SALT LAKE CITY — Yvette Shields was shooting pool with a friend at a bar in Tooele in 2016 when she met Larry Shields.
“I asked him if he ever shot pool,” Shields said. “He said, ‘I’ve tampered a little bit,'” Shields softly laughed before continuing, “He kicked my butt.”
They started dating and eventually married.
Shields said they did everything together. Even when Larry Shields was working as a maintenance manager at Tate Mortuary, he welcomed her company because she knew the tools he’d need.
“I only had 7½ years with him, but it felt like a lifetime,” she told Deseret News. In May, he died unexpectedly in a gun incident.
Three years before, the pair had talked about what they wanted to happen to their bodies if they died.
“Well, when I die, I just want to be cremated,” she’d told him. “Take me for a ride on your Harley. Let my ashes go for my last ride.”
He said he wanted to be cremated, too. But when his death came unexpectedly, Tate Mortuary owner and close family friend Cole Houghton told Yvette Shields he couldn’t do it.
“He told me, ‘I cannot cremate Larry. That would be like me burning my dad because he was like a father to me,'” she said.
Financial costs of saying goodbye
Two months before he died, Larry Shields told his wife about a casket he liked. But cremation was the most affordable option and the one they’d chosen.
At the end of life, cost matters.
The average cost of a cremation in the United States is between $2,000 and $5,000, but a direct cremation can cost as little as $800, according to Lincoln Heritage Funeral Advantage. The prices fluctuate based on the state you live in as well as the funeral home’s costs and packages.
In Utah, the World Population Review reported these 2024 statistics:
- Average funeral costs: $7,536.
- Average end-of-life costs: $13,470.
- Average total costs: $21,005.
Because cost drove her discussion with her husband, “When Cole told me he couldn’t do it, I said, ‘OK,'” Shields said.
“Cole helped me out, took care of things, and I got with a couple of (Larry’s) boys and some of his sisters, and we came up with a plan for the service and stuff,” she added, noting that Larry Shields never asked for anything, but “he was a very well-liked person in the community, and he would have done anything for everybody. So I felt like I owed it to my husband to have something for him.
“It’s just kind of an emotional thing. When you’re trying to get things organized, especially when it happens unexpectedly, you just kind of work with family and friends and people that knew him and kind of knew what he liked,” she said.
The memorial had an open casket, with his beloved Harley Davidson right next to it, wheeled in by a longtime riding friend.
Looking back, Yvette Shields advises others to have an end-of-life discussion in case something happens unexpectedly. “You never know, right? And the one thing Larry always told me was, ‘When it’s my time, the good Lord will take me.'”
She also suggests mending fences or building bridges to people who should be important if you’ve lost touch. “For those people that don’t reach out to family or keep in contact with them through the years, don’t just say it works both ways. If you don’t hear from somebody, contact that person. Always try to reach out.”
She said her husband was “always there to help out when someone needed a helping hand. But other than that, he never reached out to anybody. Life’s too short to have that perspective.”
Confronting mortality
Thanatophobia, or fear of death, is a common phobia among Americans. In a study done by Chapman University on America’s biggest fears, 20.3% said they most feared death.
But perhaps every phobia — whether irrational or not — has an underlying fear of dying. Fear that you’ll die from suffocation in a tight space, fear that you’ll fall to your death overlooking the view, or the spider will bite you, poisoning your bloodstream, ultimately killing you.
Still, death is not a typical dinner table discussion — unless your family is in the death business.
Houghton said that his kids have a unique perspective on death because their dad owns and operates a funeral home for a living. “We’re not afraid to talk about death,” he said.
“They’re around the funeral home,” Houghton added. “So they know two sides of it: We take care of people, and, you know, we stress the importance of respecting the dead. And we try to do our very best so that families can have as good of an experience as possible. When somebody passes away, my kids are kind of there.”
Lance Larkin, fourth-generation president of Larkin Mortuary and its other companies, said that even though it’s not a conversation people look forward to having, the earlier you plan, the better. “At least express your desires or your wishes to your family members, so they know what you would prefer to have happen to you” because “death and dying never goes away. It’s 24/7, 365.”
