Funerals and Flowers

Flowers are a funeral home in Tallahassee tradition. Flowers have very special meanings for funerals, so even if the obituary for someone who has died specifically asks for expressing sympathy or remembering the person by making a donation instead of sending flowers, you will find that some people will still send flowers either to the funeral home or to the bereaved family.

funeral home in Tallahassee

Flowers equal emotional expression for many people, which is why they choose to send them when someone dies. An online donation to an organization, a cause, or a charity, while needed and appropriate, doesn’t feel as connected emotionally as the act of picking out flowers or a plant for the funeral or to be given to the family.

There will always be flowers at funerals. Usually, the family of the deceased provides flowers. The immediate family provides the casket spray, while other family members provide standing sprays. Additionally, in some family traditions, individual flowers are laid on the casket at the gravesite as a token of respect.

If you choose to send flowers or a plant to a funeral for someone who has died, you should know a little about what certain flowers mean and how you can use flowers to best express your emotions and relationship to the deceased.

You may choose to send flowers to a funeral because the deceased has no surviving family to provide flowers. In this situation, you might want to choose flowers that symbolize innocence and purity or friendship. Good flower choices for purity and innocence are lilies and white roses, while yellow roses are universally recognized as expressions of friendship.

You may decide that you want to make sure the grave of the deceased has a regular fresh supply of flowers. You can make arrangements with a local florist for the flower delivery as often you desire – from once a month to once a year. If you choose to have them delivered once a year, pick a significant date like the deceased’s birthday or date of death.

A well-known American example of yearly flowers left at the grave is that of the gravesite of author Edgar Allen Poe in Baltimore, MD. From 1949 to 2009, a mysterious visitor visited Poe’s gravesite every year on Poe’s birthday (January 19). The still unknown visitor left the same thing each year: three roses and a bottle of cognac. Presumably, when this annual visit ceased in 2010, the stranger who paid homage to the late writer every year had met the same fate as Poe did in 1849.

Instead of having a florist make up a flower arrangement, you may choose to pick out your own flowers to arrange yourself. While there is significant to the type and colors of specific flowers for funerals, if you’re designing your own arrangement, then you should choose flowers that are aesthetically pleasing to your eye and make them into an arrangement that you like.

funeral home flowers

If you’re an immediate family member of the person who died, you may have been one of the family members who asked for something other than flowers to remember your loved one by. However, there is still something very personal, very comforting, and very sentimental about providing flowers for the funeral of your loved one or by making sure that there are flowers at their gravesite all year long.

For more information about flowers for funerals at funeral home in Tallahassee, including grief resources, our caring and knowledgeable staff at Lifesong Funerals & Cremations is here to assist you.

Respect at a Funeral

At funerals at Tallahassee funeral homes, your presence means that you either knew or cared for the person who died, or you know or care about the family or individual members of the person who died. While many of the funeral traditions of the past have relaxed in the last few decades, the respect that should be given by mourners to the deceased and the family of the deceased has not.

Tallahassee funeral homes

If you’re unsure of what is considered respectful, then these guidelines will help you.

First, don’t bring very small children (under the age of five, at a minimum) to a funeral or graveside service. Little ones don’t understand what is going on at a funeral, so they’re not missing anything by not being there.

In addition, very young children can be very noisy and disruptive, not because they intend to be, but because making noise is the only way they have to communicate their basic needs to adults.

Funerals and graveside services are quiet occasions where both the grieving family and the gathered mourners are reflecting on a life that has ended and on their own mortality. There should be no disruption during this very contemplative and reflective time.

Second, make sure that what you wear to a funeral service or a graveside service is appropriate. Some people don’t understand exactly what this means, and it can either cause an uproar (if you look like you’re going clubbing, for instance) for the bereaved family and other mourners or it can cause discomfort for you (if, for instance, you wear a work uniform or clothes that are specific to your trade or profession and the service is during the middle of your workday).

The family may be explicit in their loved one’s obituary about attire. For example, some people never wanted to dress up when they were alive, so their families may point to that and invite people to attend the funeral service or graveyard service in comfortable attire. Even if that is the case, you should wear clothes that are modest, in good taste, and that are not sloppy, tattered, or torn.

If the deceased’s obituary doesn’t specify a type of attire, then business casual attire is considered to be respectful attire. However, if you are attending a service during your work day and you have a uniform or work clothes on, it is perfectly acceptable to attend the funeral or graveside service in those. The family will be glad that you took the time to be there.

