Traditional Funeral Services

Generally, a traditional funeral service would include one day of visitation followed by a funeral at the funeral home or church the following day. However, the words "traditional funeral service" are becoming more and more obsolete. Every family is different and everyone has a slightly different idea of what kind of service they would choose. We are able to offer guidance and ideas to families, but the final decision regarding the type of funeral service is always yours.

A recent trend has been to center a wake or funeral service around a person's best known attributes, hobbies or occupation. For instance, a grandmother known best for her love of knitting quilts for her grandchildren or cooking meals for family events might have a display of her needlework or a collection of favorite cooking utensels and cookbooks near the casket. A family may display a woodsman's axe, hunting bow or fishing pole. A model airplane enthusiast may have one or two of his scale airplanes flanking his casket. Or a gardener's casket or urn may be personalized by an arrangement of garden tools, a wheelbarrow and roses picked from his or her backyard mixed in with some of the purchased flower arrangements generally sent by loving family and friends.

We have seen how our assisting families with this personalization of the service brings more comfort to them because it feels less like a "cookie cutter" funeral or memorial. Family and friends feel the presence of the "individual" being remembered because of the power of pictures and personalized items of the deceased.