2013-10-26

National Post

How We Die Now: “Death renders all equal,” wrote Claudian. How each one of us relates to death, however, is individual, and always changing — as we mature; as we contemplate life, and death, around us; and as society changes. In this special series in the National Post, we present stories and columns looking at the different ways we see, and prepare for, the Great Equalizer.

Robert Fulford: Death, like life, never stops changing

Like life, death never stops changing. Every generation faces new facts about the end of life. Every generation thinks about it in a different way.

Fifty years ago, a Canadian who lived to 100 was a news item and the recipient of a letter from the Queen. Today Canada has about 6,000 centenarians and their number increases by roughly 1,000 a year. A century ago, the death of a child was an expected part of family life; today we are appalled and outraged when it happens. Fifty years ago, suicide was universally abhorred and treated as a crime, if not a sin. Today the right to die, which means suicide for a good reason, is legal in several countries and American states; it may soon be a part of Canadian life.

Read more

__

Once an indisputable fact, medical advances have turned death into a diagnosis, a doctor’s judgement call

As he ministers to the fallen hero in The Princess Bride, Billy Crystal’s character Miracle Max gives voice to the ancient philosophical insight death is a puzzling concept, not as simple or clearcut as it first appears.

“Mostly dead is slightly alive,” he quips, before setting to work on the resurrection.

Once it happens, death is indisputable and, as yet, irreversible. But there are moments along the way when it can be ambiguous, fuzzy, subjective and elusive. And as medical science expands its capacity to prolong life and delay death, these mortal riddles grow in both number and complexity.

Read more

__

Will technology conquer death? New applications let people send messages from beyond the grave

People will be forced to consider their posthumous digital reputations

For Eran Alfonta, it began when a friend and his wife went abroad without their three small children, nearly had a car accident, and began to wonder: What if tragedy had not been averted?

“When they returned, they told me: ‘Listen, if something had happened to us, our three kids would be left without any message from us, without any goodbye from us,” says Mr. Alfonta, CEO of an Israeli software development company.

“Would you help us build a website so that anyone would be able to log on and record anything we would like to leave behind?’

Read more

__

At the ‘Death Cafe,’ mortals feel free to talk about taboo end-of-life issues

Susan Shandling and her partner talked about death often. They talked about why he planned to kill himself, so that when he made that final choice, she understood.

“I didn’t know when it would be. But I knew it was part of how he lived,” she said on a Wednesday evening, earlier this month, in a Dundas, Ont., house she had never been to before, among strangers undaunted by the sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes taboo topic of our inevitable demise.

“I find it really difficult to be angry,” Ms. Shandling said softly. “Because, he chose to do what he did. And he died as he lived, autonomously, and I have to respect that.”

Read more

__

‘We can’t have dying people in our backyard’: In Vancouver, there’s little room for the dead, no time for death

In Vancouver, there’s little room for the dead, and no time for death. The city of 600,000 has only one cemetery, the venerable, crowded Mountain View, where the columbaria — above-ground structures designed to hold cremated remains — are packed tight, and in-ground plots are recycled every four decades, thanks to lack of space.

Dealing with the dead is an issue in other Canadian cities, of course. Traditional funeral parlours are being squeezed from our high streets, thanks to exorbitant rents and competition from retail outfits. While most human remains in Canada are now cremated, not buried, objections are sometimes raised when new crematoria are proposed within city limits: Councillors in Mississauga, Ont. rejected an application for a modern, clean-burning crematorium this month, for example, on the basis the proposed location was too close to houses.

Read more

__

Why we’ll spend to save lives in imminent peril, but balk at expensive (yet efficient) ways to save lives down the road

Anthony Perruzza figured the idea was a no-brainer. Since 2010, the city councillor had been championing a motion to ask the transit commission to begin installing platform-level barriers at subway stations, at an estimated cost of $6- to $10-million per station, to help prevent track-level deaths.

Between 1998 and 2007, approximately 150 people killed themselves by jumping in front of a Toronto subway train; accidental deaths also occasionally take place.