Another way to show respect at a funeral service or a graveside service is to be on time. You should plan to be wherever you need to be at least 15 minutes before the scheduled start time of a funeral service or graveside service (if you are driving in the funeral process from the funeral home to the cemetery, you should be at the funeral home 15 minutes before the scheduled departure time).

cremation services offered in Tallahassee, FL

Turn your phone off, mute it, or, better yet, leave it in the car when you are attending a funeral service or a graveside service. For a very short span of time, you can show your respect for the person who died and their loved ones by having your attention solely focused on them. Whatever’s on the other end of that phone can stop and wait for the duration.

If you want to know more about showing respect at Tallahassee funeral homes, our compassionate and experienced staff at Lifesong Funerals & Cremations can help.

Grieving and Health

Grieving is normal after a cremation service in Tallahassee. When you lose someone you love to death, the pain is palpable. Not only are you adjusting to a loss in the physical sense, but you are also coping with a monumental shift in who are you and how your life will be without them in it.

Almost nobody in our society recognizes the depths of the grieving process: what it means, what it does, and how long it can actually take to come through it to a place where, although the loss is ever present, you can actually start moving forward into creating a new and meaningful life without your loved one in it.

cremation service in Tallahassee

Because of this lack of recognition, the costs of grief, especially on your overall health, are hidden until they get manifested, perhaps weeks later, perhaps months later, or perhaps years later, in significant physiological, mental, and emotional health issues that can potentially put your life at risk.

The term bereavement is somewhat archaic in our modern language. But, its origins refer to a time, long past, when people who had lost loved ones openly mourned the loss by wearing black for a certain amount of time and by taking the time out from the normal rhythm of life to grieve and to heal from the acute pain of death.

That time is no more. Today, death is just another thing to do and get past, as quickly as possible. If you’re fortunate, your employer may give you three paid days off to make funeral arrangements and hold a memorial service. Then, you’re expected to be back at work, over it, and ready to give 100% to your job and your life as though nothing happened.

It’s impossible to do. There are some people who actually lose their jobs after the death of someone they love because their job performance, which was stellar before, suddenly is erratic or much less stellar.

Mistakes and errors, sometimes big ones and sometimes costly ones, happen. In general, too, the higher your job performance was before the death of your loved one, the more glaring the effects of their death and your grief will be in how you do your job.

What employers, and society in general, don’t understand or realize is that grief is a process that gets a whole lot worse before it gets better.

Sleep is disrupted. Emotions run the gambit as you process memories, unknowns, fears, sadness, hopelessness, and aloneness (even though you may be surrounded by family members, when a loved one dies, there is a part of you that is now alone).

The return to “normal” life with its hustle and bustle, with all of the effects of the grieving process going on in the background, creates a tremendous amount of psychological stress, mental stress, and physical stress.

The body is not designed to handle this kind of unrelenting and pervasive stress for very long. Grief researchers have found that your risk for a premature death after the loss of a loved one is highest in the first two years after they’ve died.

They have also found that once you’ve experienced the loss of a loved one, your risk for an early death never returns to the lower risk that the general population has.

For more information about grief resources after a cremation service in Tallahassee, including grief resources, our caring and knowledgeable staff at Lifesong Funerals & Cremations is here to assist you. You can visit our funeral home at 20 S. Duval St., Quincy, FL 32351, or you can call us today at (850) 627-1111.

Getting Through the Fog of Grief

After Tallahassee cremation services, the full weight of grief begins to descend on you. Family and friends disperse back to their homes and their lives and you are, for the first time in days or even a couple of weeks, alone or with just the immediate family still living with you.

In our society, bereaved family members are expected to pick up the pieces quickly after the death of a loved one and charge back into life at full steam as though nothing monumental happened and the world didn’t permanently tilt off its axis in your life.

Tallahassee cremation services

As Americans, we’ve been subconsciously conditioned that this is how we are supposed to be or react after we lose a loved one to death. However, we find, to our dismay, that this ideal that’s been handed to you is not the reality we encounter.

Even if you’re normally a highly focused person, a quick decision maker, and a clear and logical thinker, you will find that you are none of those for some time (weeks, months, or even a year or two) after a loved one dies.

And, if you don’t know why or what you’re dealing with (and that it’s normal), you can feel like not only are you losing your mind, but you’re also an absolute failure, by society’s standards, at handling death and grief.

Death of a loved one is a traumatic event. The top stressor on the Holmes-Rahe Stress Inventory, the scale that is the standard for measuring stress and health risks (your life insurance rates are based on this scale), is the death of a spouse. The death of a close family member is fifth on the list and the death of a close friend is seventeenth on the list.

