Dave Ramsey would say pre-arrange for a funeral but do not pre-pay.
Go visit a funeral home and see what’s available and what costs may be incurred. Browse a catalogue or two.
Simply walking in and taking a look around when you don’t HAVE to be there is huge. When I was in college the vicar of our church took us on a “field trip” to a funeral home. I was happy to have had that experience 40 years later when it was needed.
You can buy a casket or urn on internet sites–it doesn’t hurt to check prices. It would be delivered to the funeral home within 24 hours. My friend saved about 3K this way because the home was so expensive. I used a local funeral home–his prices matched the internet. Depends on where you live so check.
Write an obit before you or a loved one dies. Find a photo if you want one.
Get ALL the information together before anything happens.
Our funeral home has information books that have all required info and a place to list it. Get one for everybody and just fill it out.
Our funeral home took care of obits, death certificates, transportaton (burial in another state), communication with second funeral home. Pretty much everything for which we were very grateful.
He told us about free burial for veteran’s, how some funeral homes mark-up flowers outrageous, that one casket is going to last as long as another so pick what looks nice to you at a lower price–the rest is promotional fluff.
Nobody asked for pre-payment from either funeral home we used, nor the cemetery (separate bill in our case).
Both my mom and dad went through all their papers and got rid of tons. My dad has some boxes marked TOD (toss on death) that he wants now but won’t mean anything later. The personal stuff–a lot of photos and family documents have already been given to us. It was fun to get out the stuff, hear stories and then take it home–they figured better to let us have it now while they could still tell us what it was!
I won’t tell you how I got a notarized signature from a guy who was spending the weekend out of cell phone service range on his yacht. He was fine with it.
I was amazed at how easy the funeral home made everything when my Dad passed away. He had the list of things we might want to do and we just went down the list. He was cremated and we had a pretty cheery party on the back deck about a month later to celebrate his life. The guys all wore his Hawaiian shirts. I recently went to a party for a first cousin once removed that they had at their property in Vermont - huge crowd of family and friends. The kids spoke and read from letters they had received. My cousin had been quite clear she wanted a party and pizza from a particular place. My FIL had a service at a local Reform temple. None of us had been to services there, but he’d gone back to attending the last few years of his life. My mil was a Christian Scientist and would probably have liked to have a service there, but my sil was so angry with them about how they treated her when she had dementia that we had a Quaker style service at the Quaker School where she had worked.
He wasn’t ill, but he was past 80 and aware of the inevitable. And he knew that my sister and I wouldn’t be able to accurately describe his military service – something he cared about a great deal.
The local newspaper (in the town where he had lived his entire life) printed it verbatim.
Not one has said anything to me (not that this family ever talks about these things) but I think one of the DILs was
hurt by MIL’s obit. FIL and his kids and their spouses sat around the table, the oldest sib took notes as the words were drafted. The grandkids listed were the bio grandkids, plus one step grandkid who was very close to MIL. The other steps were not mentioned. One is estranged from the family, so maybe I get that? The others, though, I thought should have been listed. I wanted to say something, but thought if I said “What about Bob and Suzy?” and FIL said “no, don’t list them” then that would be worse. And their mother didn’t say anything, but maybe she was expecting her husband or someone else to. She was at the funeral, but I’m not sure she has seen FIL since.
My BIL’s sister was upset that some niece’s pix got left out of a photo tribute that he had made for their dad. The niece didn’t ever mention it. Probably never watched it.
. Forget the hours he spent putting it together, the lack of pix even available for the size of the family and the time frame he had. He actually went back and re-made it after the fact just for her (which cost more hours to him and it was just totally unreasonable).
Funerals are so fraught with emotion–just do whatever you can to limit misunderstandings–write the obits (yes, years early–review them), whether burial or cremation, church service or no,
And give your family a break when things don’t go right. Remember it’s about family.
