Death Without debt is a new podcast from the Get Flushed studio.

In 2023, the average cost of a basic funeral or cremation in New Zealand was between $8,000 and $15,000. That same year, 64% of funerals and cremations in New Zealand were not pre-planned.

Those high costs and lack of planning often leaves bereaved families with a huge bill that compounds the grief of those left behind.

Death Without Debt is a social movement dedicated to: exposing the reasons why funeral costs are so high; and changing the law to make funerals and cremations more affordable for all New Zealanders.

In this episode, host Pete is joined by Fergus Wheeler from the Death Without Debt campaign. Fergus describes the New Zealand funeral industry, shares how organising funerals for his parents led him to believe that something is seriously wrong with the funeral system in New Zealand and explains the issues that prevent families managing the funeral or cremation process themselves.

To learn more about the Death Without Debt campaign, please visit www.deathwithoutdebt.org.nz or look for Death Without Debt on FaceBook.

If you would like to appear on this podcast, please email deathwithoutdebt@proton.me

Alternatively, email pete@getflushed.online

Hello and welcome to Death Without Debt. My name's Pete and I'll be the. Regular host of this show.

Earlier this year, my wife took me to a Death Without Debt workshop here in Christchurch, New Zealand. I'd never heard of Death Without Debt before that workshop, and I went along not really knowing what to expect.

Let's face it, a workshop about death probably isn't everyone's idea of a fun day out. However, by the end of the day, I'd learnt that the average cost of a basic funeral or cremation in New Zealand is between $8,000 and $15,000.

And those high costs and that lack of planning often leaves bereaved families with a huge bill that's often made worse because this is a subject that most of us don't usually discuss. The workshop had a big impact on me because afterwards I got in touch with the organizers.

You see, I've been producing podcasts for the past four years, and I wanted to use my skills to help the team behind Death Without Debt to spread the word about their campaign. Death without debt is a social movement dedicated to exposing the reasons why New Zealanders are paying so much for funerals.

The campaigners aim to change the law so that the cost of dying becomes more affordable for everyone and doesn't add to the burden of grief for those left behind. This is a good point for me to explain why I think I'm qualified to host a podcast about this subject.

I'm happy to admit that I actually know very little about Death Without Debt as a subject.

Well, I'd guess many of you listening don't know much about it either, and I think that puts me in a great position to ask questions and explore these issues on your behalf. Actually, the show really isn't about me. My role in the podcast is to introduce you to the people who live and breathe this campaign.

With that in mind, my first guest is Fergus Wheeler, whose experiences when organising successive funerals for his parents and a friend led him to conclude that something is seriously wrong with New Zealand's funeral system, and that led him to start Death Without Debt.

We'll hear from Fergus now, but over the rest of this series, I'll be joined by other people with first hand knowledge, skills and experience of Death Without Debt. This episode is dedicated to the memory of loved ones who've gone before. So I'm joined today by Fergus Wheeler, who's on the phone from Paekakariki, north of Wellington. Fergus, welcome to Death Without Debt, the podcast.

Thank you.

We've done quite a lot of work behind the scenes getting ready for this episode, but I think it's probably best for the listener if we start with a general overview of the situation as it's unfolded and go from there.

It was an expose of the american funeral industry, kind of like McDonald's and Coca Cola.

The american way of death has reached right around the world and got to New Zealand, probably started having a big influence here around the seventies.

Death was commercialised and the big question is, how did it happen that New Zealanders have got stuck so completely in the american style funeral model?

So when we talk about that, Fergus, are we talking about funeral directors taking control of the industry, or funeral directors managing the entire process?

Nowadays, there's a great deal of interest in sort of breaking free of that model. But yes, we're talking about funeral directors basically directing the whole of the funeral process. They used to be called undertakers.

They would undertake to do what you asked them to do or what was necessary, but now they're on the front foot and the public could kind of kowtow to them and think they know best and all that sort of stuff.

And just for the listeners benefit in New Zealand, are we talking about an industry that's dominated by one or two players?

Most of the industry now is owned by two australian corporations and one of those is actually dominant. Invocare and propel, I always forget which is which.

They now happen to own most of what used to be the family funeral businesses, and these family funeral businesses are still operating with the same facade. So you turn up to a funeral director and have a hard time knowing whether they're australian owned or whether they're independent.