Read more

__

Leaving a mark: How ash tattoos help the living remember the dead

Trish Rodgers filled a small bottle cap with her dead aunt’s ashes and emptied it into a vial of black ink. In her apartment, the tattoo artist used the combination of human remains and tattoo pigment to draw the outline of a rose into her cousin’s shoulder.

At that point, this was a practice that only tattoo artists used amongst themselves, Ms. Rodgers says. But since that evening in 2008, it has garnered attention of sociologists across the world and Canadian tattoo parlours are seeing requests for the procedure grow. But it remains largely underground, says Ms. Rodgers, and many artists refuse to offer it to the public, citing the “unknown risks.”

Read more

__

From funeral services to freeze-drying, today’s pet owners looking for a more meaningful goodbye

Seated in a wing-back chair in a quiet room, Diane Reilly can’t fight the tears as she recalls the death of her “soulmate.”

The Markham, Ont. empty-nester was sure Taylor would live until 18 or 20. She fed the miniature poodle homemade food, took her to a holistic vet. Their bond was strong.

When Taylor’s kidneys started to shut down last fall, Ms. Reilly was distraught and prepared to pay $10,000 for a transplant, but the dog only had a 10% chance of survival. Taylor died in February while her owner was out shoveling snow.

Read more

__

Talking to one of just 30 Orthodox Jews in Canada trained in ritual slaughter for kosher meat

The tools of Rabbi Yoel Adler’s trade fit in a black case labeled Vidpro, intended for a camera tripod. Inside are four sharpening stones and four knives. Each knife has a glittering rectangular blade, longer than his forearm.

Mr. Adler is 25; his bushy beard, black coat and rabbit-fur hat make him look older. Yoel Adler is a shochet: He is one of 30 Orthodox Jews in Canada trained in ritual slaughter of animals for kosher meat.

Last Wednesday he stopped after work to see his dad, Rabbi Sholom H. Adler, at the Kashruth Council of Canada, which grants kosher designations for foodstuffs. The elder Adler supervises slaughter for the council.

Read more

__

Popularity of collecting human body parts evidence of our society’s fascination with death

On a coffee table in the basement of a refurbished industrial building in downtown Toronto, a cheese tray and rice crackers share space with four human heads — severed and tanned, mouths stitched shut, eyes closed, nostril and ear hairs visible, each noggin perched on a wooden base.

A clutch of young professionals, sipping wine at the evening gathering in a private studio this month, bend to grab a square of cheddar as they stare into the faces of what were once robust men.

It is not the only show of death here.

Read more

__

Cryonics and the search for ‘something more’ beyond death

Ali Eldeniz was smart, and funny, and to his parents and older brother he was the smiling centre of their happy little universe.

Turkish-born, but Swiss-German in most every way, Mr. Eldeniz was raised near Zurich.

Five years ago he was completing a university degree in microbiology and headed for graduate school in Luxembourg when a doctor informed the 27-year-old that he was not going anywhere.

He had cancer. Leukemia. He was given one year to live.

It was a terrible time, his older brother, Ismail, recalls. 

Read more

__

Rituals of death: Atheists learning to honour a life in their own ways

Gretta Vosper occupies an unusual position in the Canadian landscape: she is an ordained minister in the United Church of Canada, and a committed atheist — a peculiar pairing if there ever was one. But for a new breed of atheists facing the prospect of death, she offers an ideal blend of ritual and meaning with an otherwise anti-spiritual philosophy. Particularly at the most poignant moment of their existence: Their death.

Atheists may disdain the notion of a god and an afterlife, and yet many are inclined to want something more than just the scattering of some ashes and a few kind words of tribute to mark their deaths.

Read more

__

The famous and the dead: Celebrity actions can have unintended, deadly effects

On October 19, 2010, while passing through Pitt Meadows, B.C., a red Toyota, driven by a distraught emergency-room nurse, spun out of control, leaped a concrete barrier and into the oncoming lane.

It was just before midnight on a Tuesday; it was entirely likely that the opposing lane could have been blessedly unoccupied that night.

