37-36 61st Str, Woodside, NY 11377
Practical
Three things are worth going through, and all of them belong to the family rather than to us. We ask about every one of them at the arrangement meeting, because a great deal of this goes unclaimed for no better reason than nobody knowing to ask.
What may be due
None of these is decided here. Each one is decided by the office or the insurer named beside it, on its own rules, in its own time. What we can do is tell you what exists, help you fill the forms in, and be honest about which of them is worth the afternoon.
The Social Security Administration
A one-time lump-sum payment may be due to a surviving spouse who was living with the person, or in some cases to a child. It is a small fixed amount and it has not changed in a very long time. We report the death; the claim is yours to make, and the office will tell you the current figure and whether you qualify.
Survivors' benefits are a different and much larger question, and they are that office's to answer and not ours.
The Department of Veterans Affairs
A veteran discharged under conditions other than dishonourable may be entitled to burial in a national cemetery at no cost to the family, a government headstone or marker, a burial flag, and a memorial certificate. There may also be an allowance towards the funeral, which differs depending on whether the death was connected to service.
All of it starts with the discharge papers. Find them before anything else — see the veterans' page.
The insurer
A policy can usually be assigned to pay the funeral home directly, which means a family does not have to find the money and wait for the claim. Whether an insurer will do it, and how quickly, varies enormously.
We will not tell you a policy is worth more or less than it is, and we do not sell insurance.
Why this page reads the way it does
Two sentences about the same office can look alike and be opposites. Naming a benefit your family may be entitled to, and naming the body that pays it, is a statement about your rights: those offices exist, and what they owe a surviving family has nothing whatever to do with which funeral home you rang. Saying that a funeral home is approved, accredited, contracted, endorsed or on somebody's list would be a statement about the funeral home instead, and it is a completely different kind of claim.
This page does the first and never the second. Nothing here is a credential. No office or insurer named above has approved, appointed or endorsed this business, none of them has been asked to, and helping a family claim what it is owed needs no permission from any of them. If a funeral home ever tells you it is the approved one, or the one that a particular office deals with, ask what the approval is, who granted it, and where you can read it. The answer is usually that the word was doing work no fact behind it was doing.
In this order
The order matters, and it is not the order most families would guess. The claim feels like the urgent part and it is the part that can wait; the payments feel like housekeeping and they are the part that causes real trouble if they are left.
Us
We report the death to the Social Security Administration as a matter of course. That stops the payments, which matters, because money paid after a death has to be given back.
You, with a list in front of you
Money that arrives after a death is not the family's to keep, and it is far easier to stop a payment than to give one back out of an account that has already been closed. Go through what arrives every month — pensions, annuities, anything automatic — and tell each of them early. This is the step nobody thinks of as urgent and the one that produces the letters six months later.
Us, with you
Veterans' entitlements, the Social Security death payment, and any insurance policy the family knows about. We fill the forms in with you; the decisions belong to those offices.
The first of those we do as a matter of course, without being asked, because it is part of registering a death properly. The second is yours and it is a list rather than a task. The third is the one we sit down and do with you, form by form, and it is also the one where the answer takes weeks to arrive and comes from somebody else entirely.
Nothing in the third step is a reason to delay a funeral, and no funeral home should tell you otherwise. A claim that has not been decided yet is not a reason to hold a service, and it is not a reason to choose an arrangement you did not want.
Two pages that follow from this one
Two of the three above have more to them than a card holds, and both are worth reading before the arrangement meeting rather than after it.
If the person served, find the discharge papers before anything else. Several entitlements follow from them, most of them at no cost, and a great many families never claim them.
Bring what you have found — the discharge papers, a policy number, the Social Security number — and we will go through it with you. We fill the forms in; the decisions belong to those offices.