The commercialisation I'm talking about, that all happened under independent ownership. They supplied the public with the convenience of not having to deal with the body and the convenience of having the funerals organised.

So the public had a part in it too. So I don't want to diss what happened in the funeral district. We all had a part in it.

The thing that makes New Zealand surprising, actually, is that we're meant to be the number eight wire nation of the world, do it yourselves. And Kiwis, if they love one thing, it's saving money.

So how is it the average cost of a funeral in New Zealand is $10,000, when in actual fact, if you know how to get through the system, you can do it for thousands?

I don't want to generalise too much, but for most people, being hands on in the funeral process is really important, psychologically, spiritually, however you want to phrase it, because dealing with death, being there, handling the body, building the coffin, taking the body out, putting it in the back of the car, driving it, doing all that sort of stuff yourself, doing the service sheets, taking it to the crematorium, or taking it to the cemetery, that's really an important part of getting to grips with someone having died.

And you're allowed to do those things, aren't you? Fergus yeah.

Perhaps you could describe how the medical referee system works and how it's set up, and why it's so important.

Ferguse the medical referee system is sort of a complicated, byzantine thing that is stopping people from, first of all, staying within budget on funerals and also doing it themselves. It came in as a response to the rising popularity of cremation.

The concern was that if there was vital pathological evidence or criminal evidence, that the first doctor, the doctor who attended the death, missed, then after cremation, of course, it all goes up in smoke, so it's not there anymore. So the concern was that there needs to be a second check on the first doctor's paperwork. So they established the role of a medical referee.

A medical referee is just a standard doctor, usually a GP, usually fairly experienced, sometimes retired or semi retired, and they just review the first doctor's paperwork.

It wasn't actually an act, it was a set of guidelines for proclamation paperwork. They realized there needed to be a check before a body goes up in smoke. And that's when this medical referee system came in.

The trouble is, the identity of the medical referee is pretty much a secret. The only people who know, generally speaking, are the fuel industry, and that provides the funeral to do with the captive market.

If you go to the supermarket and you ask someone while you're in the line, do you know what a medical referee is? They have no idea. Doctors actually have very little idea. As you'll hear about my experience with trying to find one when my mother died.

Who appoints the medical referees?

It's illogical, but they're actually appointed by the crematorium. I'll just explain what happens if someone's going to get cremated. First of all, obviously they have to die.

And then the doctor comes and certifies the death. So they confirm the death. They write what the cause of death was. Then that paperwork has to go to the second doctor.

And that second doctor is discharging a medical responsibility. The identity of that second doctor is usually secret or very, very hard to find out in New Zealand.

It doesn't make sense that they've been appointed by the crematorium. There's a huge problem for the public because half of the crematoriums in New Zealand are privately owned.

So they're not going to tell you where those medical referees are. Of course there's exceptions, but generally speaking, they're not going to tell you who the medical referee is.

Even for the council owned crematoriums, the only people in town who actually know how to contact these medical referees, the great cremation signed off are the funeral directors. So it's a trade secret and it traps most of New Zealand in the funeral industry's business model.

I was quite surprised at the Christchurch workshop when I learned that there's not an official list published by the Ministry of Health or by anybody else of the appointees that hold that position of medical referee. I was really shocked to hear that. That's not publicly available information.

No, no. And the Ministry of Health, who are meant to be the experts in this, they hadn't thought of that. They didn't realize that they didn't have a list.

They didn't realize the implications of this. So, you know, the system's a mess from the top to the bottom.

So the bottom line there is, even if you want to do everything associated with the cremation process yourself, you still have to go through a funeral director in order to reach a medical referee who signs the death certificate and effectively gives permission for the cremation to go ahead.

You don't have to, but that's what actually happens. You know, in most towns, you ask the doctor who the medical referee is, the doctor won't know.

You ask the crematorium who the medical referees are, and they say, you have to go to a funeral doctor. There's lots of exceptions, but as far as the general public are concerned, this system is impassable.

The overall wire, I refer to it as like a giant psychological cattle stop that's in the way of people doing their own funeral process and in the way of people being able to run a funeral that's going to be affordable for them.

The medical referee only applies to cremations.

Yeah, but. And this is really important because there's a sense of mystery around pre cremation paperwork.

