New
service introduces the ‘remembrance industry’
Wednesday, June 9, 2004
The Welland Tribune
Ontario, CANADA
For families who can’t get home to
tend to flowers planted at the headstones of loved ones, there’s
a new service available.
It may also prove invaluable to those whose
mobility is limited but want to keep gravesite gardens fresh
and see wreaths laid at Christmas.
“It provides a real sense of comfort
for those left behind,” says J.J. Patterson and Sons
Funeral Residence director Chris Chappelle.
What Chappelle is referring to, is a long-term
beautification and maintenance program provided by Westland
Services Corp., a U.S.-based company established 17 years
ago and which over the past six weeks began making headway
north of the border.
Founded in 1987, the company, through contracts
which fun 25 years or longer, will wash and scrub monuments,
plant flags and personally-selected flowers, weed beds and
fertilize soils to individually tailored maintenance agreements.
Agreements can call for weekly and biweekly
monitoring, or just about any routine schedule and allowable
under cemetery rules.
“The services can almost be considered
an essential service,” said Chappelle, from whose funeral
home Westland programs can be arranged.
Survivors who opt into Westland’s
program receive no less than two color photographs each year,
ensuring that the gravesites of loved ones are being well
tended.
“What we’ve created here is
the remembrance industry,” said company founder and
president Philip Haddad, Jr., who has been touring the area
to promote his business.
Westland’s services for a 25-year maintenance period
start at $4,000 and can run upwards to $13,000.
All monies are held in interest-yielding
trust accounts.
Westland, Haddad stressed, is a privately-held
company – not a chain.
That it has been so widely accepted said
Chappelle, demonstrates the need for loved ones’
post- funeral care.
Jim Fyfe, Westland’s senior plan
counselor for Niagara, said perhaps what the company best
provides to survivors is “peace of mind”.
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