kyiv. “If I'm talking as a private enterprise director, that's not much,” said Ivashenko. “Talking as a state enterprise director, it's a lot.”

The crematorium is state owned, with no plans for privatization. Ivashenko said more business was needed to raise workers' wages.

“It's not much; few cremations mean small salaries,” he said.

The facility makes a profit of Hr 10 to Hr 15 on each cremation. The cost for the service is between $50 and $60, excluding coffin, bearers, urn and funeral service. Business at the crematorium has been in steady decline since the beginning of the 1990s. Ivashenko blames the trying economic environment, which he says has prompted people to bury their relatives out in villages rather than in the capital. In Kyiv relatives must pay for transport and bearers, as well as a gravestone.

“Here the grave has to be appropriate to Kyiv standards,” said Ivashenko. “In the village they can raise a cross for Hr 3, drink some vodka for the reception, and go home.” Kyiv residents agreed that returning to the countryside was a more viable option.

“It's cheaper in villages, you just have to buy a bottle of vodka for the gravediggers,” said Anatoly. “Here, we don't know how much they will take from us.”