My aunt was a well-known music teacher in her community. She died about 8 years after she retired. Her sister arranged a private family funeral because that’s what she had done for her parents and it was the only kind of funeral that she was familiar with.
For months afterward, my aunt’s former students and the parents of her former students would come up to the sister on the street and scream at her about how unfair it was that people outside the family had not been able to attend the funeral. And the sister didn’t even have the “it’s what she wanted” excuse to fall back on because my aunt hadn’t left instructions.
So true! My friend’s brother died suddenly and my friend had NO idea how many people in the community his brother had touched. He was a swim coach. The place was packed and SRO.
My dad was convinced nobody would show up for my mom’s funeral held in another state–they did. Nobody their age (90’s) but younger folks who were around and actually living in that area did. TOTAL surprise to my dad (and us).
We had been to my uncle’s funeral a few years before and knew that could happen–we had to talk him into publishing the funeral information and just not keep it private ceremony.
You never know. Allow people some chance to pay their respects in some form.
When my brother died, he lived in a state that is far from my hometown. My parents had his body brought “home” to our town, and we had a funeral at my parents’ church. It was was very well attended, since he had grown up there and many friends still lived in the area. Some high school friends even traveled from far away.
But his friends in the state he lived in didn’t, and they asked if they could arrange a ceremony there as well. They waited until our family traveled there to deal with his house and belongings and had it. And I know it helped them, but it was just grueling for his sibs and parents to go through a second funeral. We weren’t going to say no, and it wasn’t any work for us to arrange, but it was emotionally just too much. I guess I wish they had just done it without his immediate family, but they just assumed we would attend. And of course we did. But to me it made the whole experience more difficult.
People in the community always have the option to hold a memorial service of their own at a later date.
I don’t think families should ever feel guilty if they prefer a private service.
Funerals are for the survivors. imho. In spite of my mother telling all of her children for years what she didn’t want, because she felt it undignified, my siblings kind of came unglued at the end and decided they really needed to do exactly what she hadn’t wanted. Mother had a difficult, drawn out death and it was important to her I be there holding her hand for weeks. I slept with her. She wasn’t interested in my sisters being there and that hurt their feelings. I am just a lot calmer than my sisters in those sorts of circumstances and they were getting her more distressed than she already was, which was pretty bad. When the ambulance took away the body, my siblings asked my opinion on planning. I gave it. They ignored what I said and I just shut up. When my husband arrived and saw what was going on, he was aghast, but I told him just to shut up, too. I’ve heard my siblings tell others I was just too emotional to participate in all the funeral events they planned. That’s fine. It is probably what they believe.
I’ve planned way more than my fair share of funerals, but not my mother’s even though she asked me to do so. But the sibs are all satisfied with what they did. It gave them some sort of peace, and Mother is gone.
When my father died we decided not to put his passing in any newspaper because my mom didn’t want people to know she was living alone. Of course, we notified all of our family and friends.
@oldfort That is actually a good safety tip. Especially if it would be easy for someone to figure out the address from public records, you do not want to advertise that here’s a vulnerable person or here’s a house that will be empty while we’re at the funeral.
A neighbor of mine’s daughter died in a car accident a few years ago. I am not too close to the neighbor and only met the daughter in passing a couple of times, so I offered to stay at their house during the service so they wouldn’t have to worry about it. It is always hard to know what will be helpful to someone at a time like that, but this worked because I wasn’t close enough to be expected to attend the funeral, but could help with house sitting.
When we’ve attended funerals, we had never really thought about having a house sitter, but it’s nice that you were able to help the family in that way. I’m sure it helped their peace of mind to not worry about that during their time of grief and the service.
So dh has just been informed about a funeral tomorrow. There’s a reception at the funeral home, followed by a burial somewhere else, followed by visiting at the surviving husband’s home. That seems like a lot for one day and has thoroughly confused him. It’s the wife of a colleague he’s met only once, so he’d like to go to one thing, not all three.
He was fine with it.