Lifesong Funerals, Author at Blog | Lifesong Funerals

What to Do after Someone Dies

Before and after funerals at funeral homes in Tallahassee, FL, there are many things that need to be done after the death of a loved one. Having a checklist ready will help you get the things accomplished that have to be done right away and long-term. Don’t be hesitant to get your family to help take care of some of these things where legal authority is not an issue.

The first thing that needs to happen after your loved one has died is that they need to be officially pronounced dead. This begins the process of the creation of a certified death certificate (completed jointly by a medical professional and the funeral director), which you’ll need to make life insurance claims, handle financial accounts, and settle the estate.

You should get at least 20 copies of the certified death certificate once it’s completed. The funeral director will take care of completing the death certificate and getting the number of certified copies that you specify.

If your loved died in the hospital, someone on the medical staff there will do the pronouncement of death and mark the time of death. If your loved one was in hospice care at home, then you will need to contact the hospice agency. A hospice medical professional will come and do the pronouncement and mark the time of death.

The next thing you’ll need to do is notify people of your loved one’s death. These first notifications will be to people who need to know. These may include immediate family members who are not present when your loved one died, close friends of your loved one and/or your family, your loved one’s primary care provider, and your loved one’s pastor.

If your loved one was still working, be sure to contact their employer’s Human Resources to notify them of the death and to ask them to cancel any upcoming scheduled events. You may not be in any shape to ask about outstanding pay and benefits that your loved one is entitled to at this point, but be sure to make a note to contact the employer within the next couple of days to inquire about these.

If your loved one has pets or children, you’ll need to ensure that they are all in a safe and comfortable environment immediately following the death.

Most people with children have some sort of legal guardianship documents in place – whether they are aunts, uncles, grandparents, or godparents – in case of death, but the people named in these documents may live elsewhere, so the children will need a safe, temporary home.

If your loved one was in the hospital, the staff will ask you what funeral home should be notified to transport your loved one from the hospital. Once you give them that information, they will contact the funeral home for transport.

If your loved one was in hospice care at home, the hospice medical professional will get the funeral home information from you and arrange for them to come and pick your loved one up.

The next thing will be to make funeral arrangements (usually within 24 hours after the death). The funeral director will guide you through the process and help you as you make decision about the service and the burial.

If you want to know more 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.

Dealing with Disenfranchised Grief

Grief resources are among the cremation services offered in Tallahassee, FL. Grief is a whole body experience. It consumes us mentally, emotional, physically, and perhaps, for a time, even spiritually. Emotions run the gambit, stress levels are high, and we can suffer physical pain and illness as a result. We can also feel run down, depressed, and unable to focus on anything.

However, it’s not uncommon for the people we interact with regularly – and this can include family members – to not understand the symptoms of our grief. There are two reasons for this. One reason may simply be that they’ve never lost a loved one, so they haven’t experienced the kind of grief that follows death. The second reason may be that they have lost a loved one, and they are convinced that the way they grieved or handled their grief afterwards is the only way people grieve.

In either case, they (employers, teachers, family members, friends, etc.) will be the first ones to tell us things like we’re overreacting, that we need to get over it and move on, and that we’re grieving too long. They will not recognize that all the “problems” they are seeing with mental, emotional, and physical health are because of the toll that grieving takes on the human body.

When people dismiss or punish our grief, we are experiencing disenfranchised grief.

Disenfranchised grief happens with every kind of grief over loss, but it’s especially common when we experience a loss that doesn’t fit within the parameters of others’ expectations.

A very common example is the deep grief that couples experience over a miscarriage. Many people don’t think that warrants the same kind of grief as the loss of a family member, a spouse, or a child. And yet that pregnancy was a child in the making, so in reality couples who’ve experienced miscarriages have actually lost a child.

Another common example is deep grieving over the loss of a beloved pet. Especially in the American culture now, pets are very deeply woven into people’s lives. They refer to them as their children and their parents call them their grandchildren. With those kind of emotional attachments, and the long life of some pets, the grief when they die is very intense and pronounced.

It hurts when other people don’t understand the grieving you’re experiencing. It adds to the trauma of the loss you’ve experienced.

