Category: funeral home

Some funerals at funeral homes in Monticello, FL will have a funeral service and a graveside service, while other funerals may have just a graveside service. Either type of funeral is acceptable, but people tend to have more experience with attending funeral services (which are usually held in the evening hours) than with attending graveside services (which are often held during the day).

Because people are more likely to attend funeral services than they are to attend graveside services, you may not know exactly what to expect at a graveside service.

A graveside service happens in the cemetery at the plot where the deceased person will be buried. This service is often very religious in tenor, but it is also much shorter than a funeral service or memorial service. This is because the graveside service’s purpose is to commit the de deceased person’s remains to the ground.

A graveside service is usually a much more intimate type of service than the funeral service because there are few people who attend it. A graveside service may also be a much more emotional service than the funeral service because it’s the family’s final farewell to their loved one.

While some families choose to have private graveside services, most graveside services are public, which means that anyone who would like to attend the graveside service can attend it.

Graveside services start at the funeral home. After the funeral service (or the morning after a nighttime funeral service), drivers who will be going to the graveside service get their vehicles in line for the funeral procession that will make its way from the funeral home to the cemetery.

The hearse will be the lead car in the funeral procession. The funeral procession will slowly take the deceased person to their place of final rest. If the cemetery is located next to the funeral chapel, then the mourners will slowly follow the family out to the burial plot.

A graveside service can be held for both the burial of a casket and for the interment of cremated remains (whether in a columbarium niche, a mausoleum, or in a cemetery plot). A clergy member will usually offer a prayer for the deceased person and a prayer for the family before the deceased person is interred.

Most cemeteries will wait until the deceased’s family has left the cemetery before they lower the casket into the burial plot, since the interment can be very difficult for the family to watch.

At a graveside service, the family of the deceased person always sits immediately in front of the casket. The funeral home will have chairs set up under a canopy, so once the deceased’s family is seated, other people can sit in the chairs behind them until they are full. Anyone else will stand during the graveside service.

Knowing what you should say to a bereaved family after a graveside service might be hard. Sometimes the family is allowed to leave the cemetery first, especially if there’s no reception planned, so you may not have a chance to speak with them at the graveside service.

But if there is a reception, express your condolences to the family before you leave the cemetery. Leave the cemetery in a dignified manner. Don’t arrive at the graveside service nor leave it with your music blaring and your bass thumping. If you do listen to the radio on the way to the cemetery, be sure to turn it off before you get to the cemetery.

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

You may be thinking about funerals at funeral homes in Havana, FL because you want to make sure you have everything your family needs to take care of things – including your funeral – when you die. If you’re not thinking about your funeral, no matter what your age, you should be.

You are going to die. That’s a certainty. Whether you’re prepared to die (and that means making sure your family is taken care of and they know what your funeral plans are) is not certain. Many Americans put off planning for their deaths because dying is uncomfortable to think about.

However, without proper planning, your death can cause a lot of unnecessary stress and strain on your family on top of the unavoidable stress and strain of losing you and grieving over that loss.

Having a prepaid funeral plan is one of the ways you can eliminate additional stress for your family when you die. Although it may seem like a significant amount of money to spend now for something that, if you’re younger, may be many years away, you should look at prepaid funeral plans the way you look at any other investment.

By having a prepaid funeral plan, you can be sure that your funeral costs are taken care of, without having to worry that your family will have to find a way to pay them after you die. All they will need to do is take your clothes to the funeral home, confirm your funeral arrangements (which is part of prepaying for a funeral) with the funeral director and pay for the funeral in full.

A prepaid funeral plan takes care of every detail of a funeral. This includes the selection of a casket and selection of a cemetery and a burial plot. It’s important to know that if you are an active military member or a military veteran, you are entitled to several funeral benefits.

One of these funeral benefits is free burial with a grave marker in a national cemetery. Your spouse and your dependent children are also eligible for free burial with you when they die (whether they die before you or after you). Even if you choose to be cremated, your cremation remains can be inurned in a national cemetery.

Prepaid funeral plans also include detailed instructions on the type of funeral service you want to have. You should anticipate that some of the people you might choose now to participate in your funeral service will be unavailable (either because they are too far away or because they have died) when your funeral takes place, so don’t get too specific about participants.