The funeral industry, with the help of the medical profession and everyone else, has managed to sort of cast mystery over burial paperwork as well. Even though burial paperwork is completely straightforward, you just ring up the council, basically, and you fill out a few forms and you're done.

Anyone can do it.

But because death is a mystery, and because the pre cremation paperwork is a mystery, the funeral industry have been able to give everyone the impression that burial paperwork is also complicated, mysterious, and requires sort of a lawyer type level of administrative skill to get through. And so the funeral industry has a captive market for close to 100%.

I read in my research for the preliminary episode, I think something like 98% of all deaths in New Zealand are registered by funeral directors.

Yeah, that's the icing on the cake as far as the funeral industry is concerned. You have to do a certain amount of paperwork for the cremation goes ahead.

You have to get the burial organised through the council before burial goes ahead. And once the person's been cremated or buried, then you've got three days to register to the death.

This is the sort of equivalent of registering the birth. So the other end of life, you register at death.

Now for years, perhaps decades, the Department of Internal affairs have, of their own admission, made it very difficult for the public to obtain the death registration form.

And I asked them why, and they said, well, we wanted to make sure that the funeral directors deal with this, so they have systemic bias towards the funeral industry.

Possibly a good point to say, Fergus, you're not anti funeral directors at all. Death without debt as a campaign is not at war with funeral directors, is it?

Yeah, you're dead. Right. Funeral directors are really nice to have on occasion, and often they're completely indispensable.

It's actually in the interests of funeral directors who have integrity to make sure that this captive market is released, so that funeral directors no longer have that power over people, but instead work with people. And good funeral directors won't be tarred with the same brush as those who are behaving badly.

There's another thing, too, is that this captive market has really made funeral prices go completely out of control.

And that's now starting to bite the funeral industry on the bum, because they're getting lots of customers who are signing up to what they feel is the expected funeral where you literally pay your respects and a lot of people can't pay their bills. So there's high time for correction.

It's a huge subject. Ferguson we've tried to just pitch the first episode at a level that allows people to understand what we're talking about.

Alongside this as an issue, there is a campaign in New Zealand called Death without debt. Is this a good point to tell listeners a little bit about the purpose of the campaign and perhaps how it all began?

Yeah, fixing the system is incredibly simple. It won't cost the government much, if anything.

And of course it's going to save not only New Zealanders but the government heaps of money from all the fallout that's going on now with funeral debt, basically what we're asking for, I mean, the most important things are to fix the paperwork system. So make pre cremation paperwork a medical responsibility. So it's the medical profession's job to get cremations signed off.

Is that a change in the statute?

The Ministry of Health, they could solve it tomorrow if they wanted to.

They could just send out a directive to doctors saying when you attend a death and you write a medical causal death certificate, if the family want to go for cremation, it's your responsibility to make sure that the paperwork is completed and return to the family so they can book cremation. That's all they need to do. We're actually asking the government to do a proper job on this and put it into law.

The second major thing they have to do is force privately owned crematoriums, or privately operated at least, because some crematoriums are council owned but are run by private businesses. Force them to accept do it yourself parties when they turn up with someone's body. And we want this done for a set fee.

So at the moment, if you turn up at a private crematorium, they can turn you away. They can add two or three or $4,000 of charges onto it. They basically have you over a barrel.

The Ministry of Health, they ran a review of all this stuff and they said the primary thing is that a dead body needs to be treated with respect. And so that's what we have to take to the issue of private crematoriums.

But beyond that, if the deceased person hasn't had an insurance policy, how are families expected to pay for that service? Fergus?

Well, there's basically no questions asked. They just have to. They have to dig into their savings, they have to sell something.

I mean, they might have to get out of a house, they might have to sell the house, they might have to borrow from people. We've heard stories of, you know, young people being told to go out and get credit cards so that they can pay for someone's funeral.

It's a big problem. And even after we've fixed the system, it's going to take quite a bit of cultural adjustment for quite a few people to get their head around that.

Paying your respects to someone who's died doesn't have to be taken literally. You don't have to spend $15,000 or $20,000 or $30,000 on a funeral to show someone that you loved them.

Fergus, what happens if somebody dies and there's no family to look after them, and there's no savings in their estate, or no policy? How does New Zealand cope with the cremation or the burial of people in that situation?

