Blog | Lifesong Funerals

With funerals at funeral homes in Tallahassee, FL, many time-honored traditions that are only found in the South will be on full display. It’s important to understand that in the South, people don’t die. Instead, they pass on, cross over, or go on. Funerals are, in essence, a reflection of the belief that the separation between those who are grieving and those who’ve passed on is simply a temporary state until they all meet in heaven.

One Southern funeral tradition is the respect shown to funeral processions. As mourners follow the hearse from the funeral home to the cemetery with flags on their cars and headlights on, their fellow motorists who encounter them pull off on the side of the road to show their respect to the deceased and to the mourners. As people from other parts of the country have moved South, this tradition is not adhered to as much in large cities as it is in smaller cities and rural areas. But it should be something that we hold on to because it has deep meaning in the funeral process.

What you wear to a funeral is a big deal in the South. Women use to have funeral dresses – no self-respecting Southern lady would dream of wearing pants to a funeral service back in the day – in muted colors, such as navy, black, or dark brown that they wore only to funeral services. Optional accessories would be gloves and an understated hat. Funeral dress has gotten so casual that you often wonder if some people are headed to the bowling alley after they leave the service. Business casual is probably the happy compromise that won’t leave all the genteel ladies in the room sitting there is aghast.

Another Southern funeral tradition is the viewing. As you enter the funeral chapel, up front is a casket, opened, with the dearly departed inside, dressed up, coiffed, and looking as though they are merely taking a nap. While this may seem odd to people from other parts of the country, this is important piece of the funeral, because it gives you one last chance to see your loved one and to tell them, face-to-face, goodbye.

Food is everywhere in Southern funerals. As soon as friends, family, and neighbors hear that someone has died, everybody gets in the kitchen and makes their casserole or dessert – lots of desserts – to take over to the bereaved family’s home. And the food train continues even after the funeral when someone hosts a funeral reception. It may be a potluck at the deceased’s church or a potluck at a family member’s home, but the important thing is that, in the South food equals love, so the more food the more love.

Another Southern funeral tradition is what we do after the funeral. When everybody gets together, we tell stories about our loved ones that have crossed over. We talk about them because it keeps them with us all the time and it keeps their memories alive for as long as we keep telling their story. That’s a great legacy for the future generations of Southerners, and it’s a tradition we should never let slip away.

If you want to learn more Southern funeral traditions 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.

Having funeral services at Marianna, FL funeral homes plays a very important role for grieving families as they process the death of loved ones and move from shock and disbelief (even when death is expected) to adjustment and acceptance, which promote healthy grieving.

Some people may decide they don’t want a funeral service. However, the funeral service is not only for the person who died. It is also as much, if not in some ways more, for the bereaved family.

One reason why having a funeral service is important is because it allows the family to participate in a cultural ritual that is full of meaning and symbolism that is designed to offer support, encouragement, and comfort. A funeral service provides a safe place to grief and a launchpad to accept and move forward in life without a loved one.

Extended family and friends play an important role in funeral services. Many times, extended family and far-flung friends will come into town for the funeral of a loved one. This gives the grieving family an opportunity to reconnect and strengthen connections that may blossom and grow as time moves forward. It could be a cousin, an uncle, or a friend from college that a family member cares deeply about, but they’ve just lost touch over the years. The funeral service can serve as a spark to reform that close connection that may have once been, and that strengthens the support network of the family.

Another reason why having a funeral service is important is that it gives the family a safe place to grieve. As the painful emotions of loss are openly expressed in an environment that is filled with supportive and loving people who want to help, the healing process begins. It certainly doesn’t end there, because recovering from loss and moving to a place of grief where it becomes momentary and situational takes time, but initiating healing is often the hardest step to take.

A funeral service gives friends, family (immediate and extended), and acquaintances an opportunity to openly pay their respects to and honor the memory of someone who has died. A funeral service gives those that want to honor the deceased with words a chance to do so, and it gives everyone who is there the opportunity to feel like they’ve been part of honoring and paying tribute to the person who died.

A final reason why having a funeral service is so important is that it gives everyone, including the grieving family, extended family, close friends, casual friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, an opportunity to say goodbye and to experience closure. A funeral service, which can include eulogies and stories or testimonies about the deceased, gives people a chance to say things they wanted to say to the deceased, or describe how they felt about the deceased, or things they want the family to remember about the deceased.

Many good memories and stories can come out of this part of a funeral services as the grieving family may hear great stories about their loved one for the first time or they realize how much their loved one was respected, admired, and loved within the community.

If you want to learn more about funeral services at Marianna, FL funeral homes, 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.

Funeral directors provide a lot of Bristol, FL funeral services. Without these funeral directors and the services provided by them, grieving families would bear the burden of handling all the matters related to the burial of the loved ones on their own.

It’s important to understand that funeral directors genuinely care about grieving families. It’s often a misconception that being exposed to death every day, as funeral directors are, that they become immune to emotional response or reactions when someone dies.

