What is a Direct Disposition Service?

Things you should know before you go:

What is a Direct Disposition Service?
By Andrew Hodges
October 2005

Finishing our look at the different types of funeral services, we end with the Direct Disposition, also known as Immediate Disposition. With this type of service, the family is only requesting the funeral home perform the necessary task of either burying the body or cremating the body with no visitation or funeral service.

Similar to the Memorial Service discussed last month, when burial or cremation is requested immediately, the funeral home will give the family the opportunity to have a viewing of the body prior to burial or cremation before the disposition.

To summarize this type of service, the funeral home performs the services required; transferring the body from place of death to the funeral home, meeting with the next of kin to review the selected service, sign the required documents, and place the body in a casket or cremation container. If cremation is selected, the funeral home will seek the signature of the local coroner to sign the cremation certificate. The funeral home will register the death with the province and transfer the body to a cemetery for burial or crematorium for cremation.

Repatriation and Receiving are other services that funeral homes offer, but they may or may not appear in the funeral home service price list. The reason some funeral homes do not have a section of their price list dedicated to these types of services is because they may rarely be called upon to perform these types of services. But as families today are more likely to be spread about in different areas of the province, country or world, funeral homes are able to assist in this area.

Repatriation is a fancy word for returning someone to their native land; which may mean from St. Marys to their home town of Ottawa or to their home country of Italy. The body may be returned for the purpose of having funeral and/or burial. The funeral home would organize such things as preparation of the body, completing necessary paperwork and transportation. In a later article I will explain what happens when someone is sent outside of Canada. It really deserves an article of its own because every country has a different set of requirements when it comes to shipping human remains.

Receiving is either having someone transferred from where they live to be buried with the rest of their family or when someone dies on vacation, for example, to be returned home. In the latter case, a local funeral home in the area of place of death would organize what needs to be done to transfer the body back home and then the receiving funeral home would organize any visitation, funeral and final disposition.

Now that we have defined the different types of services funeral homes offer: Traditional Service, Memorial Service, Graveside Service, Direct Disposition, Repatriation and Receiving, my hope is that the understanding of these service packages allows people to see there are options. Everyone does not have to have the same funeral. Service packages are the blueprints to ending up with individual services accommodating different needs.