I'm actually going to visit Wellington's City Mission this week to talk to a woman who came to one of our recent workshops, and she deals with exactly those cases. You know, people who have died in Wellington who have no family, often they've been living on the streets. So I actually don't know what happens.

But I do know what happens when someone dies in a rest home or hospital and they've got no family, and it's basically the funeral director's contacted. They come and get the body, they take it away, they cremate it, and they apply for the women's funeral grant to cover their costs.

Winsby and working income, New Zealand, yeah, working income.

Hugely complicated subject, Fergus. I think we've done it justice. To describe the primary issues, I have.

To apologise for sounding so complicated. The reason is that, yes, it is complicated, and that is why it's so hard for people to understand it and therefore organise their own funerals.

But on the other hand, you can boil it right down and you can just say that official paperwork requirements are trapping people in the funeral disease business model. That's number one.

And number two is that private crematoriums are able to charge what they like, because often they're the only crematorium in a district. So to boil it right down, it's just those two things.

Yeah. Now, I know that you've been doing a series of workshops all around New Zealand to help spread the message and help people understand this issue.

How did your involvement in this campaign begin?

As my parents got older, they were quite happy to talk about death and the arrangements that would need to be made, and my mother, more so, but my father, too.

They didn't want a big, fancy funeral, and they were quite happy for us to organise as much of it as we wanted and to keep it modest, you know, especially in terms of price. And so my father, he died first, and he died in Rotorua hospital. He died overnight.

And in the morning, I followed his body down to the morgue, and I had a chat to the guy in the morgue, and I said, we'd like to take the body home ourselves. And he said, yeah, that's fine, but you've got 20 minutes. I'm going out.

20 minutes to prepare your father to take him home.

Yeah.

And it was a bit of a tricky thing because I had my mother there, and she was over 90 and getting pretty frail after a week hovering around his bedside. Anyway, that was okay. We just scrambled everything, got the hatchback, backed it into the morgue, up to the warehouse, basically.

And the guy sort of looked under the COVID of a few body bags and said, that's him. And we loaded him into the back of the hatchback, went to countdown. I left my mother to be with my father's body in the car.

I went and got a whole lot of dry ice, and we took him home from Rotorua. We drove through Taup, and I thought, while I was about it, I would pop into the taup times and put an ad in.

And that was a bit complicated because they were used to the funeral directors doing that, and not just anybody. And so that was a bit of a rigmarole, but they were pretty okay about it.

So this is the death notice in the newspaper, because my parents were of.

That generation where everything was done through the paper, not Facebook or something. So I came out and I ran into one of dad's friends on the main street on the way back to the car.

And I said, oh, look, I'm sorry to say, but John died last night. I said, would you like to come and say goodbye to him.

So we just walked over to the hatchback and pulled up the hatchback on the main street, and there was dad. And he said goodbye and had a little few words with him and put the boot down.

And we drove back home to Turangi, which is where my parents were living at that point. And then the fun and games started. We rang up the local funeral director down the other end of the lake. So Tuurangi is like a 50k drive from Taup.

So Taupo is at the north end of the lake. Turing is at the south end of the lake. And I said, we just want to have a really bare bones cremation. We don't need anything.

We'll just bring the body. And they said, well, it's not as simple as that. There's a lot of complicated paperwork to come through, and you'll need to come in.

We had to find someone to mind my father's body while we drove down to the end of the lake. So my mum, myself, my wife, and our daughters went down, talked to the funeral director, and as it turned out, it was a completely wasted trip.

There was all sorts of items listed there that we hadn't actually asked for and hadn't used. There was a hearse hire and a coffin. So I queried all this, and they said, oh, you're sorry about the hearse hire?

That was a bit unprofessional, putting that in the bill. Then the coffin. I said, well, why did you charge for a coffin? Because we just delivered them on a gurney like a stretcher on wheels.

And I said, oh, no, you're legally required to have a. Of a coffin before cremation.

I said, well, could you send us the legislation, please, so that, you know, I can be assured that we did actually have to pay for this coffin that you've just charged us four or $500 for. So they sent us some legislation.

And to tell you the truth, I actually felt sick in my stomach having to query all this, but I'd sniffed a rat, and I knew that we were being taken for a ride at that stage. I just sort of said, look, I can't be bothered looking at all this paperwork. It's just making me feel ill.

