Lor the Day of the Dead, November 2, many families will go to put flowers on the grave of a relative. There is no doubt that on this occasion, Mme X will remember the circumstances in which he was forbidden to meditate on the body of his mother, who died at the age of 93, then attending his burial.
On September 21, 2018, when she intended to say a final goodbye, a funeral home employee blocked her way. She explains to him that the deceased would not have wanted his presence: a bailiff’s report, drawn up at her request on July 18, 2018, therefore two months before his death, prohibited that Mme X and her family attend her funeral.
The employee specifies that a medical certificate attached to this report testifies to her absence of “cognitive disorder” when she came to see the bailiff. Mme X leaves again. Was the funeral home employee entitled to act in this way?
“Access to the funeral room (or to the mortuary room of a hospital) is not regulatedexplains Pierre Larribe, legal manager of the National Funeral Federation. In the past, when people died at home, you could open your door or not. Today, the funeral chamber in which the body is presented, while awaiting its burial, is comparable to a private place: the one who provides the funeral rents it to the funeral home, and can indicate to them that he does not want to see this or that person enter. » The company, says Mr. Larribe, will have an interest in protecting themselves from a ” writing “ to deny this access.
The cemetery, a public place
On the other hand, specifies the specialist, “it is not possible to restrict access to ceremony rooms, whether in a crematorium or in a place of worship”, nor, of course, at the cemetery, which is a public place. If you wish to ban a person from the funeral ceremony, “the coffin must be placed, obviously closed, in a private room” : this has already been done, “for example in a hotel, a theater, or at the Cirque d’hiver, for Achille Zavatta”.
Rather than attacking funeral directors, Mme X, undoubtedly poorly advised, attacks the doctor who wrote the medical certificate: she disputes that her mother has been healthy, on the grounds that, since 2014, she was under guardianship. She takes legal action to obtain the certificate, covered by medical confidentiality, and, January 5, 2023the Aix-en-Provence Court of Appeal judges that it has a “legitimate interest ” Act.
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