The most basic service a funeral home should provide is treating its grieving clients in a professional, considerate, appropriate manner. Rose Hills-Alhambra was sorely lacking this. When my family came in to sign paperwork for my mother's cremation, they made us sit in the public waiting area with other clients where they then harassed my dad (in a very condescending way) about not bringing in the proper ID papers for my mom.
When they finally ushered us into a private room, it was the arrangement counselor Mr. Chan's messy office filled with bags of people's stuff haphazardly stashed behind the desk. Deceased people's stuff, from what I could tell. No respect for the dead. Unacceptable.
We had to sit there for over an hour, watching Mr. Chan type up the paperwork for my dad to sign -- paperwork that could easily have been prepared beforehand. Mr. Chan kept making mistakes and having to re-type stuff and re-print pages. We even had to sit there while he got up, unwrapped a new ream of paper, and loaded it into the printer. So unprofessional!
Meanwhile, Mr. Chan told us we needed to ID my mom's body before the cremation, via streaming video from their storage facility in Whittier. The prospect of this was so upsetting to my dad that he started crying. But what should've been a two-second process became forty minutes of torture when there were "technical difficulties" with the video feed. Mr. Chan kept insisting that technicians were fixing it. He kept telling us to wait... and wait... and wait. It was agony for my father.
We finally told them we were leaving and asked Mr. Chan to call us when the video was working again. It wasn't repaired until DAYS later.
The worst part about all this was not his incompetence, but his attitude. He had a brash and off-putting manner, giggling at inappropriate moments and showing no regard for the fact that we were all in a fragile emotional state. My mother had just died two days before, and this man was saying, "Now let's talk about money" with a creepy little laugh. It's a horrifying feeling to know that your loved one's remains are in the hands of these people. read more