And I said, look, I'll have a chat to you in a month or two. A month or two later, we went down to the funeral home. I queried the bill, I queried about the coffin.

We revisited them, charging for hearse, and we also revisited them, charging us $2,000 or whatever it was in professional service fees. And I asked them what it was and they said, well, it's very complicated. And I said, well, you've been doing this for 30 years now.

You should be able to explain to me what this paperwork business is. And he just refused to. So I said, well, it's your choice. If you want to get paid, you're going to have to explain what that bill is all about.

And so in the end, he wouldn't budge. In the end, we sort of came to an agreement and I still paid him too much. I paid him $400 for professional service fees.

As I understand it, that professional fees charge can be several thousand dollars now.

Oh, yeah, it can be more than that. I mean, we got sent a bill the other day and it was close to $4,000.

A bill from another family who'd lost a loved one.

Yeah. You can tell that they were really taking advantage of this woman whose husband had died. Yeah.

And it was very close to $4,000 for basically getting a second doctor's signature and, I believe, registering death. So let's be charitable. It would have taken them ten minutes to 15 minutes for the whole thing. That's a pretty good rate for a lawyer.

I mean, I don't know any lawyers who earn that much.

No, not for five minutes work.

Well, yeah, in this case, 15 minutes. So, anyway, my mother, after that, she didn't want anything to do with this lot.

And she said, whatever you do, just avoid them as much as you possibly can. Anyway, about two years later, she died. And she died on a Friday night, just after midnight.

And we waited, like most people do until the morning, and we just rang up the hospice nurse who had been around and said that, you know, my mother had died overnight. And she said, well, you have to call a funeral director. I said, well, we can't actually afford to call a funeral director.

We are doing this ourselves. And she insisted upon it. She said, no, no, you actually have to hire a funeral director. Now, she was a nice woman.

She worked for hospice, which was a great organisation, but she had been, for want of a better word, brainwashed by the culture by the funeral industry into believing that you actually have to hire a funeral director.

We stood our ground and were polite about it, but we couldn't get a doctor to come and first of all, confirm she was dead, and secondly, to write the mental cause of death certificate. That didn't happen. No doctor turned up until Monday, just before lunch. So it's three days to wait for someone to turn up. This is a small town.

Where was your mum during this time, Fergus?

We had her laid out in the living room and we put flowers around. We put a kotawai, like a beautiful woven mori cloak, which we had been loaned for the occasion.

And we had harakeki flax weaving underneath her, and we had her cooled down with ice and we had her wrapped in a shroud. And, you know, it was wintertime, so she kept cool. And she looked beautiful lying there.

Actually, it was a nice period of time, but really, a doctor or nurse or someone should have come and confirmed who had been dead on the Saturday. And this is going to affect every New Zealand who lives in a small town or out in the country.

The problem there is that medical centres are not thinking about the funeral bills that people have been forced to pay.

A nurse could have come out, confirmed she was dead, and the doctor could have written the cause of the death certificate from their cell phone in the weekend, or a nurse practitioner, which is a highly qualified nurse, could have actually visited that weekend and confirmed the death and written the medical course of death certificate. That's one of the things that's forcing families into the industry's business model.

And I would think that's actually really common around New Zealand, because we constantly hear in the media that there's a shortage of gps, that local medical practices in small, remote rural towns are being forced to close because they can't get the doctors and the staff to keep them going, and that because they're financially, they're just not viable in a small community in Turangi.

They almost all live down the other end of the lake in Taup.

So it's expected that families in Turangi will ring up a funeral director and take the body down to the doctor in Taup to be confirmed dead, and then either left in Taup at the funeral directors in the chilla, so to speak, or taken all the way back to Turangi. Now, a hearse trip is very expensive.

I mean, you're all talking, you know, for a trip like that, you're talking a minimum of $400, probably a lot more each way. That's another thing that needs to be looked at. And we are Death Without Debt.

Just looking at that, trying to get the government clean up that sort of system. And it's really just thoughtlessness on the part of the medical profession.

And I don't want to bag the medical profession because, you know, they really hung under a great deal of strain. But we tried to have a conversation with the local medical centre about this.

To their credit, they brought six of their staff to this meeting to talk to me, but there was no follow up. Nothing that they promised happened.

