Funeral Homes Help You as You Cope With Loss

Funeral homes exist to serve the people in their communities as they cope with the loss of a loved one. Death is never, ever easy, whether it was expected or unexpected. Grief, initial and extended, can just take over every aspect of life when a loved one dies. But initial grief after death is so overwhelming that it literally overshadows everything else.

That’s where funeral homes come in and do the heavy lifting of making arrangements, overseeing every detail, and providing comfort and support to the bereaved family. This lessens the burden on the family so that they can focus on grieving for their loss. Funeral homes take care of transporting the deceased, handling each step of the funeral process (including taking care of legal requirements, planning the funeral, and making the funeral arrangements) to execute the funeral in accordance with the wishes of the deceased and the family.

There’s much that goes on behind the scenes that even families aren’t aware of when funeral homes provide their services to them. A funeral home’s job is to help families make final arrangements for their loved ones.

This consists of setting up the service, including acoustic setup for music, for readings, and videoing the service. It also consists of ensuring that there’s a guestbook, funeral programs, and thank-you cards for the family to send thank-you notes for flowers and other gifts that are sent to the funeral home. The funeral home makes sure that all the cards with flowers and gifts are saved and gives them to the family after the service.

Funeral homes also help you with focus and organization as the funeral planning progresses. They will gather all the information needed for death certificates, such as the deceased’s full name and address, the city where they were born and their date of birth, their marital status, and their occupation.

Funeral homes will give you guidance on the kinds of information that you will need to handle some of the other legal matters related to a death, such as insurance policies, loan and lease information, beneficiary information, last wills, and tax returns. If there are legal matters that need an attorney’s assistance, funeral homes will make the contact to make sure adequate legal counsel is available.

Funeral homes will also help you arrange the actual details of the funeral, including contacting people you would like to be involved in the service (if you have not already or are unable to do so), finding a cemetery or a crematory, sending out obituary and death notices, and choosing a casket, vault, headstone, or urn.

If the deceased was an honorably-discharged military veteran and burial is desired in a national cemetery with veterans funeral benefits, funeral homes will make all the arrangements with the Veterans Administration and take of the details involved in making the burial happen.

Additionally, funeral homes will help personalize the funeral arrangements if you want to do something like dove or butterfly releases or you want to create special memorial shirts. They can also give assistance with photo or video memorial tributes. And they can help arrange burials at sea, if that was the desire of your loved one.

Funeral homes are excellent at providing grief support and resources before, during, and after the funeral. Many funeral homes offer grief support group meetings, while others have close connections with grief counselors and support groups in the community.

For the best that funeral homes have to offer, depend on our compassionate and experienced team at Hopler & Eschbach. You can visit our funeral home at 483 Chenango St., Binghamton, NY 13901, or you can call us today at (607) 722-4023.