Morrison Funeral Homes

Morrison Funeral Homes Obituaries

Funeral homes can be caught in the middle of family conflicts - The Ledger

It’s rare for relatives to be so intransigent they’re willing to go to court, said Trey Hall, a funeral director at Gentry-Morrison Funeral Homes in Lakeland.“We have had families drag out a dispute over 30 days, but usually it can be resolved before the time and expense of a court order,” Hall said.Nelson said he has witnessed family conflicts that had to be decided in court a few times.“We don’t cremate without everybody’s signature and everybody’s OK that has a legal right," he said. "If you don’t (have that), it may not be a law broken but you can be sued. Cremation is our biggest potential liability because it is so permanent. Burial is not so permanent. With cremation, there’s no turning back.”In the most extreme case Fields has experienced, an impasse among family members stretched out for 10 months.“They wouldn’t return phone calls,” Fields said. “They all basically abandoned the body with us.”Fields was fortunate to find a resolution to the crisis. He discovered the deceased man was a veteran, so he arranged to have him buried at Florida National Cemetery in Bushnell. That meant covering the costs of a casket and burial in addition to the expense of storing the body for 10 months.“If it happened too much, I wouldn’t do this job,” Fields said.Paperwork problemsAnother potential headache for funeral homes can emerge from another source. A doctor must sign a death certificate and list a cause of death before a funeral home may proceed with disposition. In some cases of unattended deaths, though, the dead person’s last known doctor refuses to sign.Nelson said a doctor who hasn’t seen the deceased in months might worry about legal liability in assigning a cause of death.“We’ve had that issue many times,” Nelson said. “They have to give an educated guess based on the medical history. A lot of times, these are physicians who don’t sign very many death certificates.”In those cases, the county medical examiner might need to persuade the doctor to sign the death certificate, Nelson said.“Physicians are not going to pay any attention to a lowly funeral director,” he said. “Well, the medical examiner carries a pretty big stick and he is a colleague.”Schichtel said he understands why a doctor might be reluctant to sign a death certificate for a patient he or she hasn’t seen recently. In some cases, Schichtel said, Polk County Medical Examiner Stephen Nelson must complete the death certificate himself.As American families increasingly scatter across the country, funeral homes sometimes face difficulties in finding the next of kin. If no relatives can be easily located, the funeral home must take steps to establish a record of doing its due diligence in searching for family members.One step is to run an obituary in the local newspaper asking for information. That action often results in contact from a relative, Hall said.If the obituary doesn’t produce results, the funeral home typically sends letters by certified mail to the last known address of the next of kin.When those efforts yield no results, the funeral home can make a request to Polk County Social Services for help. If the county agency also fails to get any response from relatives, it can grant the funeral home permission to dispose of the body, usually by cremation.If the funeral home can prove the deceased person was indigent, the county covers a small portion of the cremation cost, Schichtel said.Unwanted ashesEven when a funeral home gets permission to move forward with a cremation, the deceased person’s relatives sometimes drop out of the picture before the final step in the process — the claiming of the ashes.It’s not a matter of refusing to pay.“We cannot hold the ashes hostage for a funeral bill,” Nelson said. “If they have not paid us,...