And so it's just something that we just have to get the government to force them to do, otherwise, nothing's going to change. They're just too busy to think at the moment.

Can we just go over, how have you gone from these very intense personal experience with your parents to you being such an architect and such a campaigner in the Death Without Debt movement?

Fergus, to understand that, you kind of have to hear the rest of the story. The fact that there was no one turned up to confirm my mother had been dead was the least of our problems.

When the doctor did arrive, we asked, who was the second signature? Could you organise that? He says, I've got no idea what you're talking about. I don't know who they are. I don't even know anything about this.

The funeral was actually going to be on that day. As it turned out, it was on that day. So we were organising the funeral at the same time as trying to find this second signatory.

So we rang around all the medical centers in the district, saying, do you have a medical referee? And can we talk to them? Can we get this cremation signed off? Every single medical center said, no, we don't have a medical referee.

You have to hire a funeral director. And then we asked them, do you know what a medical referee is? And they said they actually didn't.

The medical staff, the doctors and the nurses, everyone who wasn't a medical referee had no idea what a referee was or. Or what they did. It was basically impossible to get sign off.

When we did eventually find out who the main medical referee was, it turned out he was out of town. And so we had to go through the whole process and find out who the deputy or the backup referee was. And it turned that they too were out of town.

Normally there's only one or two medical referees in the district, but Taupo actually happened to have three medical referees. And so we went through the whole process again, ringing around absolutely everyone we knew, and said, do you know who the third medical referee is?

And it turned out that they, too, were out of town at the same time as this is happening. We got a call from the funeral home who owned the local crematorium, and they said, the cremation is cancelled. I said, what do you mean?

And he said, well, you just can't rock up here and expect to have someone cremated unless you're a customer. I said, so you're asking for another $3,000? He didn't answer directly, but he indicated that I was on the money, so to speak.

I said, well, that's okay, we'll just drive to Rotorua, but we will be talking about what's just happened. So think about it, and if you change your mind, give this ring back.

So, half an hour later, the funeral home had obviously thought, well, this is going to be bad press, and rang back and said, it will take her. But then half an hour later, they rang back and said, we're not taking her. And I said, what do you mean? What is it this time?

Which has got a pacemaker, and we don't take out pacemakers.

Now, that was a direct lie, because very few doctors know how to take out a pacemaker these days, because that's the job that the funeral industry does, without question. So that was basically another attempt by the local funeral home to extort more money out of this.

The issue there, Fergus, is that you can't put a pacemaker through the cremation process.

Yeah, correct.

Pacemakers apparently are like a little nuclear bomb when they go into a crematorium. You can take them out yourself, but I think it's illegal. So you actually have to have someone official do it.

We had to basically get the instructions off the Internet and fax them to the local doctor and get the doctors bone up on how to do it. And then we had to get them to quote it.

I said to the funeral home, I know that you take these out, so either we pay the doctor to do it or we pay you. So how about you change your tune? In the end, they agreed to do it.

They basically tried every trick in the book, and it was only the threat of bad publicity that kept them in line.

And I think it's really important to remember here, Fergus, that you're a grieving family at this stage.

Someone dies, it's really big, you don't have a great deal of sleep, and you're dealing with the magnitude of the event and you're organising the funeral. As it turned out, we did actually make the funeral that day, despite this incredible amount of drama.

So we had the funeral and we had to take her body back home again that evening because the doctors just hadn't signed off her cremation. That's an indictment on the system. It was a really weird feeling to have to take someone's body back home after the funeral. It was a strange night.

It was a cold turangi night, so it was frosty. And so we decided just to leave her in the car in the garage.

And then in the morning, I got up and drove down the lake and stopped for a moment, looking over the lake as the sun came up. But when I got to the doctor's surgery to get the medical referee, who I heard was going to be back in town, the whole drama started up again.

So I had gotten to promise that they would be expecting me, that the doctor would be expecting me, that they'd know what I wanted, which was just a simple sign off from the medical referee. And I arrived there and it was back to square one. They said, no, you have to hire a funeral director.

No, we don't have anyone here who signs that off. And after another half hour's arguing, they said, yes, he is a medical referee, I understand now, but he's away at emergency all day.

In the end, I just said, well, if you don't get this sorted in 15 minutes, I'm going to take my mother's body, I'm going to put it on your counter and I'm going to leave it there for you to sort. That galvanized them into action.

