Category: cremation

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.

Grief resources are among the cremation services offered in Tallahassee, FL. After the death and cremation of a loved one, the grieving process begins in earnest. Friends and family go back to their homes and to their normal lives, leaving us alone with our grief and, sometimes, the feeling of emptiness, especially in the case of spouses. Grief can be amplified by the sense of being out of sync with the rest of the world.

For many people, one of the hardest parts of post-death grief is the conjunction of the grieving person, whose entire life and world has completely and permanently changed, with everything and everyone else just going on the same as always. Grieving people can feel very isolated.

This is when pets can be a tremendous help in the grieving process in many ways.

A very practical way that pets can help with the grieving process is they provide the foundation for returning to a normal routine. They need to be fed, watered, and walked on a regular schedule, so those needs inject a sense of normalcy into a time where nothing else is normal.

Physical activity helps produce endorphins, which make us feel better, so walking pets is a key way that we can have a better general sense of well-being even while we’re in the middle of the grieving process.

Pets provide companionship, so it can be very comforting to have them around when someone is grieving. Loneliness and isolation can still feel very real at times, but having pets can help reduce these feelings on a personal level.

Research shows that pets reduce the production of cortisol, the stress hormone. Stress, and a lot of it, is very much a part of the grieving process. Stress can be exacerbated as the grieving person has to handle all the legal, financial, and other details associated with the loss of a loved one. Making the adjustment to a new life without the person who has died is also very stressful. But having pets can help ease the stress and make the adjustment period easier.

The first year after a loved one dies can be extremely difficult emotionally and mentally. Being around other people might be hard at times because they may say something unintentionally that is insensitive or even hurts. Most people, we hope, aren’t intentionally judgmental or critical, but when they are it can feel like being attacked all the time. And strong emotions are part and parcel of the grieving process, so crying and sorrow can appear any time, and when they do, people may feel embarrassed or ashamed.

Pets, however, love unconditionally, so they don’t care if you cry, sob, or talk to yourself. They are simply there for you and their worlds revolve around you. Pets can be a safe haven while you’re grieving because, unlike people, they don’t have any expectations of you except to love and be loved. Pets are never insensitive, judgmental, or critical about anything you do or say.

Pets can be very comforting a grieving, because they can help lessen the feelings of emptiness and being lost without a loved one. Pets offer a sense of reassurance and comfort that can make the empty spaces and the uncertainties of death easier to face and to deal with. Dogs, in particular, are attuned to feelings and can always sense when their owners are sad or feeling down. They will always respond to that with even more affection and care.

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.

Guidance on final disposition is one of the cremation services offered in Tallahassee, FL. This is one of the end-of-life decisions that you should make before you die. Not only do you need to make sure you’ve got powers of attorney for medical and financial oversight set up, as well as a will or revocable trust, before you die, but you also need to discuss your funeral plans with your loved ones and let them know what you want. This is an incredible gift that each of us can give to our families because they won’t have the additional stress of making this decision, and can instead focus on grieving and healing.

Cremations and burials are the two most common funeral options. Each option has many avenues that will keep your memory alive and give your family comfort after your death.

Burials generally include funeral visitations, funeral services, graveside ceremonies, and burials underground. Visitations are usually held a couple of hours before funeral services, while gravesite ceremonies are held – often the next day – at the cemetery plot where the burial will be.

Burials will include embalming if there will be a viewing as part of the funeral visitation, but embalming is not necessary if you decide not to have a viewing during the visitation. The body will be stored at exceptionally cold temperatures to delay deterioration.

Burials have, until recently, been very traditional in American culture. In many communities where generations of people are born and die there, family or church cemeteries abound and burials are expected to be the final means of disposition.

Funeral burials offer a lot of advantages. First, most religions accept and prefer underground burials. Underground burials in cemeteries also provide families with a physical location where they can go to visit after their loved one has died. Headstones or grave markers placed on the graveside offer a tangible and long-lasting monument to the deceased’s memory.

There are also some disadvantages to burials. If you don’t have cemetery plots already purchased, have a church or family cemetery where burial plots are free to members, or are eligible to be buried in a national cemetery, then cemetery plots will have to be purchased.

Another disadvantage of burials is that they are permanent and in one location. Therefore, if family members who don’t live close by want to visit the cemetery, they have to make arrangements to travel there (and perhaps, if they live far away, making lodging arrangements). If a family moves to another location and decides they want to move the grave site, which can be done, the logistics can be complicated and the cost can be very high.

Cremations can be direct (no funeral service, with the option of a memorial service later), or they can include a visitation (with or without a viewing) and a funeral service, after which cremation happens.

With cremations, you have many options for the cremains. They can be buried underground (for instance, spouses who have a spouse already buried), stored in a columbarium (a memorial headstone is placed in the niche where the urn is stored), buried in a cemetery’s urn garden (a well-manicured section of the cemetery that is specifically designated for burying urns with cremains), or put into wearable jewelry to keep your deceased loved one close by.