It was not. Instead, it contained a Suzuki Swift carrying Beckie Dyer and Johnny De Oliveira, a Pitt Meadows couple who just happened to be driving home from a Justin Bieber concert at Vancouver’s Rogers Arena. They were killed instantly when the Toyota landed on top of them.

Read more

__

Dead men walking: Under 19th-century conditions, millions of Canadians would already be dead

In the year 1900, the average Canadian life expectancy was just 50 years old. Today, slightly more than a century later, average life expectancy is 81, an astonishing 62% increase. On average, for each passing year of the 20th century, medical science and social norms added an extra 100 days to the Canadian lifespan.

What this means, of course, is that Canada is home to millions of people who, if they had been born just a few decades sooner, would be dead. Compared with the Canada of 1900, today’s Canada has dead people in its House of Commons, dead people on its Olympic team, dead people in its military and entire cities and voting blocs that, under 19th-century conditions, would all be expired, bereft of life and resting in peace. The good old days, indeed.

Read more

__

Cremation takes creative flight: Ashes now ending up anywhere from space to the ocean floor

Daniel Hamer dreamed of being an astronaut. As a child, space shuttle blueprints wallpapered his bedroom and space vehicles dangled from the ceiling. He watched every shuttle launch and could name crew members by heart.

After a difficult life on the streets, the Edmonton, Alta., man succumbed to his drug addictions in 2011 at the age of 35.

In June of 2013, his younger sister went to New Mexico to watch as Celestis, a Houston-based aerospace company, launched his cremated remains into space.

Read more

__

The way to go: How some well-known Canadians would like to end their days

What is the ideal way to die? That’s what the National Post asked a number of prominent Canadians, from authors to athletes. Not everyone wanted to tell us (were they really too busy?). But you will find the best answers from those who did, here.

__

Death by numbers: How many people die in a year and what’s killing them

100,000,000 - the highest estimated death toll in a war or armed conflict was the Taiping Rebellion in China from 1851 to 1864. Read more

__

Graphic: You’ve Died. Now What?

__

Photos: What happens when life meets death

__

Sports

The pursuit of flying just a stone’s throw from a tragic fall

As she watched them prepare to jump, the tension thickening in the thin mountain air, Dr. Rhonda Cohen began to focus on one particular jumper. It was early spring, but there was snow on Jungfrau, a well-known launching pad in Switzerland, and there seemed to be an unusual silence around the man as he checked the zippers on his wingsuit.

Cohen, a sports psychologist working at Middlesex University, in London, was up on the mountain with a documentary film crew. The relatively new pursuit of wingsuit flying — jumping from mountains or airplanes in an outfit that makes the jumper look like a flying squirrel — had already become known as much for its death toll as its adrenaline rushes.

Read more

__

Athletes may appear superhuman, but they aren’t invincible

The great writer Mark Kram wrote about Muhammad Ali once at age 47, and the story was called “Great Men Die Twice”; first as great, then as men. Ali has become as a shadow of his impossible brightness, imprisoned by Parkinson’s, his glowing face reduced to a mask and knowing eyes. Athletes compete, burn brightly, fade, and eventually die. Great men die twice. 

Sometimes, though, sports kills both at once. During Ali-Frazier III, when the two men went 15 vicious rounds, Ali said, “This must be what dyin’ feels like,” but he lived. The last professional boxer to actually die in a sanctioned fight was a light heavyweight named Roman Simakov in a title defence in Moscow; he was alive when he left the ring, but brain injuries killed him in hospital. That was in December of 2011.

Read more

__

Comment

Jonathan Kay: Death — Can’t live with it …

For today’s special edition of the National Post, we asked some of our finest writers to opine on the issue of death.

Rex Murphy supplied an especially thought-provoking column, full of brilliant literary snippets from the great writers of the 17th century — a period that seems to have been a sort of golden age for ruminations on the fate that awaits us all.

It makes for sombre reading: Sir Thomas Browne’s Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk is not the sort of book that will lift you out of a down mood.

