Lifesong Funerals, Author at Blog | Lifesong Funerals

Leave a Legacy Behind

After cremation, which is one of the cremation services offered in Tallahassee, FL, our families will be left with more than just the things we owned and the money we accumulated. While we may have amassed a lot of things and great wealth during our time on earth, they will not last as a legacy. They are finite and they will eventually be no more at some point down the road.

What we leave that will last is our examples, which are made up of our values and principles – the things we lived by and for throughout our time here. So, when we think about leaving a legacy behind, we need to think about what we want to make sure that our descendants can learn from and take from and pass on from our lives.

How do we demonstrate our values and principles in how we live so that our families can see what was most important to us and what we hope they will embrace, make their own, and continue?

One way we can do this is by showing unwavering support for things and causes that we believe in. This can be our faith, our commitment to serving other people, both in our communities and beyond, or holding fundraisers for something that matters to us, such as fighting a disease or condition, assisting community volunteer services like firefighting or emergency services, or helping people have access to educational opportunities.

Some people create foundations or scholarships before they die, with the legal condition that their heirs continue to actively support and financially contribute to them after they die. We don’t have to have a huge fortune to do something like this, and it is a great way to make sure that our descendants share this part of our legacy.

Another way that we can demonstrate our values and our principles is by sharing the gifts we’ve been given with others. Some people not only love to cook or bake, but they also love to share what they’ve cooked or baked with others. Some people are very good listeners and encouragers, so they regularly visit with or call people who need someone to listen and who need to be encouraged.

Some people are gifted musicians, so they freely share that gift with people who may be homebound or people in assisted living facilities or nursing homes. Other people use their gifts to volunteer in the community. They may donate time each week to helping students in after-school programs, coaching athletic teams, working in the local library, or performing a service for their church congregation.

We live in a society that is increasingly becoming selfish – and stingy – with time and money. We are surrounded by people who look through or avoid need right in front of them because they’re unwilling to share anything, whether they have a little or a lot, with anyone else.

In fact, a recent article in Psychology Today explained the phenomenon of people who have less being much more likely to share what they had with others than people who have more. Create a legacy of seeing those in need, caring about those in need, and sharing with those in need no matter how much or how little you have to pass on to those you leave behind when you die.

For information about cremation services offered in Tallahassee, FL, 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.

Fear of Death

Before funerals at funeral homes in Tallahassee, FL, you may find yourself fearing the end of life. You are not alone. Many people, especially in the Western world, are afraid of death. But why are you – and a lot of other people – afraid of death?

To answer that question, we need to understand the emotion of fear and how that emotion and the contextual environment of that emotion has changed over time.

Fear is a response to a direct threat. Before human civilizations became so complex, most fears were generated from our physical environments. For example, if we were confronted by a bear or stepped in the path of a poisonous snake, fear for our lives was the natural response. This was a real fear based on real circumstances that were happening.

However, as our human existences have become more sophisticated, in the Western world particularly, and these real physical threats have become more of an aberration than part of our normal existence, our fear has turned toward intangible threats.

Intangible threats are things we haven’t experienced and things that we can’t perceive with our senses. These can include things like the loss of a job, the loss of independence, and the theft of our assets by cyber criminals, and the loss of life.

We think about these intangible threats – that may not have happened and, in most cases, are unlikely to happen – and we develop fears about them. As author Mark Twain famously said, “I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”

So, this change in how fear gets generated necessitates another question. Why are you afraid of death?

Death is a unique experience in life. We experience it only once. Those who’ve experienced it before us can’t come back to tell us what happens and what it’s like. Therefore, we truly don’t know anything about death – as an experience – except that it happens.

Because death is an both tangible in the sense that it will happen and intangible in the sense that none of us knows what the experience of it is until it happens and we can’t share that with anyone else, it can evoke a response of fear about something will happen in the future.

But the fear of death is more than just about the experience itself. The other fear can also be about what happens after death. Solomon says in Ecclesiastes 9:5 that the living know that they die, but the dead don’t know anything. Jesus Christ Himself, in talking about his friend Lazarus in John 11:11, said that the dead sleep. When we’re asleep, time passes and, for the most part, we are unaware of any of that time.