And within five minutes, the medical referee came out of some back room and he signed the paper and I took my mother up to the crematorium, took her around the back, and that was where I said goodbye. By then, it felt like it was her body. I felt like she had gone. I think most people know what I mean when I say that. So that was it.

It was a fairly, let's say, intense few days.

It certainly sounds like it. Ferguson, I think it's really important here to say that you weren't asking to do anything illegal.

You weren't asking to do anything prohibited, banned or completely left field. You were asking to manage the process of your mother's funeral and cremation yourselves as a family.

Yeah. But we were led to believe at every step of the process that we were acting, if not illegally, then irresponsibly or unreasonably. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it has to be said, it's not this difficult. Everywhere in the country where there are council owned and operated crematoriums, it's still very difficult, but it's not that difficult.

And there are some private crematoriums who actually are reasonable and they won't play the same sort of extortion games that we encountered. Anyway, what happened after that is I just kind of took it in my stride. You know, people say, oh, weren't you traumatized? Well, possibly I was.

I don't know.

I just sort of did what had to be done and I had a few good friends around and I wrote up the funeral notes for my mother's friends who hadn't been able to get there. So we didn't video the funeral and we didn't record it in any way. My mum's generation, they did everything by letter.

So I just wrote it up and emailed it out, or posted it, as the case may be. But I also wrote up what happened with all the business with the funeral home and the medical referees and the. The medical community.

And I got an email back a couple of days later from Jeanette Fitzsimons, who was the former leader of the Green party. She knew my mum and she said, look, this is absolutely atrocious.

Do you know that there's a review of death, burial and cremation legislation going through at the moment? You should write a submission and tell them about it. That's how Death Without Debt started.

There's so much more to cover, Fergus, so I hope we'll be able to come back and do that in future episodes. Where is the best place for people to go online to find out more about Death Without Debt?

Are you holding any more workshops and if so, how do people find about those?

The answer to both questions is to go to our website, deathwithoutdebt.org, comma, or just Google Death without debt. That's us. You'll see there on the menu. There's do it yourself workshop tab. Just go in there and you can find out when the next workshops are.

At the moment, actually, we're having a little bit of a hiatus while we organise the rest of the itinerary for the workshops. So we've done a good chunk of the South island.

Our next plan is to go and do a good chunk of the North island, return back to the South island before Christmas and so on. We'll try and get most of the country done by summer.

I have to say, Fergus, that's how I became aware and involved in Death Without Debt that my wife had booked tickets for the Christchurch workshop, which I think was in May. This is going to sound, potentially sound a bit strange. I really enjoyed the day. I didn't know anything about Death Without Debt as a subject before.

Death isn't something that people talk about. In my circle of friends, we just don't talk about death very often, and I've been fortunate that I've lost very few close family members and friends.

So I've not had a huge amount of exposure to death or to the funeral cremation industry.

But I came to that workshop and I was really impressed by the level of debate, by the contribution made by people in the audience, and just the stories that people shared about their experiences trying to work through this process. And I was just struck by the variety of experience that people shared at the Death Without Debt workshop.

I would urge listeners, if they intrigued by this subject and they want to know more, please have a look at the website and sign up and go along to a workshop.

The workshops are not at all funereal.

People want to share these stories. The topic touched a nerve with me and I felt that I wanted to contribute in one way, and it just so happened that I'm able to build podcasts.

So I'm really pleased that you're able to join me and I hope that we'll be able to do more episodes and extend knowledge across New Zealand and beyond of this subject and the issues that are contained within it.

It's fantastic. Thank you.

No, you're very welcome.

I'd like to thank Fergus for joining me today and for sharing the very personal story behind this campaign. However you look at it, death is something that will happen to each and every one of us.

It's an unavoidable part of living, but as a society, we don't really talk about it. And just like me, most of us may only deal with a funeral or cremation firsthand when a loved one or close family member dies.

If you do have experience with death, funerals and cremation, and you'd like to share those stories by appearing on the show, please get in touch. I'll put links in the notes, but the easiest way is to visit deathwithoutdebt.org or email deathwithoutdeat. Proton me. Thank you for listening.

Please follow the show or subscribe so you get the next episode delivered straight to your device. I've been Pete and this has been Death Without Debt.