Read more

__

George Jonas: The rock outside your window

When my father was nearing 90, he started slowing down. Sometimes he barely stirred from his big leather armchair. Visiting him one day, I found him standing, leaning heavily on his cane, reluctant to take that first step with which a journey of a thousand miles must begin, according to Mao Zedong.

“What would you like, Dad?’’ I asked him. “I’ll get it for you.”

“Ha!” Father’s reply was an exclamation of dry mirth. “If I knew what I wanted, I’d get it myself.”

This was cocky but not quite accurate. Although the deterioration of father’s memory came first, his body didn’t take long to catch up. Remembering what he wanted was no guarantee that it would show up in his hand.

Read more

__

Rex Murphy: Your quaint honour turn to dust

Halloween, at least in part, originally was a ceremony for the dead, and in the Christian context an interval to honour or pray for those who had died but were still parked, so to speak, in Purgatory, awaiting their eventual ascent to heaven.

It was, and still is, underneath the costumery and fun, a time to think of the dead.

Death may be the only taboo left in the modern world. We cosmetize to delay its inevitable advent.

Botox and surgery are our apotropaic — our effort to ward off carnal dissolution. But other eras were not so skittish about death.

Read more

__

Father Raymond J. de Souza: All the tombs shall be empty

Last Sunday, after our own parish Mass, I walked over to the neighouring Anglican parish of Holy Trinity for the dedication of a restored funeral monument in the parish cemetery. It was a good preparation for November, the month that Catholic piety assigns to special prayers for the dead and in which the faithful are encouraged to visit cemeteries.

While at Trinity Anglican’s cemetery, I looked in on another restoration project — the stone vault in which coffins were stored during the winter. In days gone by, when it was impossible to dig graves after the frost had set in, burials were delayed until spring and the coffins stored in a vault after the funeral. Such vaults were secured under lock against grave-robbers.

Read more

__

Barbara Kay: ‘So here it is at last, the distinguished thing’

Death has always preoccupied me. The same questions arise, unbidden, sometimes several times a day: When, where, how will I die? I’m not made gloomy by this tic. It keeps my ego in check.

When I was growing up, sex and death were the two great conversational taboos. Both were charged with mystery. For sex, that all changed with the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s.

First the sexologists flung open the closet door, threw sex onto a gurney, and under the glare of high-intensity lamps cut it open, peering and probing into every orifice, nook and cranny. Sexologists recorded sex’s parts while its sum — the mystery — died on the table.

Read More

__

Adam Leith Gollner: Cheating death

Longevity studies occupy a windswept limbo-land, in which the distinction between pseudoscience and verifiable research often is intentionally obfuscated. A measured approach is usually an indicator of reliability in a researcher, but many well-regarded aging scientists make sweeping declarations about ending the disease of growing old.

Take this prototypical example, made 25 years ago by Michael D. West at a corporation called Geron: “We absolutely have within our hands the technology to manipulate and reverse ageing in every tissue and system.” The intervening decades would seem to refute that claim, but it hasn’t stopped such proclamations.

Read more

__

Gary Clement’s Week in Review … OF DEATH!

__

Arts & Life

The look of death: How black went from widows’ weeds to the runway

Black: the absence of light to denote mourning. The colour worn for centuries by priests and clerics as a symbol of poverty and of dying to oneself to serve a greater good. It was more widely popularized in the 19th century, first as the British court mourned Princess Charlotte in 1817 and again when Queen Victoria plunged her wardrobe into darkness, taking all of gaslit London society with her. She wore black for half her life in mourning for her late husband Prince Albert and that act set the standard (and inspired a series of complex rules) for widows and wearing black for anywhere from six months to two years after the passing of a loved one or family member. The social custom extended to even the working classes, who tinted their existing garments black. Yet only the wealthy could afford the full mourning garb of widow’s weeds, making them a fashionable status symbol.

Read More

__

Where there’s a will, there’s a payday: Celebrity memorabilia auctions allow fans to take home a piece of their idols

A celebrity once asked Darren Julien what they could do to make their items worth more money at auction. “And I said … die,” the auctioneer says with a laugh. “Jokingly, but it is true. Say Michael Jackson — we held the record when Michael was alive selling one of his gloves for $30,000, and then he passed and we sold it for $420,000.”

