Daughter tells of funeral make-up blunder
12:00 AEDT Thu Apr 5 2012
Lorraine Fuller died in 2007
A grieving daughter had to rush to re-touch her dead mother's make-up before she was cremated after undertakers "slapped" on brash colours against her wishes.
Cassiopia Fuller told the funeral directors her mother Lorraine preferred to wear just blue eyeliner and mascara. So she was shocked to find her laying in the open casket at the funeral chapel in Freemantle, Western Australia, with a heavy dose of blue eye shadow and bright pink lipstick, and no eyeliner.
"She looked nothing like my mum," Ms Fuller told ninemsn of the 2007 funeral.
"It looked like a two-year-old had done her make-up".
Ms Fuller was one of several ninemsn readers who shared their funeral nightmares in the wake of yesterday's story about a Melbourne florist who wrote 'rast in peas' on the funeral wreath. (Read more)
Ms Fuller said her simple instructions were not heeded and she had to compose herself and try and fix the make-up blunder.
"It was just like they slapped a bit of make up on her face and didn't listen to anything I said," she said.
"I removed the lipstick but did not have time to fix her eyes."
To make matters even worse, when the coffin was removed from the hearse she realised it was missing the $500 casket spray she had paid for, and the hearse itself was devoid of flowers.
"It was discovered that the arrangement had been delivered to a different funeral home," Ms Fuller said.
The funeral directors apologised and promised to send the family a bottle of wine the next day, but Ms Fuller said it never came.
Emails from ninemsn readers reveal botched flower arrangements and spelling errors on wreath cards are a common funeral frustration.
Many readers said they ordered floral tributes which failed to materialise or ended up at the wrong church.
Name: Allan
Sent: Wednesday, April 4, 2.14pm (AEST)
"For my mother's funeral I ordered a wreath for her coffin in her favourite flowers, and in her favourite colours. At the funeral, the director came up to me and asked if I had ordered flowers for the coffin. I told him I had. He said well, they are not here. At the wake, a friend arrived with the flowers I had ordered, saying that they had been left on the front steps of a church up the road from where we were. That Church was closed and had been boarded up for years, but the idiot driver left them there anyway. It was very upsetting for all the family, they were not there on her coffin, to show how much we loved and cared for her. I never even received an apology form the florist, nor a refund."
Name: Allison
Sent: Wednesday, April 4, 6.02pm (AEST)
"My cousin's daughter's funeral, the director kept on saying my cousin's name when talking about the deceased."
Name: M Smith
Sent: Wednesday, April 4, 4.02pm (AEST)
"At my Grandfather's funeral, during the service the funeral director proceeded to say that "Jim was now happy up in Heaven, re-united with his beloved Maisie". (His wife). We all were horrified, as his "beloved Maisie" was alive and well, sitting in the front row. Luckily, Gran being quite hard of hearing didn't actually hear what he said but the rest of the family were quite angry that he hadn't checked his facts more thoroughly!!"
Name: Nat
Sent: Wednesday, April 4, 2.18pm (AEST)
"I went to the funeral parlour when my father passed away 20 years ago and helped my mother select my father's coffin. I was horrified, whilst sitting in the church at my father's funeral to discover he was not in the coffin we had picked. Throughout the service I kept looking over at the coffin in disbelief that my father was being put to rest in the wrong coffin. To this day it upsets me when I think of it."
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