Mortuary Shipping: A Way to Reunite Families with Bergen Funeral Service Inc.
Bronx, NY (PRWEB) July 01, 2014 -- Losing a loved one is a very difficult and sensitive time for grieving family members. Emotions can be heightened even more if the deceased has family in a different country that wishes to say goodbye. If the family cannot travel to see the deceased, the deceased can travel to see the family with mortuary shipping. This funeral service brings once separated families together for a celebration of life before the burial service.
Mortuary shipping not only unites families but also allows them to perform the burial rites of their cultures, something that they would not have been able to do while in separate countries. Burial rituals are different in countries and religions alike; burial rituals for Roman Catholics in the US are going to be different from Roman Catholics in the Philippines. For this reason, international mortuary shipping provided by funeral homes offers families of different backgrounds and cultures the chance to send off their loved one the proper way. However, some funeral homes and local morgues are not well versed in mortuary shipping.
According to a June 18th article by NBC 4 New York, there was recently a massive mistake made by a local morgue that led to the misplacement of a body. After 85-year-old Aura Ballesteros died from declining health on May 16th, her son Hector got permission from the city medical examiner to store her body in the city’s morgue while he made funeral arrangements with his family in Colombia. However, someone at the Jacobi Medical Center did not make a note of this and had her body shipped to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine for “anatomical donation.” Hector was notified a day after she had been shipped and immediately called the morgue to let them know of their mistake.
Thankfully, Ms. Ballesteros had not been dissected but she had been subjected to embalming. However, Hector claimed that when he finally saw his mother for her funeral her face was swollen and there were wounds on her neck and legs, all from the embalming process. The mistake that was made at the local morgue will continue to haunt this family for a long time to come.
The reason Ms. Ballesteros was to be kept in the morgue was because her son was trying to plan the funeral with his sisters who live in Colombia. With proper mortuary shipping, this family could have been reunited in order to perform the burial rites of the Colombian culture. However, this was not able to happen because of the shipping mistake. It was also not mentioned in the article if Hector’s sisters in Colombia were able to make it to New York to see their mother before her burial.
Bergen Funeral Service is a family-owned and operated funeral home with locations in Queens, Brooklyn, New Jersey and Florida. Since 1962, this funeral home has been treating funeral and burial services with sympathy, dignity and respect so that families have the chance to say goodbye to their loved ones. There, the funeral directors are on constant communication with grieving families in order to plan the service and mortuary shipping for the deceased.
Matt Connors, Bergen Funeral Service Inc., http://bergenfuneral.com/, +1 (201) 703-0091, [email protected]
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