There are many ways to finance a prepaid funeral.

One of these is to purchase burial insurance. Burial insurance typically has lower payout amounts than life insurance (payouts are usually capped at $25,000), but they also have lower premiums and do not require a medical exam before purchase.

Another way to finance a prepaid funeral is to set up a joint account with a loved one that is specifically to be used for paying for funeral expenses. The loved one who survives you when you die will be able to use the money in the account to pay for your funeral.

A third way to finance a prepaid funeral is to set up a Payable on Death account through your bank. With this kind of account, you will a name a beneficiary who will have access to the money in the account to pay for your funeral expenses.

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

Before funerals at funeral homes in Quincy, FL, everyone should have a care plan in place for the end of their lives. But as cases of COVID-19 continue to grow across the country, including in Florida, it is critical that you don’t delay getting your end-of-life care plan in place and communicating what you want with your family.

The COVID-19 pandemic is teaching us many things, not the least of which is that things can change suddenly. This includes your health. You may be fine today, but there is no guarantee that you’ll be fine tomorrow. That’s the way this virus works.

What you can do today – and what you should do today – is to create your end-of-life care plan and make sure that your family knows what kind of care you want. There are several legal documents that you need to make sure you have.

The first legal document is a medical proxy. When you create a medical proxy, you designate someone that you trust and who knows your medical history and your end-of-life care wishes to make medical decisions for you if you are not able to make them for yourself.

You may also want to list a second person as an alternative, in case your primary health care proxy isn’t able to fulfill their duties.

A medical proxy, which is also known as a medical power of attorney, can be created online, using legal software, or by an attorney. A medical proxy is legal as long as it is signed and dated. You should give a copy to your primary care provider and to the person that you’ve designated as your proxy.

If you go to the hospital, you need to make sure that the document is included in your electronic records. This will make it easier for your medical proxy to advocate for your healthcare if you can’t, including making end-of-life decisions.

The second legal document that you need is a living will. A living will let you specify the kind of care that you want at the end of your life.

You can opt for every possible medical intervention to be used to save your life if you are dying or you can opt for no medical intervention, except for medication to keep you comfortable and pain-free, when you are at the end of your life.

This is a vital document during the COVID-19 pandemic. If you do not have it, medical personnel will default to doing everything possible to try to save your life. While the odds are good that you will die anyway, they will perform very painful procedures to try to prolong your life.

This means that you could spend several days or weeks and a lot of money in the hospital with the same outcome you would have had if no medical intervention happened. You may be someone who wants all the medical care possible or you may be someone who doesn’t.

If you don’t want medical intervention at the end of your life, your living will ensures that your wishes are honored.

You can create a living will the same way that you create your medical proxy. A living will is legal as long as it is signed and dated.

The final legal document you need to have in place is a will or trust. These legal instruments let you appoint someone to take care of your final affairs after you die, including taking care of outstanding debts and distributing your assets as you specify.

If you want to know more about planning end-of-life care from funeral homes in Quincy, FL, our compassionate and experienced staff at Lifesong Funerals & Cremations can help.

Access to grief resources after a cremation service is available in Tallahassee. One of the normal side effects of the grieving process is not being able to think clearly for an extended period of time after your loved one has died. Even though this condition is common and will eventually end, it can be very troubling while you’re experiencing it.

This physiological and neurological condition, known as the fog of grief, is not something that you are just imaging is happening. It’s a very real to loss, but it may seem that your capacity to think, to respond, or even to process information is permanently altered.

Grief counseling professionals explain that this feeling of being in a fog, being unable to remember simple things like where we put our car keys or even important dates needed for filing paperwork, is the brain and body’s cumulative response to trauma.

While you may not think of the death of someone you love as being traumatic, it is, of all of life’s experiences, one of the most traumatic events you will experience. The shock you feel after suffering a great personal loss can have any number of effects, but these effects are all manifestations of the mind’s urgent need to stop and process what has happened.

For example, after your loved one has died, you may find that your grief literally makes even the smallest or easiest task seem overwhelming and impossible to do. You may find that if the communication of well-meaning family and friends consists of more than a few words or a short sentence, your mind immediately shuts down and you are unable to answer them.