However, Western literature has been overlaid on the theology of the Bible, and it has suggested that when we die, we don’t sleep, but instead we get an immediate change in consciousness – and place outside the grave – that can either be okay or not okay.

One of the biggest literary influences on how we perceive the afterlife is Dante Alighieri’s The Inferno. Written as a political satire against his enemies in Florence who opposed the Pope and were backed by the Holy Roman Emperor, Dante created a complex and tortuous multilayered Hell that he consigned his enemies to.

Through time this Hell was integrated into Christian theology as the place where “bad” people go when they die. The fear of going “down” instead of going “up” (even though John 3:13 specifically says that no human except the resurrected and spiritual Jesus has ascended to heaven) is also intertwined with death.

If you want to learn about funerals at funeral homes in Tallahassee, FL, our compassionate and experienced staff at Lifesong Funerals & Cremations can help. 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.

Grief Psychology

Providing grief resources is among the cremation services offered in Tallahassee, FL. Grief over the death of someone we love is part of the price we pay for love. Although a variation of this statement has been attributed to various people, including Queen Elizabeth II of Britain, its true source is unknown.

However, whether this statement was made by someone who has been lost to history or someone who is well-known, the essence of it is valid. Love, loss, and grief go hand-in-hand.

We often don’t start the long road of the grieving process until after our loved ones are cremated, and family members and friends who gathered from far and near to offer us comfort and support have left to go back to their homes and their lives and we find ourselves alone, facing the absence of someone we love.

Grief has well-known physical effects including sleep disruption, fatigue, and weak immunity, which can make us more susceptible to getting every sniffle and cough within arm’s reach, as well as creating permanent damage to organs like the heart and the brain.

Grief also has well-known emotional effects. These can include anger at our loved one for dying and anger that we have been left alone (as well as anger at our friends and family members who have moved back into the normal routines of their lives, while we’re stuck in the middle of grief). Prolonged sorrow, profound sadness, and even chronic depression are also common emotional effects of grief.

However, we may not be aware of or understand the psychological effects of grief. The root of what happens to us at the psychological level is our thinking. We spend more time than we realize thinking subconsciously or unconsciously about things that we are totally unaware of when we’re alert and awake.

Those subconscious and unconscious thoughts are often the basis of our dreams, as they weave themselves into the REM periods of our sleep patterns. Have you ever awakened suddenly from a dream that was a patchwork of things, problems, and people from throughout your life and wondered where in the world all that stuff came from and why it was all together in one place? Those dreams come from all the thinking that we do that we don’t know about on a conscious level.

There are three psychological components of grief, however, that we should be aware of, because how we handle these will be a crucial factor in how well we grieve and how well we move through the grieving process after someone we love has died.

The first psychological component of grief is the recognition of and the feeling of loss. We start this by establishing the relationship of the person who died in our lives: spouse, parent, sibling, child, or grandchild. Then we recount the nature of our relationship with them in terms of what they provided for us that we now no longer have and will never have again in the same way.

The second psychological component of grief is the awareness of change. After we lose someone we love, life is never the same and everything going forward will be a change to something different than it was.

The third psychological component of grief is the realization of how little control we have over what happens in life and in death. This recognition may, at least temporarily, leave us feeling somewhat vulnerable about the present and fearful of the future. Gradually, though, this vulnerability and fear is countered by unexpected strength, endurance, and resilience.

For more information about grief resources and cremation services offered 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.

Why Having a Funeral Service Matters

When thinking about funerals at funeral homes in Tallahassee, FL, you may think that you don’t want any kind of service after you die. You may tell your family that you don’t want a service. You may say something like, “just take me to the cemetery and bury me.”

However, while you may not personally care about or even want any kind of service after you die, there are a few things you might want to think about in terms of why funeral services matter.

First of all, you’ll be dead. You won’t know whether a service of any kind is held for you or not. So, prohibiting your family from having some kind of service to pay tribute to your life and to stop to acknowledge your death – and their loss – is a limitation you are putting on them from the grave, so to speak. And they may not be happy about it.

The second thing you’ll want to consider is that a service – whether it’s a funeral service, a graveside service, or a memorial service – after you die is for those people – family, friends, and acquaintances – who survive you. The service honors your memory, but it’s not really for you.

