Bell-O’dea Funeral Home

Bell-O’Dea did a marvelous job with my Mom’s funeral this past Saturday. Months before her death we met and John O’Dea opened an irrevocable burial trust with me, which allowed me to make smaller payments toward the total bill and spread out the financial impact. And believe me, if you have an older parent who insists on traditional burial, there is a lot of financial impact associated with this event.
Although John was literally hours from flying out of town when I contacted him again, he arranged a wake the next day and a funeral on a Saturday (with a priest who was also out of town at the time), which would allow the maximum number of friends and family to attend. He also put Mike, his second-​in-​command, in charge of things. Both did a wonderful job. When John told me there would be a $ 700 additional charge from the cemetery to prepare the grave on a Saturday (yes, it costs $ 700 more to dig a hole on Saturday than on Friday), he immediately suggested that we could save $ 400 by nixing the family limo to take us around that day. Which turned out to be a great idea. When my sister wanted to place a funeral notice in an out-​of-​state paper, John helped her cut back the notice just enough to save a few hundred dollars on the charge (yes, it costs hundreds of dollars to place a death notice in a newspaper in 2015). He also researched the grave site I had purchased ten years earlier and let me know that we could place two urns of cremated remains on top of the casket at a later date for no extra charge. With grave sites now costing thousands of dollars, this was also very thoughtful on his part.
At the church, Mike and his crew led family members up to speak in a very respectful way, and at the gravesite, Mike picked the most fragrant roses from the bouquet on the casket after the ceremony and handed them to immediate family members with a kind smile. Those white roses, which were gorgeously fragrant, became a way to draw us all together and will be a treasured positive memory from a surreal and painful moment.
I highly recommend Bell-O’Dea for anyone in the Brookline or surrounding area.

We could not be more pleased with the personal service that John Odea provided to our family after the passing of my Dad. When my mom suggested calling a funeral home I instinctively became concerned that we would have to spend much more than required based on stories in the media about unscrupulous practices in the funeral industry. From the moment we began working with Bell-​Odea I knew this would not be the case. Everything was disclosed up front including a detailed price list of services. John even educated us about free Veteran death burial benefits that we did not even know my dad and mom were entitled to. There was so much to do after my dad passed and Bell-​Odea took an enormous and difficult part of the process off our hands and just took care of all of the details for us.