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Undertakers count cost of drunken coffin spillage

A Swedish firm of funeral directors has agreed to pay 15,000 kronor to two sisters after their father's coffin was tipped without grace into an open grave by pallbearers unsteady on their feet.

Published: 6 May 2010 10:03 CEST

The sisters sued the firm after the funeral, which took place in February 2008, left them appalled and claiming that a number of the undertakers were clearly drunk while in charge of the coffin.

The undertakers had been close to dropping the man’s coffin on a number of occasions during the service but the ungraceful dumping of their father into his final resting place proved the final straw for the mourning siblings.

As the pallbearers approached the grave they are reported to have lost their grip which resulted in a heavy fall into the ground with the coffin landing on its side.

“Both daughters were in shock and ran away in tears from the cemetery,” their lawyer Michael Abejon wrote in their submission to Södertörn District Court.

“They didn’t dare to look in the grave as they were convinced the coffin had opened and their dead father had fallen out.”

The sisters who both spent time on sick leave after the traumatic funeral, will now each receive 7,500 kronor after settling their differences with the funeral directors. The sisters had originally claimed 20,000 kronor each in compensation.

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France: Final farewell for Chirac in family's home village

GEORGES GOBET / AFP

“I can only say thank you in the name of my father and mother,” the statesman's daughter Claude Chirac said in a tearful address at Sainte-Fereole, a small village in the Chirac fiefdom of the Correze region.

“In childhood and adolescence, Jacques Chirac was made here,” said mayor Henri Soulier.

Born in Paris, Chirac, who died aged 86 on September 26, moved as a young boy to Sainte-Fereole where he was elected a municipal councillor in 1965 before becoming a Correze lawmaker two years later.

He continued to represent the Correze department until becoming president in 1995, serving as head of state until 2007.

Chirac's widow Bernadette, 86, did not attend the gathering of some 200 people in a picturesque village square decked out in portraits of the former president showing key moments of his life in public service.

Soulier said he had proposed and Chirac's family had agreed to rename the square after him in the village which they had insisted would be the site of the final homage to his life.

Prior to the ceremony, local leaders had accompanied the family to lay a wreath at the tomb of Chirac's parents.

The group then stopped by the village hall and the family home, of which Claude Chirac's husband Frederic Salat-Baroux vowed “we shall never sell this house. One is always from somewhere and, for Claude, that's here.”

Claude recalled how she was “often at Sainte-Fereole with Laurence,” Chirac's other daughter, who died in 2016.

“We would leave Paris on Friday and our parents would leave us there before travelling around the department,” she recalled.

“My mother is very emotional today that she cannot come … it's an exceptional homage. It is very comforting to her. And I want to say thank you for that because she really needs it,” Claude said.

Local authorities said meanwhile some 3,000 people had participated in a day of “memory and friendship” to honour Chirac at nearby Sarran, where Bernadette was first elected a municipal councillor in 1971 and which houses a museum dedicated to his life.

Among those attending Saturday was former Socialist president Francois Hollande, who was a political rival of Chirac in Correze, as well as Chirac's grandson Martin Rey-Chirac.

Dozens of world leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, last Monday paid their final respects at a funeral service in Paris alongside dignitaries including former US president Bill Clinton, a day after 7,000 people queued to view Chirac's coffin at Invalides military hospital and museum.

He was then laid to rest at a cemetery at Montparnasse in Paris.

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