Category: cremation

After cremations as part of the cremation services offered in Tallahassee, FL, the will of your loved one may name you as the executor of the estate. Being named the executor of your loved one’s estate is not all fun and games. In fact, executing even the simplest estates can take a lot of time and a lot of work.

If there are no obstacles, executing an estate will mean paying off debts, ensuring taxes are paid, accounting for all assets in the estate, and ensuring that assets are distributed according to your loved one’s stated wishes.

However, it is more likely that obstacles will crop up will you are executing your loved one’s estate. Some of these could have been preventable, if your loved one had done things a little differently, perhaps, but, in the end, they are the things you are going to have to live with and find ways to settle or work around in a fair and honest way.

One potential difficulty that you may face as an executor is that you are not the sole executor of your loved one’s estate. Sometimes, with sincere intentions of being inclusive and fair, people will name several people as executors of their estate.

This can be common among parents who want to either make sure all their children have a say in how their estate is settled or don’t want one child burdened with the entire responsibility by themselves.

However well-intentioned this is, it often creates more problems than it solves. There can be a lot of issues among the children that make it harder and that take longer to settle the estate than should be necessary.

For example, all the co-executors may live in separate locations, making it difficult for some of them to be involved in the estate activities that require hands-on involvement, such as securing assets or selling property.

Some of the co-executors may not have the skills to do the work of an executor, so they end up doing very little in settling the matters of the estate. Finally, as the number of executors of an estate gets bigger, so does the amount of estate paperwork that must be completed. Getting all the necessary signatures can slow down even the simplest of estate tasks.

Another difficulty that you may encounter in your role as the executor of your loved one’s estate is finding yourself in disputes with heirs of the estate (and if you are an heir as well, this problem can get amplified in a hurry). As the executor, your job is to secure all your loved one’s assets and then distribute them according to your loved one’s wishes.

However, in many cases, as soon as a loved one dies, the whole family, heirs or not, descends upon their home and starts putting dibs on what’s theirs (“they promised it to me”) or what they want. Some go as far as to actually remove items or money and take them with them.

One way to avoid this is to secure your loved one’s home and other assets as quickly as possible after they die. For real property, it’s a good idea to have locks changed, so that you are the only one with access, which also gives you complete control over how it is distributed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Funeral preplanning is among the cremation services offered in Tallahassee, FL. As cremations become a more popular method of final disposition in the United States, the desire to preplanning funerals has also gained momentum among Americans.

If you don’t think you need to preplan your funeral, then think about the other momentous events in your life. Would you want just a few days to plan your wedding or the birth of your children? Of course not.

Yet, if you don’t preplan your funeral, then that is exactly the scenario you will leave your family with. With over 500 decisions that need to be made about funeral arrangements, a few days is hardly enough time to give a funeral the care and attention it deserves.

You can prevent your family from being put in this stressful position while they are grieving over losing you to death by planning your funeral in advance while you are still alive.

By preplanning your funeral, you can also make sure that your desires and wishes for your funeral are honored. If you want to be cremated and your family doesn’t know that you want to be cremated, then your wishes will not be honored and your desires for your funeral will not be met.

To begin preplanning your funeral, sit down and write out what you want done after you die. If you want to be cremated, then specify that in your instructions. You can specify whether you want a direct cremation – cremation with no services beforehand – or you want an indirect cremation (services held before you are cremated).

If you want to have a service before or after you are cremated, write down the details of what you want included in the service. Specify what readings you would like to have read and who you want to read them. Specify whether you want eulogies given and who you want to give them.

Specify what kind of spiritual comfort you want to be included. Think about what you want to leave of your faith and beliefs with your family and other mourners. Include scriptures that have special meaning to you. Designate the clergy member that you want to do this part of the service.

Next, pick out the music you want played at your service. If you want songs performed live by vocalists or instrumentalists, then specify those songs and who should perform them. If you want recorded songs played, then include their titles and the artists.

Record any final words of wisdom or advice you want to leave with your family and those who’ve gathered to mourn your passing before the service ends.

Once you’ve got these instructions written down, then schedule an appointment with your funeral home director and leave a copy of your instructions with them. The funeral home director will create a folder where your wishes will be stored. If you have a funeral insurance policy, you can also leave the pertinent information about the policy to be placed in your folder by the funeral director.

Preplanning your funeral is a way to reduce extra stress for your family when you die. Make sure to discuss your funeral plans with them and give the person who will oversee your final affairs a copy of your funeral instructions.

For more information about funeral preplanning 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.