STORY #1:
HEADLINE: Money to bury the poor falls to 'critical point'
Charlotte's Catholic Social Services burial assistance program facing hard times
Date: 8/22/2010
By Tim Funk
Sha-Shounna Bryant died minutes after being born July 4, her mother a Mecklenburg County Jail inmate escorted to the hospital, her father an out-of-work house painter with no money to bury his daughter.
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Last Christmas Eve, Kelly Cooke and her sister cried all night after deciding they couldn't afford to claim the body of their 42-year-old brother, a struggling tattoo artist whose few worldly goods included an empty wallet.
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And this summer, Steve Forstner, 34, didn't know where to turn when a nurse called to say that the neighbor he befriended - elderly, poor, alone - might only have days to live.
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All cries for help. All answered by Charlotte's Catholic Social Services, which has had a burial assistance program for the indigent since the mid-1990s.
In 2009-10, CSS, working with 22 local funeral homes and city-owned Oaklawn Cemetery, helped offer dignified, if no-frill, funeral arrangements for Forstner's neighbor, Cooke's brother, baby Bryant and 160 others - 95 percent of them non-Catholic.
That's the good news.
The bad news: With the cost of preparing and burying a body going up and contributions to charities going down, the CSS burial assistance fund is about broke.
"We have $386, " Elizabeth Thurbee, CSS's longtime executive director, said recently. "We really are at a critical point. We simply don't have the money now. Funeral homes are calling us, and holding bodies."
In the past, donations usually kept up with demand and CSS managed to keep expenses low.
No more. Not with the sour economy and, just over a year ago, nearly a doubling of the rate paid to funeral homes and the city cemetery, which still get considerably less than their normal fees.
And few have answered CSS's own plea for help.
Traditionally, Thurbee sends a letter to all area churches, Catholic and Protestant, asking for donations to CSS's burial assistance program - the only one in Mecklenburg County. If every church agreed to bury just one indigent, she likes to say, there would be more than enough money to meet the growing need.
But, like CSS itself, churches are stretched these days and inundated with requests for help from everywhere.
"Last time, " said Thurbee, "our letter didn't get a very good response."
Those who've been helped in their time of grief hope that others can get the same assistance.
"It felt like a big relief, " said Jonathan Florez Londono, 21, a Queens University of Charlotte student whose mother just didn't wake up one day last year. "You have all this confusion and then here's this glimmer of light" from CSS.
Forstner, a former circus performer who now is part of a team that cuts down trees, said he, too, felt CSS's support and guidance with the death of his elderly neighbor, a military veteran entitled to a burial plot and marker in the national cemetery in Salisbury.
"Catholic Social Services made it as simple as possible. They even called me and asked me how I was doing, " recalled Forstner, who said he came up with $800 for the discounted arrangements. "Their program is a vital service. Especially now, when the economy is so bad."
Local history on burials
No other agency or faith group in Charlotte offers such a program. Some houses of worship occasionally help individual families.
But most eligible families are referred to CSS by funeral homes, cemeteries, hospitals and Hospice. Here's who qualifies: families who have no insurance, are unable to negotiate financial arrangements with a funeral home and have less than the cost of the discounted burial or cremation.
Until 1994, Mecklenburg County had taxpayer-funded burial assistance. But county officials, looking for ways to avoid a tax hike, ended the $50,000 pauper burial aid program that had existed for 25 years. Going forward, they said, the county would pay to bury only the indigent whose bodies went unclaimed - the minimum required by state law.
Thurbee and then-Bishop William Curlin, who led the Catholic Diocese of Charlotte, were so touched by an Observer story that year - about a woman who had to hunt for money to bury her murdered grandson - that they decided to act.
"Bishop Curlin came to me and said, 'How can this be? We have to do something, ' " Thurbee said. "Just because you're poor should not mean you shouldn't be able to bury your loved ones with dignity and care. ...Catholic social teaching is grounded in the caring of our brothers and sisters - reaching out to the poor, the vulnerable, the helpless."
She and the bishop met with funeral directors and city cemetery officials, came up with eligibility and other rules, then launched what CSS still calls a ministry.
That first year, they helped six to10 families, Thurbee said, then 20-30 annually for years after that. But in the last few years, as the economy has left so many families without jobs and savings, it's topped 100.
Along with the increased demand came pressure from some funeral homes to raise the level of reimbursement.
For 15 years, CSS and its partners were able to provide everything for $600, with eligible families contributing what they could and CSS providing the rest of the money.
But in July 2009, CSS agreed to raise the discounted cost to $1,100 - with $800 going to the funeral home, which prepares and transports the body and orders the casket, and $300 to the city cemetery, which provides the plot and opens and closes the grave. (Discounted cremations of adults cost $600 under the program.)
"Under the old reimbursement, just to get a casket, we were getting in the hole, " said Ken Poe, president of Hankins & Whittington Funeral Home. "We felt: It's not hard to give away our labor, but it is hard to give out cash."
The higher payment helps, Poe said, but it's still "only a fraction of what it costs to do business" - an amount he estimated at between $3,000 and $4,000, including overhead costs.
Still, Poe and other funeral directors said they feel a social and moral responsibility to participate.
"Regardless of a family's situation, that's somebody's loved one and they do need to have a burial, " said Theoplis Ingram, director and general manager at Alexander Funeral Home.
The burial assistance fund has gone up and down over the years but was always able to keep up. Now, with expenses way up and donations sluggish, the fund is at its lowest point ever.