Grief is an expression of that trauma. And when grief takes over, it affects you mentally, physically, and emotionally. Grief literally trumps everything else in your life.

The fog of grief is normal. It consists of three distinct and recognizable components.

The first is the emotional component. You are engulfed in processing the death of your loved one. You are trying to understand what happened, why it happened, and how it has affected you. In this component, you are literally sorting through pain. What’s going on beyond your pain seems irrelevant and pointless.

The second component of the fog of grief is the neurological component. Since death and the loss it brings are traumatic, the brain automatically responds to that by decreasing activity in the hippocampus (the region of the brain that regulates memory, learning, emotion, and motivation).

Therefore, it can be hard to remember simple things like where you put your car keys – short-term memory – and it can be hard to remember the steps to a process in your career that you’ve been doing for several years – long-term memory.

Decreased activity in the hippocampus can also make it difficult to come to final decisions about little things and big things, and, because the brain’s GPS lies within the hippocampus, you may find yourself getting lost while driving familiar roads and routes.

The third component of the fog of grief is the physical component. When the body experiences trauma, it will put all its energy toward healing that trauma. This energy includes mental energy, physical energy, and neurological energy. The result is overwhelming fatigue and sluggishness.

Guidance with grief resources is one of the Tallahassee cremation services our compassionate and experienced staff at Lifesong Funerals & Cremations can help you with. You can come by our funeral home at 20 S. Duval St., Quincy, FL 32351, or you can contact us today at (850) 627-1111.

Avoiding Family Inheritance Rifts

You’re preparing for the end of your life. You’re taking all the steps to make sure everything is squared away, including planning your cremation in Tallahassee, FL. You are definitely doing all the right things to make the administrative part of your death easier for your family.

However, there are some steps you should make sure you take when you are getting your will or trust in order to make sure that your family doesn’t implode after your death because of the way your appointed an executor or trustee or dispersed your assets.

cremation in Tallahassee, FL

In recent years, fighting among family members about estate matters have followed the deaths of musician Tom Petty (2017), comedian and actor Robin Williams (2015), musician B. B. King (2015), disc jockey Casey Kasem (2014), and actress Audrey Hepburn (1993).

Much of the fighting and ill will has been related to how the will or trust left by these very talented and intelligent people named executors or trustees, how inheritances were split between beneficiaries, and, most notably, who was not named as trustees or beneficiaries and vague wording that made it unclear who was entitled to what in the estate.

There are some very simple steps you can take to ensure that this does not happen with your family or your estate when you die.

One of the documents that you should keep with (and, to be legally-binding, specifically refer to in) your will or your trust is a Personal Property Memorandum that lists how you want personal assets like furniture, vehicles, jewelry, family heirlooms and the like distributed among your family members. You should sign and date it. It does not have to be signed in front of witnesses and it does not have to notarized.

These items don’t typically get enumerated in wills or trusts, which deal with real property (personal and business) and financial assets. You should review your Personal Property Memorandum regularly to keep it current. If you change it, you should destroy any previous versions and replace them with the newly signed and dated version with your updates.

You should also include a Letter of Instruction with your will or trust. A Letter of Instruction lets you communicate all your wishes for your estate. Though this is not a legally-binding document, it enables you to communicate, in your own words, directly with your family after your death as to what your estate contains, what you intend to be done with your estate, and how you intend your estate to be distributed.

What should your Letter of Instruction include? It should basically be a well-defined roadmap for your final affairs. Items you should have in your Letter of Instruction include:

  • Location of your important documents (wills, trusts, property titles, insurance policies, etc.)
  • Funeral home where you planned your funeral and your final disposition
  • Cremations services wishes
  • Comprehensive list of financial assets
  • Pension or profit-sharing plan information
  • Location of last tax return and Social Security statements
  • Location of safety deposit boxes and keys
  • Distribution of insurance policy payouts, trust provisions, and, if applicable, business succession summaries

Because this is you talking to those you will leave behind, you need to be detailed and specific so there will be questions about what you want or what you mean. These questions – or the lack of any information at all – are often the source of family inheritance rifts.

For information about planning for cremation in Tallahassee, FL, including grief resources, our caring and knowledgeable staff at Lifesong Funerals & Cremations is here to assist you. You can visit our funeral home at 20 S. Duval St., Quincy, FL 32351, or you can call us today at (850) 627-1111.