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.

Grief resources are among the cremation services offered in Tallahassee, FL. Social media’s purpose, at its inception, was to bring people together in a virtual environment. Originally, the idea was to connect people with things in common: common friends, common backgrounds, common work and school locations, and common interests. The theory was that a single person could widen their social circles as they found other people they had things in common with.

That concept has been successful – perhaps too successful. While social media has brought old friends back together, it has also created a community of connections that don’t necessarily mesh as well together as the theoretical model assumed.

This idea of connection to a large community can lead to a phenomenon known as oversharing. People detail every nuance of their lives. Whether it’s pictures of what they had for dinner or relating every single incident that happens during the course of a day, there is an assumption that there is an empathetic and waiting audience, standing by, waiting to help, to comfort, and to support.

As with every other part of our lives, social media has become the forum for public grieving after the loss of someone we love. Often, the first time friends and family hear of the death of a loved one, it’s on social media. We shared details about the death. We share our funeral planning. We share the obituary. And we share the location of whatever services, whether to funeral service or a memorial service, will be held and all the details related to it.

After we say goodbye to a loved one, then we take to social media to grieve their loss. Social media has accommodated this by taking the accounts of people who have died and turning them into memorial walls, where people can leave comments and condolences.

In some cases, people share the most intimate parts of their grieving process, which includes emotions, memories, regrets, and wishes about and for the loved one they lost. While social media gets criticized for many things, this sharing of the journey of grief even by someone you may not know can give insights into what grieving looks like, how it feels, and how it progresses.

For some people, this may create empathy, compassion, and sensitivity when they’re dealing with people in real life who’ve lost somebody that they love very much.

As a society, we’ve become impatient with emotional processes that we deem negative. Grief is one of those. For people who’ve never lost somebody they loved and have never grieved, there is an expectation – unrealistic – that people who are grieving feel sad for a few days and then they brush it all off I go on as if nothing ever happened.

Our work worlds treat grief this way as well. In general, when someone in your immediate family dies, you get three days of bereavement. After those three days, you’re expected to be back at work and 100% engaged, with the sadness, the sorrow, and the grieving behind you.

So grieving publicly on social media for too long and too much can often bring hurtful and painful results, as the societal expectation of a short period of time being allocated to a negative process is imposed. People may say very insensitive things like, “You’ll be fine. You just need to get over it.,” or “You need to be happy and everything will be better.” People may be critical and people may be condemnatory.

So while sharing expressions of grief on social media may be fine in small doses, it’s really best to find real people, whether they’re trusted friends, family members, or people in a grief support group, to share the deepest parts and the longest parts of the grieving process with.

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.

Many cremation services are offered in Tallahassee, FL. Among them are an effort to see death as something that we need to be aware of and to accept as the final destination that each of comes to at some point in human existence. While death is sad and represents loss, it doesn’t change the fact that each of us will come face to face with it, either in losing people we love, or in losing our own lives.

Death positivity is many things, but there are some things that it is not.

One of these is that death positivity is not a movement driven by people who have dark outlooks on life and are living to die. Instead, it a movement that looks at death as a natural occurrence in life, and that means that people need to be cognizant of death, talking about death, and preparing for death. The art and visuals that are associated with death positivity are not meaningless. Instead, they focus on putting the needs of the family and the deceased person first. And that means looking for ways to reform the way humanity views death, as well as the way medical professionals handle death.

Another myth about death positivity is that it focuses on the ideals of a good death, while ignoring the fact that many people suffer terribly when they die. What a good death means in practice is that each of us can define, within the limits of being human, how we die. This includes having living wills, which keep us from having to undergo unnecessary procedures while we incur huge medical bills when we’re dying.

It also includes having do not resuscitate (DNR) orders and do no intubate (DNI) orders in place so that our lives are not prolonged when they have naturally ended. Additionally, we can choose where we die. Many people are now choosing to die at home, instead of going into nursing facilities or the hospital to die.

We can also choose our funeral arrangements, which can include burial or cremation. We can choose the kind of services that we want to be held to remember our lives. In other words, dying a good death means being a full participant in our deaths.

One of the most prevailing myths about death positivity is that there is no fear of death nor grieving about death. Nothing could be further from the truth. While there may be acceptance of death, that doesn’t mean there’s necessarily an absence of all fear. It’s easy to accept death when you’re not face to face with it. However, the closer we get to death, the more likely that some fears will arise. That’s normal. We wouldn’t be human if they didn’t.

One of the things that death positivity tries to address is how to manage the natural fears that we may encounter about death. It’s a roadmap to walk through the fears, not pretending that they’re not there.

Believing that grief is not a part of death is absurd. Grief is a natural result of death, because it is another expression of love. Death positivity doesn’t take away bereavement over the loss of somebody we love. Grieving is a process that everybody who loses somebody will go through. The intensity may last weeks, months, or even years. Eventually, though, the intensity changes, and grief becomes silent, mostly unseen partner that walks with us the rest of our lives.

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.