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Dying Dreams Bring Comfort

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.

Planning for Your Digital Death

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.

Keeping Your Will Current

Long before thinking about funerals at funeral homes in Tallahassee, FL, you may have created a will. You know you did it. You think you know where it is. You are fairly certain you know what’s in it.

However, if you have a will (if you don’t, you should), you very likely created it a while back. You may have created it when you got married. You may have created it when you had or adopted children. There was likely a very compelling reason why you decided to create a will.

However, there may be a lot of water that has gone under the bridge since you originally created your will. Life has changed. You have change. Your family has changed. And the odds are good that much of that information in the will has changed or needs to be changed.

A will does little good if the information in it is obsolete or wrong. Wills, like people, are living instruments that we create to protect the ones we love. Therefore, we should take the time to regularly to review them to make sure they accurately reflect current circumstances and our current wishes.

So, how often should you review and/or update your will?

The short answer is any time something changes with your assets or with your family status.

However, if this is your first time reviewing your will in a long time, before you consider asset changes and family status changes, consider whom you have named as the executor of your will.

The role of executor is one of the most important in ensuring that your family is protected and taken care of after you die. Because of that, you need to make sure that the executor you named to execute your will is still the same person as the person you originally designated.

It may be that the person you named as your executor is no longer alive. It may be that the person you named as your executor was a close friend or acquaintance at the time, but that acquaintance faded away over the years or the friendship changed and you are no longer even in touch with each other or know anything about each other’s lives.

It may be that the person you named as executor is still very much a part of your life, but no longer has the capability of being your executor. They may have mental health issues or they may suffering from a type of dementia that has left them mentally or emotionally incapacitated.

Whatever the case, it’s time to talk with someone who is currently close in your life about being your executor, and then make sure your will gets changed to name the new executor.

The other change that you may need to make is in the people you’ve designated as legal guardians for your children. If your children are still minors, but the people who are named as legal guardians are no longer living or do not have the financial resources to take care of your children, then you may consider changing the legal guardians who will be able to adequately care for your children if you die.

Asset changes and family status changes that require that you update your will can include:

Marriage
Divorce
Childbirth or adoption
Death of beneficiaries and heirs
Large real property purchases or sales (homes, vehicles, businesses, etc.)
Changes in financial status (including paid off or newly acquired debts, such as mortgages)
Opening or closing a business

If you want to know more about will reviews 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.

Difficulties Executors May Face

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.

Things You Need to Know after a Loved One Dies

After funerals at funeral homes in Tallahassee, FL, you and your family will be engulfed in the grief and sorrow that comes after someone you love has died. In those immediate days following a loved one’s death, the focus will be on them: their memory, the life they lived, the void their death has left in your lives.

However, soon after the death of a loved one, the reality of practical matters such as settling their estate and knowing who has legal rights regarding them and their affairs sets in. And it is in this time that confusion can sometimes abound. Here is what you need to know.

Any powers of attorney that were in effect before you loved one died are no longer valid. This includes, obviously, medical powers of attorney, but perhaps not as obviously, durable powers of attorney. A durable power of attorney appoints someone to handle legal and financial matters for another person who is living, but is unable to handle those matters themselves.

Once the person dies, the durable power of attorney ends. The only person authorized to handle legal and financial matters for the estate of your deceased loved one is the person whom they named as the executor in their will or the trustee in their revocable trust (this may be the same person who had durable power of attorney while your loved one was alive, but it sometimes is not).

If your loved one died without a will, then the only person who will be authorized to handle legal and financial matters of their estate is the person whom the court appoints as the executor of the estate.

After your loved one dies, it’s important that all their assets are protected. The time after your loved one dies will be emotionally chaotic and it will leave you and your family vulnerable to being taken advantage of – sometimes by family members themselves – by people who want to personally benefit from the assets your loved one left.

Before the estate is opened – this is the legal term for the beginning of settling your loved one’s estate – all assets should be protected from anyone taking them or distributing them. Once the estate is opened (the instructions in a will or revocable trust initiate this), then only the person who is named as executor or trustee is legally authorized to take or distribute assets, and only in accordance with your deceased loved one’s instructions.

Debts and taxes follow the estate of your loved one. Therefore, it is important that debts be paid from the estate and taxes filed on behalf of the estate (for the tax year in which your loved one dies, if there is taxable income).

However, these financial liabilities of the estate do not become financial responsibilities for heirs, beneficiaries, other family members, or friends. If there are not enough financial assets in the estate to satisfy these debts and obligations, then so be it. No one else is obligated or required to take them on and pay them.

Make sure to notify everyone of your loved one’s death. This includes credit card companies, government agencies, cell phone carriers, utility companies, and other entities that need to know. When you contact these companies, you can either close the accounts, such as credit cards and cell phone carriers (unless you are jointly named on them), or have them put in your name only so that the estate doesn’t accrue additional debt.

If you want to learn 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.