More and more New Zealanders of European descent are being cremated without any form of service following death, and its raised questions about their ability to confront mortality.
New Zealand funeral directors association president Stephen Dil said they have seen an increase in Pakeha being directly cremated from 10 to 25 per cent.
"I guess the challenge in that is saying if you're not going to have a funeral what are you going to do?" Mr Dil told TVNZ1's Breakfast today.
He continued: "And how are you going to remember and say goodbye to the person who has died?"
"But the causes of this increase in cremations is hard to pin down."
Mr Dil blames a variety of factors on the rise in cremations.
"I think business of life, social changes, all of those things are coming together and I think we're trying to find ways of making the process of experiencing grief easier and confusing effectiveness with ease and we could be more effective with what we do rather than being easy about it," he said.
"I think grief is such a big wide topic, it's actually something we actually have to go through, we can't go around it, or over it, or under it, we have to go through it and we try to avoid that sometimes."
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