Funeral services have a very practical and necessary purpose that you may not be aware of, but that you probably don’t want to deprive your family of. The funeral process, from death to making arrangements to having a service to burial, spans several days. This time gives your loved ones a chance to accept the reality of your death, surrounded by support and sympathy of friends and extended family.

The funeral process, in essence, creates a safe landing for your loved ones as they adjust to losing you and the prospect of living without you and with the void that your death has created in their lives.

The funeral service is the centerpiece of the funeral process. It is a service that’s designed for three things: comfort for your loved ones, collective mourning for all those who attend, and acknowledgement that you lived, your life mattered, and you will be missed.

Funeral services also give a judgment-free zone where people, including your loved ones, can grieve. Out of funeral services come important and lasting items that can both evoke good memories and guide your loved ones through the grieving process.

One of these items might be a memorial website, where people from all over who knew you, but might not be able to attend your funeral service in person, can offer their condolences to your loved ones and share memories of their relationship with you. Memorial websites are also a place where photos and other reminders of you can be posted so that your loved ones have access to them long after the funeral process is over.

Another item that is included in the funeral service is the Order of Service, which includes your photo, your date of birth and date of death, and the details about your funeral service and graveside service.

Most funeral services include readings, such as poetry, prose, and Bible scriptures. These are read by people who were important in your life. Funerals also may include eulogies given by close friends or family members. Funeral services also usually have a spiritual comfort section and music (performed live or recorded). The Order of Service lists each part and who is doing it, and it is a permanent reminder for both your loved ones and all those who attend of you and your life.

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

Suicide Without Warnings

Providing grief resources is among the cremation services offered in Tallahassee, FL. People who’ve lost a loved one to suicide often struggle with grief and regret that they could not have prevented the death of someone they loved.

More than 100 people in the United States commit suicide each day. Suicide is the 10th leading cause of all deaths in this country. Among people between 15 and 24 years of age, suicide is the 3rd leading cause of death. Among people who are between the ages of 25 and 44, suicide is the 4th leading cause of death.

Some people struggle with a lifetime of chronic and severe depression or other mental illnesses before taking their own lives in a moment of desperation and hopelessness. Some people who commit suicide have a long history of threatening to commit suicide or attempting to commit suicide.

All suicides leave many questions and few answers for the families and friends who must live the rest of their lives without someone they love. But most baffling, it seems, are suicides that have no warnings.

People whose loved ones commit suicide without any warnings share similar stories about the previous days, weeks, and months of their time together. The loved ones who take their lives are often relaxed, normal, and even optimistic or happy.

The reality is that many people who commit suicide never give any indicating that they are thinking about committing suicide or planning how to commit suicide. We can often wonder how a person could hide such a momentous decision behind a façade of being fine and being upbeat about life.

To understand how this could be, we have to consider several factors that are associated with deaths caused by suicide.

One of these factors is the stigma that is associated with suicide. Letting people know that a person is thinking about or planning to kill themselves is to put oneself under labels of “crazy,” “selfish,” and “weird.”

Another factor is that most people who commit suicide understand how painful, on some level, it will be to those they leave behind. Not discussing what they are thinking and planning, in their minds, lessens the amount of pain they are inflicting on friends and loved ones.

A third factor for people who are thinking about and planning to commit suicide is the possibility that their plan to kill themselves will be thwarted when others find out. For people in emotional pain, the thought of living longer may be too unbearable to even contemplate.

Although each suicide and the reasons behind it is unique, there are some common situations that may increase the risk of – and raise warning flags for – people thinking about and planning suicides. These can include a significant loss (such as the death of a spouse or loss of a job), a life crisis (like a breakup of a longtime relationship or a divorce), loss of social support (because, for example, of a move to a new place or the relocation of family or close friends), a chronic or terminal illness, or the suicides of family members, friends, or favorite celebrities.

For family members and friends of someone who has died as a result of suicide, it can be difficult to find answers to the question of what they didn’t see that could have prevented the suicide. The answer is that the person who committed suicide intentionally made sure that there was nothing to see.

For information about cremation services offered 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.