A French crematorium's last minute bill for an overweight coffin

Imagine how you would feel if, just before the cremation of your nearest and dearest, you were asked by the company carrying out the ceremony to pay an additional fee because the total weight of the casket and the deceased was heavier than you had initially told them.

That's exactly what happened last week in France to the family of Michel Fontalirand.

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Moments before he was due to be cremated at the Montussan crematorium five kilometres from the southwestern city of Bordeaux, Fontalirand's family was asked to stump up a surcharge because the weight of the coffin and body combined was more than had been originally registered with the undertakers.

"When I arrived at the crematorium, I was told there was a slight problem," explained Chantal Correia who had been the family member charged with the responsibility of organising her brother-in-law's funeral arrangements.

"I was informed that Michel actually weighed 25 kgs more than the 120 kgs I had registered when he died, and that the crematorium would have to charge €830 rather than the €565 originally quoted for the cremation," she added.

The news certainly came as a surprise to Correia, who had wrongly assumed that her brother-in-law had lost weight during the final weeks of his life when he was in a coma.

Instead the former amateur rugby player and self-acclaimed bon vivant who, while alive, had ordinarily weighed in at a portly 125 kgs (275 lbs) for 1.70 metres (five feet six inches) had put on an extra 25 kgs.

A fact the undertakers should have picked up on, according to Georges Virgo, the director of the company that runs the Montussan crematorium.

"We specialise in cremating 'corpulent' people and it's the responsibility of the undertakers to ensure that they do their job properly and explain everything to the family," he said.

"Getting the weight right is an important cost factor in our business," he said.

"And last year our furnaces broke down twice because of mistakes made (in registering the weight)," he continued.

"Each time it happened it cost us €150,000," he added.

Crématorium de Montussan -Crématoriums Montussan 33450 Gironde - kewego


Now you might be thinking that his rather hard-nosed business response was hardly the most delicate way of dealing with the extra weight problem on the day, and while it might have been upsetting to Fontalirand's family, they didn't feel in a position to react in any other way than to pay the surcharge.

But as Correia admitted, her brother-in-law would probably have seen the funnier side of events at his cremation.

"He enjoyed his food and loved a joke or two," she said.

"He didn't want flowers or wreaths or any fuss made when he died, just a coffin, to be cremated and basta," she added.

"If he had imagined that we would end up paying a surcharge for his 'extra weight' he would probably have smiled and said, 'I should have gone on a diet before dying'."