If celebrity is the contemporary world’s religion, then dead celebrity detritus is the equivalent holy relic — tiny shards of icons and saintly locks of hair under glass, spread to believers far and wide. Think of the formula as fame, exponentially multiplied by death.

Read more

__

How to plan the ultimate vacation to Switzerland, suicide tourism capital of the world

It’s an old saw that travel broadens the horizons, which makes it easy to overlook the fundament-shaking truth of it. A trip to Haiti can make you rethink your thoughts on foreign aid. Drop in on any given village in Greenland and you’ll realize the Arctic can be a fully functioning part of a society. And one trip to Addis Ababa and you’ll never refer to “Africa” as an undifferentiated whole again.

It might be better to say that travel is a solution to problems you didn’t know you had, including the one most of us spend our lives pretending doesn’t exist, our own mortality.

Switzerland is not a country that would seem to have anything to teach us except, perhaps, how to get rich by studiously not caring where your money comes from.

Read more

__

Mireille Silcoff: Spare me the scares

Until yesterday I had never seen a horror movie, and as of today I am still not 100% sure what I saw counts. Mike bet me that I could not make through even one quarter of a real horror film and I proved him wrong, although on my computer — and using YouTube, with the screen non-enlarged — as film projector.

OK, fine, it was a 19-minute “scariest moments” video. But I say: still The Exorcist. Mike says: cop-out. At this point I don’t care. I saw all the key scenes and, like those retching audience members back in 1973, felt physically ill. I then spent half an hour watching Season 5 Absolutely Fabulous outtakes to try to cleanse myself of The Exorcist, but The Exorcist is still with me, in some terrible, post-traumatic stress-like way. 

Read more

__

Jane MacDougall: Conversations with my ghost

Imagine a house.

An old house. Big enough that you would grouse about having to fetch someone if there was a phone call. Big enough that, turning a corner, you might often say, “Oh, I didn’t know you were home.” It is a Tudor house. Set it well back from the street, behind a brick and iron fence.

Conjure trees, lots of trees, but mostly of one type. Make them cathedral-like cedars casting everlasting shadows and obscuring a clear sightline into the property. There, in the northeastern corner, a stand of silver birch, night or day, appears blanched by moonlight.

This is the house I want you to see in your mind’s eye.

Read more

__

Dave Bidini: The gold one died while falling

A poem in memory of Jesús Javier Hernández “Oro” Silva, Dec.24 1971 – Oct. 26, 1993

The gold one died while falling.

Some of us dream of other ways:
Lying atop Pamela Anderson’s pillows, firm and cool.
Suddenly confused, and then gone.
Scoring the winning goal for your long-standing team
in a game you most wanted to win, then celebrating:
heart-hooked, hose-pierced, and spiked to the ice.
Or perhaps chicken-boned while eating
The greatest sandwich ever.

Read more

__

Jonathan Goldstein: Questions posed by the universe

I’m working on a monologue for my radio show about an alternate dimension in which people are continually asked questions from the heavens.

The questions can come at any time and there is no handbook or study guide for how to answer. People might find themselves on the way to a movie with friends when a booming voice — the kind Moses must have heard — would come thundering from the firmament.

“If you die and are reincarnated,” the voice asks, “would you choose to be reborn as a page in the Bible or a napkin on your true love’s lap?”

Read more

__

A quick bite before they headed off: Last meals of the famously departed, from Marilyn to Elvis

__

Financial Post

Are you betting on an inheritance to solve your money problems?

We’ve become a nation of waiters. Not the type ready to serve you lunch but serious spenders banking on an inheritance to get us out of our financial jams.

Wills and estate lawyer Les Kotzer says “waiter” is the perfect term to describe the growing clientele streaming into his office in Thornhill, a wealthy suburb north of Toronto.

“I’m starting to hear about a lot of people who are depending on this mattress of their parents to fall back on,” said Mr. Kotzer, of Fish & Associates, who tells the story of seemingly wealthy clients who showed up his door and hopped out of an expensive sports car. “They’re flashing Rolex watches, diamond bracelets. I ask them where they live, it’s in an expensive area. I ask him ‘what do you do’. He’s not working. She’s a substitute school teacher.”

