Classic Cremation & Funeral Services Inc. is a locally owned, grass-roots funeral business, providing simple and tailored cremation, burial and celebration of life services. The owner, Ngaio Davis, a proud Canadian who was raised on the west coast of B.C., has fifteen solid years of funeral service experience and seeks to continue in this exemplary profession in way that is meaningful and progressive. Through professional and personal experiences with diverse funeral and mourning rituals and observances, she has a keen interest in assisting the public in “Natural Death” practices, including Green Burial and other eco-conscious options, adding a much needed and fresh alternative to traditional funeral practices in the Vancouver area.
At Classic Cremation we know and appreciate the value of hard work and have made deliberate choices to ensure that our services and merchandise are offered at fair and affordable prices without sacrificing our customers expectations and experience. Our facilities are modest yet comfortable, ensuring lower overhead costs than larger funeral home operations. By not having a chapel on-site, the options of memorial and celebration venues are as varied as our clients and our city.
Our mission at Classic Cremation & Funeral Services Inc. is to strive for daily excellence by:
- listening to the needs of others and finding unique complimentary solutions
- being innovators in funeral service while remaining respectful of its rich history
- being educators in our communities, promoting the value of rituals new and old, and the value of celebrating and memorializing lives lived
We trust that our deep respect for those we serve will provide a safe and comfortable atmosphere throughout your grief journey.
An Introduction to Ngaio Davis, CFSP
Working in funeral service requires one to be wholly present in each and every situation, to be able to listen to and through the words of the bereaved and respond appropriately, to be able to adapt to an ever-changing landscape and to quietly support the people you work with. These attributes are what drew Ngaio into funeral service and her dedication to stay true to them is what keeps her in this field.
Nothing about Ngaio’s life has ever been “run-of-the-mill”, from being raised as a farm-girl in rural B.C. to becoming a journey-person carpenter in her early 20’s. So it’s no wonder that after years of working in traditional funeral homes, both corporately and privately owned, Ngaio took the big leap of opening up her own non-traditional funeral provider business so that she could practice her work in a way that was more in tune with how she felt about funeral service.
Funeral Directors are involved with people at an incredibly vulnerable and intimate time in their lives and the responsibility they have is simply to serve their needs, whatever they are. Too often families are met with inflexibility of service from funeral homes, causing them to compromise their needs and settle for services and products that a funeral home offers. Even, when it isn’t exactly how they would prefer to memorialize the one they cared so deeply for. Ngaio sets herself apart from other funeral directors and traditional funeral homes by simply asking, “How can I help you?”, rather than providing a limited number of options and then asking the client to choose one.
One of Ngaio’s goals in funeral service is to bring more awareness and offerings to people about eco-friendly funeral options. Such as, green or natural burial, green cremation, natural viewings, green caskets and biodegradable urns. In life, many of us are concerned with our impact on the environment and so can we be at death. It is an area that is slowly starting to gain recognition and Ngaio is doing her best to be at the forefront of it in Vancouver.
Not only is Ngaio fully committed to offering sincere and genuine assistance to people who have just experienced a death, she is keen to encourage people to talk openly about death and dying. It is frequently acknowledged that North Americans in general have a poor relationship with the topic of death, which translates into numerous difficulties and issues in other areas. In her capacity as a funeral director, she has experienced too often the utter desperation people are faced with because they are not at all prepared to face a death experience. As an independent funeral provider, Ngaio now has the freedom to get involved with spreading the conversation that other western nations are having about the new age of death and dying.