"For the first time in our program's history, " Thurbee said, "we have had to say: 'I'm sorry, we cannot help you. We do not have the money.' "
CSS can still arrange discounted rates for eligible families, if they pay most or all of the $1,100.
Poe said CSS might draw more financial support from the faith community if it adopted a more ecumenical name for the program.
And though his funeral home is a major participant, he suggested that CSS could cut expenses through tougher screening, to better weed out those who don't truly qualify.
"We've seen cases where it was obvious (families) were not reporting all their assets to Catholic Social Services, " he said. "They say, 'My father didn't have any resources.' What we're really talking about is: What are the family's resources?"
Thurbee's answer?
"I think we do a great job in screening people's resources because it is important to make sure those who need the service most get it, " she said. "So we use all that's available to us to verify income and ability to pay. But we also have a mission to treat those who come to us to bury their loved ones with dignity and compassion."
The CSS 'blessing'
The fund still had some leeway last Christmas Eve, when Kelly Cooke's younger brother was found dead.
Tyler Steen, who had drug problems and did some time in prison, left behind a mini-refrigerator, a stereo speaker, a necklace, a tattoo chair, and a wallet with no money in it.
At the hospital, Cooke and her sister were given options: You can claim your brother's body, then pay thousands of dollars to have him buried or cremated. Or you can chose to not claim his body, turning it over to Mecklenburg County, then the state, for cremation. As a pauper, his ashes - by then, the property of the state - would be disposed of at sea.
The married sisters, who didn't have a lot of money and had seven children between them, decided, reluctantly, not to claim his body. Then they went back to their separate homes in Denver, N.C., and cried into the night. The next morning, they were on the phone to each other: We can't do this to him. Aren't there other options?
A few days later, Cooke, whose husband had been laid off from his job, found out about what she calls "a blessing": the CSS program.
The social workers arranged for discounted arrangements and put up $580 for Steen's cremation. The sisters paid $20 upfront and - though they are not required to - have been sending $20 a month to pay back the amount CSS covered.
Cooke said her family is grateful they were able to do the right thing for a brother who was smiling in every one of the old pictures they found after his death. Next month, she and other family members plan to sprinkle his ashes in Cascade Lake near Brevard. It was during a family camping trip there last year that someone snapped the last known photo of Steen. Now framed, it shows him happily fishing.
"The people at Catholic Social Services were always so nice; we cried in their office and they gave us boxes of tissue, " said Cooke, who attends a nondenominational church. "If their program had not been available, we'd have had to sign him over and live with that guilt the rest of our lives."
A calm, peaceful rest
Barbara Grisinger, one of three social workers at CSS, wonders what happens to the families who sound so dispirited when she tells them how much they would have to pay for even a discounted burial.
"They say, 'We have to pay $1,100?' " Grisinger said. "I never hear from them again."
She and colleague Jeannie Beall are also haunted by those who came to CSS after being told they were dying. They were there in hopes of finding money for their own funeral.
Trying to offer a little encouragement to one woman filling out an application, Grisinger offered: "You look healthy."
"Yeah, " the woman replied, "I'm having a pretty good day."
Then there was the 20-year-old daughter who went door to door, asking neighbors to help her raise enough money to bury her mother.
"She came in with an envelope, " Beall said. "It was filled with $300 or $400."
But the hardest cases, the social workers agreed, are parents burying children.
It's not as expensive to bury the young, so Grisinger was able to help last month when Al Springs came asking for $150 to bury a daughter he didn't get to meet during her brief life.
Sha-Shounna Bryant's mother had been in jail for violating probation on an earlier drug paraphernalia conviction.
The baby's body was taken to A.E. Grier & Sons Funeral Home, where it stayed for weeks while Springs, then 50 and jobless, went asking for money at area churches.
Temple Church International, where he's a member, gave him $150. Then, when he told the funeral home that he was otherwise broke, he was referred to Catholic Social Services.
"It'd be chaos out there without this program, " said Springs, who paints and repairs houses when he can get the work. "You never know when death is going to come."
On July 29, more than three weeks after her death, Sha-Shounna was finally laid to rest in Oaklawn Cemetery's charity section for babies.
Springs and a friend arrived in his weathered pickup. They walked to Row Q, said a silent prayer, then watched as a backhoe covered the tiny, white hard-plastic casket with dirt.
They left behind a white rose, a tulip and a heart-shaped balloon that lightly danced in the wind.
"All her troubles are over with now, " Springs said before climbing back into his truck. "She's gone home to heaven."
Researchers Marion Paynter and Maria David contributed.
BOX: How it works
The deceased must have been a resident of Mecklenburg County.
Being Catholic is not a requirement. Only about 5 percent of those who have been helped by CSS were Catholic.
The program serves families who have no insurance, are unable to negotiate financial arrangements with a funeral home and have less than the $1,100 cost of the burial charged through the program.
People seeking help must fill out an application that asks for household income and expenses.
The no-frill burial plan includes: minimum preparation of the body; a cloth-covered casket; private viewing by the family or responsible party; transportation of the body to the cemetery; tent and chairs at the grave site; filing of the death certificate by the funeral home; and a seven-line obituary notice in the Observer.
Catholic Social Services tries to rotate participating funeral homes.
Families being helped are not permitted to buy extras, such as limousine service. And funeral homes in the program have agreed not to try to sell families such supplemental services on the side.
All contributions made to CSS's burial assistance program go to help families burying loved ones. The social workers' salaries are covered by CSS fundraisers, the diocese and other donations.
Catholic Social Services is audited annually by Deloitte & Touche.
CSS's other services include domestic and international adoptions, refugee resettlement and counseling. Tim Funk