They do not. They feel the sense of loss, and if the deceased is a child or someone who died a violent death, the loss hits funeral directors even more deeply.

Funeral directors have experienced loss somewhere along the way in their lives. It may be the loss of immediate family members or the loss of friends or colleagues, but they’ve been where grieving families are, so they know how to meet them there and meet the needs they have there.

However, funeral directors are professionals. So like physicians or surgeons who may be delivering bad news or providing care for terminal illnesses, funeral directors must keep their own emotions and reactions in check in order to best serve the needs of grieving families. But it never means they don’t care.

As funeral homes have advanced and expanded the services they provide to their communities, they have also diversified their staffing, so that now more funeral directors are younger and more women are becoming funeral directors. This enables the funeral home to better meet all the needs of all the families who come to them in their time of sorrow.

It’s important to understand that the job of a funeral director is not an easy one. Funeral directors are on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all year round. Like medical professionals, funeral directors can get a call at any time and have to leave, no matter whether it’s the middle of a family wedding, a child’s birthday celebration, or at the beginning of Thanksgiving dinner.

For funeral directors, the needs of other people (when they lose a loved one) are the priority. The funeral director’s needs always take a backseat. That is a sacrifice that funeral directors willingly make to serve their communities.

It’s important to understand that funeral directors are there to take care of the deceased, the grieving family, and every aspect, from beginning to end, of the funeral process. The funeral director will provide guidance in every area where a decision needs to be made. This will include things like choosing burial or cremation, choosing whether to have a funeral service, if having a funeral service, deciding where and when, choosing burial sites, choosing caskets, and choosing flowers, to name a few.

Funeral directors don’t want grieving families to have any regrets regarding their deceased loved one. That is why they’ll often encourage the families to hold either a funeral service or a memorial service. Either of these types of services help initiate the healing process and provide a sense of closure about the death of a loved one. Having a service of some kind can eliminate the possibility of regrets down the road.

A final thing to know about funeral directors is that they are truly committed to making sure all the needs of grieving families are met. They are not aloof and uncaring, but instead invested in all the funeral services they provide and perform for the family.

For more information about Bristol, FL funeral services, 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 hearses are essential to Quincy, FL funeral homes. They play a very important role in the funeral process and in the rituals that surround funeral services and burials. But the modern funeral hearses you see today are not how funeral hearses started out.

The first known means of transporting deceased people is the funeral bier. The deceased person was placed on the bier, cleaned up and dressed, and laid out for loved ones to say their farewells before the body was buried. After the family was done, the body would be wrapped in linen and perfumed with spices, and then at least two people would move the bier from the family house to the site of burial.

Biers were constructed of flat wood surfaces that resembled a stretcher. They were either moved manually or with wheels attached to the bottom to transport deceased people from the places where they died to the places where they would be buried.

From biers came the next hearse evolution, which was coffins. Coffins, unlike biers, were completely covered and could be easily transported not just from the deceased’s home to the burial plot, but also in funeral services that honored the deceased’s memory.

Ancient Greece is where the coffin seems to have originated. Greeks relied heavily on ritualized services and customs as part of their culture. Funerals were no different. Many times, part of the funeral ritual, was to carry the dead in coffins through the streets of a city as a way to honor them. Onlookers were expected to be so silent that a pin could be heard dropping.

Until the 17th century, hearses were either biers or coffins. Biers began to be covered with canopies somewhere along the way, and it was this evolution in hearses that led to the creation of the funeral carriage, which was drawn by horses.

The word hearse had been a part of funeral terminology since almost the beginning. But it referred to a candelabra that was placed on the bier or casket as a sign of respect and to identify it as the remains of a deceased person.

After the development of horse-drawn funeral carriages, the word hearse was used to identify them because the coffins, which became the burial containers, instead of the candelabras, were placed on top of the carriage, and it has been used to describe the means of transporting the dead ever since.

However, the evolution of hearse did not stop with the horse-drawn funeral carriages of the 1600’s. By the early 1800’s, as Europe’s wealth increased, carriages had become elaborately-designed vehicles that held the coffin inside as the deceased was transported from the place of death to the place of burial.

Funeral processions had become an integrated part of European funeral rituals. While they were meant to honor and show respect to the death, they were also used to display the wealth of the family of the deceased. The more elaborate and fancy the funeral carriage was, the wealthier the deceased’s family was. These processions were very ornate and stately, overshadowing, for the most part, the actual funeral services and burials.

An offshoot of the funeral carriage emerged after the construction of the railway system through the U.S. Known as a hearse trolley, the railways were built worldwide to transport bodies to where they needed to go. Many railways were constructed from the main line to cemeteries to transport bodies from the end of the railroad to the burial site.

The 20th century saw the first of the motorized hearses that we are familiar with today. As car engineering and technology has advanced, so has the engineering and technology of hearses.

If you want to learn more about the history of hearses at Quincy, FL funeral homes, 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.