Read More

__

Leaving an inheritance to the kids — or not

After a lifetime of hard work and saving, you have accumulated some serious assets. When you die, do you really want your diligence to fund a life of leisure for your kids? Or do you worry that your children lack the know-how to handle significant amounts of capital and that a sea of red ink will swamp your financial legacy?

If you have these concerns, you are certainly not alone. A survey of Canadian millionaires by RBC found that nearly one-half do not have confidence in their children’s abilities to manage their inheritance. Research in the U.S. and other countries has arrived at similar findings. Worldwide, many affluent parents worry that their children are ill-equipped to handle the challenges of inherited wealth.

Read more

__

Ted Rechtshaffen: I can insure you, you and you

Getty Images

Here’s a great money making scheme: Buy insurance on people that may have an unfortunate accident. Maybe your neighbour who drives recklessly, or a colleague who participates in risky sports. Or someone whose lifestyle might lead them towards a poor outcome.

In Canada, the only way you can do this is if you are related to that person or they are a close business associate. And even then, you can’t do it behind their backs.

That means siblings, children, parents, grandparents and grandchildren. Even aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews should work. On the business front, if you are a business owner, a senior employee or equity partner would be someone who you could legitimately insure.

Read More

__

An eternity in suburbia awaits for those who don’t lock their real estate costs down now

Tyler Anderson/National Post

Buy now or you could end up in the suburbs until the end of time.

It sounds like your typical real estate pitch but this one is for your final piece of land, your burial plot.

Prices are rising fast and what used to cost $200 to $400 in the 1970s in a central area of Toronto might be closer to $18,000 to $24,000 now.

“It’s very similar, the closer you get to the city the more expensive it gets,” says Daniel Reid, director of sales and marketing at Toronto-based Park Lawn LP.  “One of the reasons it’s true is we are running out of land. It’s just land cost and availability.”

Read more

__

You are going to live longer, but just how long is anybody’s guess

One prominent member at my golf club has always been a heavy drinker and a chain smoker. He turned 80 recently which prompted him to muse out loud that if he had known he was going to live so long, he would have taken better care of himself.

Based on new mortality tables published by the Canadian Institute of Actuaries, it turns out we should all heed his advice.

The tables confirm what we already know, that Canadians are living longer. More noteworthy is the fresh confirmation that mortality rates have been declining even faster than we had previously projected.

For instance, a woman who just turned 60 can expect to live until about 87.

Life span statistics can be a little misleading, however, because they give the perception we will live until a fixed age and then die.

In fact, the vast majority of us will die earlier or later and we don’t know which it will be.

Read more

__

Death: The biggest financial planning wildcard

Getty Images

Financial planning requires a number of assumptions — future investment returns, inflation rates, income growth and expense estimates, among others. Despite the debate about which standard assumptions to use for these variables, by far, no factor is more important than that of your impending death.

The Wealthy Barber taught us that saving 10% – 15% of income via an automatic savings plan is the key to financial independence. And while this isn’t a bad target, it’s tough to factor in the spectre of death to such a standard. If you want to have a million dollars by the time you retire, that’s relatively easy to budget for. If you want to have $25,000 to buy a new car in five years, that’s even easier. But if you want to have a certain amount of money by the time you die — whether to create an inheritance or die broke — that’s a bit more difficult to plan for.

Read more

__

Leaving a legacy: ‘You only die when you are forgotten’

Philip Cheung for National Post

He may have given away more money than anybody else in Canada, so Seymour Schulich probably has some insight into what drives the desire to have your name live on.

“There are people out there who think their legacy is their company. Your company is not your legacy. Companies have a mortality rate,” says Mr. Schulich, 73, a billionaire who made his money in the gold sector and remains a director of Newmont Mining Corp. “Business is a means to an end. I don’t need to get any richer, thank you. I have two major objectives now. Number one is to be counted among the greatest Canadian philanthropists of my era and two to encourage other wealthy folks to step up.”

