Death: the one certainty we avoid
By Ghert Tjerivanga|
There is a particular kind of avoidance that disguises itself as optimism.
People plan carefully for the things they hope will happen. A wedding gets months of preparation. A retirement gets decades of saving. A child’s education gets a dedicated account opened before the child can walk. These are acts of love and foresight, and they are entirely reasonable.
What is harder to explain is the almost universal reluctance to plan for the one event that is not hoped for, not optional, and not uncertain.
Death is the only guaranteed appointment on anyone’s calendar, and it is the one most people have made absolutely no financial arrangement for.
This is not ignorance. Most people know, in some abstract sense, that they will die. They know that funerals cost money, often more than expected, and almost always at a moment when the family is least equipped to find it. They know that the burden of those costs will fall on someone.
And yet the conversation gets delayed. Next month. After the holidays. When things are a little more settled.
The postponement is not laziness. It is the very human difficulty of planning for something that requires you to sit, even briefly, with your own mortality.
The cost of that wait is paid by the people left behind. A funeral in Namibia can run to tens of thousands of dollars when transport, catering, a burial site, and the practical costs of bringing family together are considered. That money has to come from somewhere.
In the absence of a plan, it comes from savings that were meant for something else, from family members who can barely afford to contribute, from loans that will take months to repay.
The grief does not pause while the finances are sorted out. Both happen simultaneously, and the financial pressure makes the grief harder to bear.
Funeral cover exists precisely to remove that pressure. Not to make death easier – nothing does that – but to ensure that the people who are grieving are not also scrambling. That the family can focus on mourning rather than on managing a financial crisis that arrived without warning at the worst possible moment.
The conversation about funeral cover is not a morbid one. It is an act of care.
Deciding in advance how your funeral will be paid for is one of the most concrete things a person can do for the people they love. It says: I have thought about this. I have made a plan. You will not have to figure it out alone.
We plan carefully for the life we hope to live. The people who love us deserve the same care applied to the one ending that is certain.
– Ghert Tjerivanga is Gobabis Sales Branch Manager, for Retail Mass Business, at Old Mutual Namibia.