However, there is a more severe form of disenfranchised grief, which is known as suffocated grief.

Suffocated grief is grief that is not only unacknowledged, but is also punished.

Suffocated grief is especially common for children who are grieving when they are in school. These children may be disruptive and unruly, or tired and lethargic, and they are punished by school personnel for their behavior. Underprivileged children may be the most strongly affected by suffocated grief. When the norms of grief through one person or institution’s eyes are imposed on everyone else, the imposition basically says that person or institution gets to decide who gets to grieve and who doesn’t.

When the normal reactions of grief are not acknowledged and are punished, they can have devastating long-term effects. When no support is given for grieving children who may miss homework assignments or fail tests, while before they were doing well in school, then it can lead to a further decline in academic performance. They may fail the entire school year and be held back a year, or put in remedial classes the next year. To a child, this is a particularly hard defeat to come back from, and most never do.

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.

Filing Life Insurance Claims

After funerals at funeral homes in Tallahassee, FL, one of the responsibilities of the executor is to make sure any life insurance claims and filed and paid to the estate. You might not realize it, but life insurance companies are supposed to regularly check the Social Security database for deaths that are reported and match them up with clients and policies.

However, most life insurance companies don’t do this consistently or regularly, so it’s not prudent to wait on them to send a payout on a life insurance claim. However, in some cases, life insurance companies are more vigilant, but they run into a snag trying to send the payout because the address they have on file for the beneficiary is decades old and the beneficiary no longer lives there.

So, it’s best to be proactive about getting life insurance claims filed to receive the payout as quickly as possible.

The first thing you’ll need to do in this process is to find the life insurance policy. Presumably, it should be with the deceased’s other important papers, like the will or trust. The deceased may have kept these in a bank safety deposit box or a fireproof home safe. If you’re unable to locate the original life insurance policy, look for an annual billing statement, which will have the life insurance company’s name and contact information, the policy number, and the value of the life insurance payout. This might be a printed statement or it might be an online statement. If you can’t find a printed statement, then you should have a digital will that has the life insurance login information, so you can get a statement online by logging into the deceased’s account.

There may several life insurance policies for the deceased, including their places of employment, so it’s prudent to check with all employers by contacting their Human Resources department to find out if there are any life insurance policies in effect.

If you can’t find any life insurance policy information anywhere, your next step is to contact the the state’s unclaimed property office. You should contact the office in the state where the deceased lived. They can let you know if any unclaimed life insurance money in the deceased’s name was turned over to them. You can find each state’s unclaimed property office by following a link on the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrator’s website.

An important fact to remember is that no money is considered unclaimed until one years has elapsed without activity or contact with the life insurance policy holder, so it will take you more than a year to settle this part of the estate if you can’t find life insurance policy information easily.

Once you have the life insurance policy information, you will contact the life insurance company and they will instruct you how to file a claim. You will need a certified copy of the death certificate and you will have to complete forms for the company. They will then pay the claim.

Most life insurance policy payouts are exempt from taxes. However, if a life insurance policy is one that accrues interest, you will be responsible for paying taxes on the interest income.

If you want to know more about life insurance policies 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.

Seasons of Death

Cremations are one of the cremation services offered in Tallahassee, FL, but it may surprise you to learn that there tend to be more deaths and cremations during some parts of the calendar year than during others.

Funeral home directors have been tracking data related to death and seasons for quite some time. In their analysis, they began to recognize that there is definite seasonality to death. They found out that winter months, especially December and January, have much death rates than summer months like June and July.

Death rates not only are very high during the winter months, but they tend to be exceptionally high during the Christmas-to-New Year’s timeframe, as discovered by sociologist David Phillips. Phillips studied more than 57 million deaths that occurred between the years of 1979 and 2004. In each year, Phillips found a recurring jump in the number of deaths that happened during the two weeks after Christmas Day. Incidentally, Phillips’ data showed that January has the highest average number of deaths, while September has the lowest average number of deaths.

This increase in the chances of dying during the winter as opposed to the summer is a statistic fact that is independent of milder fluctuations in seasonal weather as well as where people live in the United States. But it begs the question why.