Read more

__

Family Finance: What a retired man can do to protect his estate

A widower we’ll call Philip, 78, is eager to preserve his wealth. He spent almost four decades working in the chemical industry, much of that time as a factory supervisor. A widower and a resident of Ontario, he wants to keep as much as he can of his nearly $1-million net worth for his two sons, Herb, who lives in Ontario, and Fred, who lives south of the border in Georgia.

Philip has no immediate financial problems, for his take home income, about $5,500 a month, exceeds his allocations other than savings by $3,015 a month. He has no debts and is in good health. Yet he is focused on what he considers his adversaries: current taxes and probate fees after he dies.

“I would like ideas on how to reduce probate fees for my estate when the time comes and also how to reduce my exposure to the Old Age Security clawback which eats up what I can give my sons,” he says.

Read more

__

Five reasons you need help with your will

The drafting of a will is not something you should do without guidance. Errors in drafting can invalidate the best intentions, says Gregory Sanders, a lawyer and chartered accountant who heads the tax law group at Perley-Robertson, Hill & McDougall LLP based in Ottawa. Here is a list of his warning signs and precautions:

Validity A will that does not comply with the laws of the relevant province may be ruled invalid. That amounts to the same thing as dying without a will, Mr. Sanders says. The tables of intestacy which say which relatives get what fractions will then govern. A public trustee could wind up handling the financial fruits of your life’s work. Each province has specific rules about the signing of a will, who can be a witness and how they document what they witness, he adds.

Read more

__

Lifeco shares no longer the living dead

Looking back over the past five years, it’s easy to argue that the unfortunate truth about life insurance stocks is that the life has gone out of them.

Sure, there’s been some volatility, like back in the spring when all that talk about tapering by the U.S. Federal Reserve helped push up lifeco shares. But, arguably, such bursts of activity are more comparable to the twitches of a seriously ill patient after a defibrillator treatment than any real sign of recovery and returning strength — especially considering the shares of the major players have barely returned to their 2009 levels.

Read more

__

Online shopping shakes up the funeral industry

When Kim Darby’s mother passed away in July, she wanted to honour her mother’s memory but didn’t have a lot money for an expensive funeral.

A friend recommended she take a non-traditional route by shopping for services online.

“Immediately there is a relief,” said the 47-year-old from Ottawa. “Because there is nobody in your face. Nobody making you feel guilty that you’re putting a price on your loved one’s head.”

Through basicfunerals.ca, she arranged for cremation, purchased a rosewood urn, and planned a service at her mother’s home for about $3,000, less than half what other family funerals have cost.

Read more

__

Reaping the benefit of death stocks

The lucrative death business doesn’t always get the respect it deserves from investors, but higher mortality rates and growing consolidation in the funeral home industry could breathe more life into the somewhat morbid play.

“Overall, it’s not super sexy attractive growth, but it’s growth nonetheless,” said Joe Janssen, an analyst at Barrington Research Associates in Chicago. “The average life expectancy has increased, but there’s a finite time where people do pass. The Grim Reaper, unfortunately, still comes.”

The North American death-care industry is generally divided into three segments: funeral or memorial services; disposition of remains through cremation or burial; and monuments, marker inscriptions or art.

Read more

__

Going out in style: Funeral planning for 2013

Your life was grand. You should have an exit as fabulous as you are.

Gone are the days when death was mostly followed by open caskets, solemn church funerals with three days of visitation and receptions with coffee and crustless sandwiches.

“The funeral is yesterday. It’s dying out,” says Lawrence Little, founder of Alternatives Funeral and Cremation Services in Aldergrove, B.C. “The choices that have been out there for decades aren’t really working anymore.”

Read more

__

Death and taxes: Leave your assets to your heirs instead of the CRA

Unlike the U.S., Canada no longer has any form of estate or inheritance tax. Yet despite this, death can trigger a significant income tax bill that, if not properly planned for, can leave an unexpected liability when a loved one passes away. Here is what happens to your non-registered and registered assets when you die:

No

Show more