Category: cremation

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As you’re preplanning a Tallahassee cremation, you’re already thinking ahead to the time when you die and what you want to happen after you die. You may also find yourself wondering what dying will be like. Although every death is in some way unique, there are also some common things that happen during the dying process.

One very common occurrence is vivid dreaming about things that are very comforting. While end-of-life dreams and hallucinations are well-documented, many medical professionals have paid little attention to them and have attached little significance to them.

However, hospice medical teams have always felt that dying dreams and hallucinations are very important. At the Palliative Care Institute in Cheektowaga, NY, Buffalo Hospice chief medical officer Christopher Kerr led a research team to conduct an 18-month (January 2011 to July 2012) study on dying dreams and hallucinations.

In this study, the research team did over 450 interviews with 59 patients at Buffalo Hospice. The patient criteria for being in the study was being terminally ill and not having any cognitive impairment.

What Kerr and the team of researchers were looking for as they explored dying dreams and hallucinations was a way to determine how often dying dreams and visions occurred, what the dying dreams and visions were about, and what significance the dying dreams and visions had to the patients.

One insight that the researchers were hoping to gain was whether there was a correlation between the number of dying dreams and visions, their content, and the patients’ proximity to death.

What Kerr and his team found was that as death got closer, the vividness and frequency of dreams and hallucinations increased. The content of the dreams and hallucinations? Meeting up again, often in an earlier time such as war or childhood, with friends and family who had already predeceased them in death.

One of the surprising things that came out of the research were the things that the patients saw or dreamed about that they had never told anyone about. For example, in Kerr’s research group, there was a dying lady who was going through the motions of holding and talking to an baby in her arms. The baby’s name was Danny.

The lady had four children, who were sitting around her bed. None was named Danny. They were mystified by their mother’s behavior. However, when their aunt – their mother’s sister – came to visit, she immediately knew who Danny was. He was the patient’s stillborn first child, whom neither the patient nor her husband ever said anything about to their other four children.

The research that Kerr and his team discovered some interesting things about dying dreams and hallucinations. For example, almost 90% of the patients had at least one dying dream of hallucination. Nearly 100% of the patients believed their dreams or hallucinations were real.

One of the most common themes of the dying dreams and hallucinations was traveling or getting ready to travel. Less than 20% of the dying dreams or hallucinations were disturbing for the patients, while the overwhelming majority – 60% – were comforting and calming (21% were neither disturbing or comforting).

The closer the patients moved toward death, the more frequently they had comforting dreams and visions that included not only deceased loved ones, but also deceased pets.

If you want to know more preplanning a Tallahassee cremation, 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.

Before using the cremation services offered in Tallahassee, FL, you need to make sure all your affairs are in order. This includes having a will or trust in place that protects your physical assets, including your property, your finances, and other tangible and intangible items of value for your family.

However, while many people don’t think about it, there are other things that you need to protect and make sure your loved ones have access to after you die. These are your digital assets.

Digital assets are all the things that you have that give you access to things on online. You’ve probably added your digital assets in such a piecemeal fashion that you are not aware of just how many you’ve accumulated over the years. However, when you’re gone, your family will need to access every single one of those digital assets for one reason or another.

One of the digital assets that your family will need after you are gone are your usernames and passwords for all your online accounts (including the website for the account). These can include bank and PayPal accounts, investment accounts, retirement accounts, credit card company accounts, airline rewards accounts, shopping accounts, email accounts, social media accounts, online subscriptions, and streaming services accounts.

You may think you’ve got this covered because you’re using password management software, which stores all of these. However, if your family doesn’t have the administrative username and password to your password management program or if your computer crashes, having the password manager does your family absolutely no good.

However, most password management programs let you create export this information and save it in a file. If your password management software gives you this option, you should export your information at least once a month and store it on a flash drive (labeled “Usernames & Passwords”) that you keep with your important papers.

If you don’t have a password manager, then you should have a file that you keep updated that contains all this information. Save it on the flash drive labeled “Usernames & Passwords.”

Online subscriptions, streaming services and social media are three digital assets that require special consideration. It’s important to remember that all of these have credit cards or a PayPal account attached to them to pay for the service (in the case of Spotify, basic service is free, but premium and other services have a monthly fee).

Therefore, you need to be sure that you include that credit card information in the file you create with usernames and passwords for each service. After you die, many of your credit cards will be canceled.

It’s a good idea to consider devoting one, small maximum limit credit card as the form of payment for all your online subscriptions and services. Then, change all your accounts so they are charged to that credit card. Make sure you designate this as the credit card that needs to remain active after you die so that your family doesn’t lose access to subscription and streaming services.

Streaming services includes video and music services like Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, and Sling.

Online subscription services include software subscriptions like Microsoft Office 365 and Adobe Suite.

Social media includes services like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Snapchat. These will remain active until they are physically deactivated, so it’s prudent for your family to deactivate or delete these accounts after you die.

For information about the 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.