Once people know that the wintertime has the highest death rate, they may assume that suicides push the numbers higher, because of the prevalence of winter blues and the holiday season blues. However, the facts tell a different story. The summer months tend to see an increase in the number of suicide deaths (and Mondays are the most frequently chosen day).

When you take the data as a whole, the leading causes of death in America can be grouped into three broad categories: summer seasonal (6%), not seasonal (24%), and winter seasonal (69%).

The not seasonal deaths include causes of death like cancer, homicides, and infant deaths. Summer seasonal deaths include suicides and accidents (driving, boating, drowning, etc.). While it might seem that there would be more deaths caused by accidents in snowy and icy weather during the winter months, the reality is that many parts of the United States get little to no extreme winter weather, and in areas of the country where the winter weather is much more dangerous, people have the good sense to not get out in it.

There are some definite correlations between illnesses and the abundance of winter seasonality deaths. The winter months are prime time for serious illnesses like the flu and pneumonia, both of which can be fatal. There is also a correlation between weather and death in places that do see quite a bit of snow during the winter. There is a very sharp rise in fatal heart attacks during the winter months. Many of these occur while people are doing snow removal, a task that requires heavy exertion. The combination of heavy exertion combined with extreme cold wreaks havoc on the heart, which in turn can be fatal.

The good news about the seasonality of death, is as the author Anthony Trollope pointed out, is that season mortality starts to decrease significantly by around May 7th of each year.

For more 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.

Understanding Comfort Care

Before death and funerals at funeral homes in Tallahassee, FL, often end-of-life care is required. This is known as comfort care. Comfort care is fully covered by Medicare and may be fully or partially covered by other types of health insurance. If you don’t have Medicare, check with your insurance provided to see what kind of comfort care coverage your policy offers.

Palliative care is one kind of comfort care. Palliative care is provided in the home to people who have chronic and severe illnesses and medical conditions that are being treated, but that require continual medical supervision and support. You can receive palliative care indefinitely or until you decide you no longer want treatment for your illness or medical condition.

Palliative care is an excellent option for people with severe medical conditions like congestive heart failure, cancer, or late-stage dementia where getting to medical facilities for checkups and other assistive therapies is prohibitive.

Palliative care generally includes one visit by a nurse each week to check on the medical condition of the patient. The nurse will take vital signs, do medical assessments based on the input of the patient and/or caregiver, draw bloodwork, if needed, and communicate medication recommendations to the patient’s primary care physician. The nurse can also request the primary care physician to do orders for medical equipment like hospital beds, walkers, and oxygen concentrators (these are safer and easier to use than oxygen tanks) to be delivered to the home.

Palliative care also includes the services of occupational therapists, physical therapists, speech therapists, and aides. If a patient has had a stroke, for example, each type of therapist can help adapt the home and improve the patient’s ability to move and talk. Therapists may come to the home once or twice a week. Aides are available, usually twice a week, to help with the personal grooming needs the patient has.

Palliative care is comprehensive care that is provided in the home as long as illnesses or medical conditions are being actively treated.

Once a patient decides they no longer want to have their chronic and severe illness or medical condition treated, then comfort care is provided in the form of hospice care. It’s important to understand that there comes a time in every severe illness or medical condition where treatments become ineffective or they take so much out of the person that the quality of life is greatly diminished. This is not giving up. Instead, it’s an acceptance of the reality of approaching death.

Hospice care admission is based on a single severe illness or medical condition. For example, if a person has terminal cancer and decides they no want treatment for it, then they will be admitted to hospice care for cancer. The hospice care admission is done by a nurse who visits the home. The nurse will ensure that medications for the illness the patient is admitted under are delivered to the home and that medical equipment needed is ordered and delivered. The nurse will also make sure that a comfort care kit (which is used during the dying process) is delivered to the home within 24 hours of admission to hospice care.

Other people who may visit the home during hospice care are chaplains, social workers, and aides.

In general, hospice care is on-call medical care, where hospice care is called in when the medical condition of the patient changes or worsens. Hospice care nurses will visit frequently during the last couple of days before the patient dies. They will be the first phone call the caregiver and/or family makes after death occurs.

If you want to know more about visitations 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.