Your thinking and movements will be slowed and muddled, and everything seems like you’re trying to walk through quicksand. There may be times when you feel like you have shut down completely.

But even though ever recovering from this state seems too far away or even impossible at these times, you need to be assured that, in time, you will start slowly healing from your loss, and the fog of grief will gradually start to lift.

The fog of grief typically has three components.

Emotionally, you are trying to make sense of what has happened and are often puzzled that the outside world is seemingly oblivious and is still going about as if nothing monumental has happened.

Neurologically, you are in a form of mental self-protection, which is essential until you can safely begin to process the loss of your loved one and move forward. This component explains the memory lapses and the slowed thinking that you experience in the fog of grief.

Finally, there is the physical component, which causes you to feel extreme fatigue because all of your resources are diverted toward healing the trauma you have experienced.

The fog of grief can be quite confusing and disruptive while it lasts. However, most grief professionals see it as a necessary part of our overall recovery as you take the road through grief into a new and different life.

There is a consensus that the fog of grief generally lasts between two and seven months after you lose your loved one. However, it may last even longer than that for you.

Be patient because that there is no one timetable or calendar that applies to everybody. What grief counselors stress, instead, is the importance of allowing yourself to acknowledge and fully experience your grief, however long that takes you.

For more information about obtaining grief resources after a cremation service in Tallahassee, our caring and knowledgeable staff at Lifesong Funerals & Cremations is here to assist you.

A Tallahassee, FL funeral home can give you guidance on how to create sympathy cards that are meaningful and give a grieving family the comfort and encouragement they need. Sympathy cards are designed to make those who have lost a loved one feel comforted and supported by other people.

However, your first task is to find the right kind of sympathy card so that you can write a meaningful message to bereaved family members. When you look online or go to a card store, you will find a lot of words already written on them.

You may intuitively feel slightly put off by these kinds of sympathy cards because they don’t express what you feel in your heart. There’s a good reason for that.

The greeting card industry, like most other writing industries in the 21st century, pays freelance or contract writers to write the content in these kinds of sympathy cards. As a result, the messages can feel hollow and like they lack the warmth and sympathy that you want to convey to grieving family members.

It is best to avoid buying this type of sympathy cards and simply signing your name and sending it to the family that has lost a loved one.

If you’re unsure of whether you should send a sympathy card like this because you don’t know quite how to express your own feelings, think about how you would feel if you’d lost a loved one and you received one of these cards that someone close to you just signed and mailed to you.

To the bereaved family, receiving a card like this can make them feel as if the sender didn’t care enough to write anything themselves, sent the card out of duty and not care and concern, or that the sender was simply too busy to be bothered with more than a signature.

While all of this may be untrue, that may be how the grieving family perceives it. Therefore, you should select a very simple sympathy card that is blank inside where you can write a note to the inside. Your note doesn’t have to lengthy, but it needs to be heartfelt.

Two of the best ways to write meaningful sympathy cards is to simply express your condolences on the family’s loss or to share a fond memory of their loved one.

Clichés should be avoided at all costs. Don’t write that you know how the family feels or that the death of their loved one is a blessing or for the best.

While you may imagine how the family feels, but you don’t actually know how they feel. Therefore, use phrases like, “I can imagine…” instead. Calling a loved one’s death a blessing or saying that it is for the best doesn’t feel that way to a family who is grieving the loss. This can be unintentionally hurtful.

If you’re sending a sympathy card, but you know only one member of the deceased’s family, address the card to that person. Write to the person you know, but make sure you extend your thoughts to the rest of their family.

Make your sympathy card meaningful by making the family – or person you know – aware of your concern and that you are available to visit, to listen, or to help them.

Finally, be sure your handwriting is legible. If your cursive writing is difficult to read, then print your note. In addition, include your full name, because a lot of Steve’s, Mary’s, Mark’s, and Ann’s may be sending sympathy cards. You can also, optionally, include your cell number and an email address if the family wants to contact you later.

For help from a Tallahassee, FL funeral home with creating a meaningful sympathy card, just ask our caring and knowledgeable staff at Lifesong Funerals & Cremations.