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COVID-19 Funeral and Memorial Technology

FuneralResources.com and MemorialTechnology.com Offer COVID-19 Families
New Funeral and Memorial Technology Tools

Memorial Technology
New Memorial Technology Helps COVID-19 Families Heal and Remember

COVID-19 Families Face Funeral Planning Challenges

In response to the overwhelming number of families losing loved ones to the COVID-19 pandemic, Funeral Resources.com and MemorialTechnology.com provide COVID-19 families with the awareness, education, and access to some of the funeral industry’s newest and most innovative memorial technology tools.

Chris Hill, Founder says; “With a national shutdown in place, COVID-19 families and the death care industry are both facing the most devastating funeral planning challenges in the history. Not only are there extreme limitations on accessing traditional funeral planning needs like funerals, visitations, wakes, memorial services, but to make matters worse, lots of stress and pressure to afford the significant costs and expenses of losing a loved one.”

COVID-19 Families Have Much-Needed Help and Hope

Not only is there an abundance of free information, answers, and support available at these family-focused online resource centers for COVID-19 families, but also access to new memorial technology tools.

Most Popular New Memorial Technology Tools:

  1. Funeral Webcasting – Allows families to “attend” a memorial service “live” online
  2. Video Tribute – Powerful combination of video, pictures, and funeral music
  3. Memorial Website – Personalized websites so families can share together anywhere
  4. Gravestone Technology – Amazing way to see much more than a name and date
  5. Memorial Diamond – Customized genuine diamonds for family heirlooms
  6. Memorial Reefs – Green Burials at sea offer an underwater living legacy

“After losing a loved one, my loss became an inspiration to help families make these difficult situations easier. Given the COVID-19 crisis facing families today, we felt compelled to serve as the hands and feet of Christ. We knew God was calling us to find a way to come together and do something special…at a time when families need it most”, explains Christopher P. Hill, Founder.

Click Here to Learn More: MemorialTechnology.com

Best Memorial Technology

Top Six Memorial Technology Tools to Remember a Loved One

Like me and many other families who have lost a loved one, I was unaware of many of the new, best, and most innovative memorial technology options available for helping families plan a funeralburial, cremation, or even serve as an added value to their end of life planning. 

Each of these wonderful new memorial technology tools allow families to remember their loved ones.

They also provide a much better opportunity for individuals and families to heal from the inevitable grief and loss associated from losing a loved one.

You can find more information about each of these six new memorial technology options by visiting the following extremely educational and FREE family-focused online resource center: 

MemorialTechnology.com:

Click each picture below to learn more:

 Memorial Reefs
For loved ones who were in the Navy, divers, sailors, swimmers, or other types of sea lovers, memorial reefs are becoming very popular option for final resting places for cremations.
 Memorial Diamond
Rather than storing a loved ones ashes in the traditional cremation urn, many families are choosing memorial jewelry such as a memorial diamond and many other creative opportunities.
 Memorial Website
Memorial websites allow people to come to together in one place on the internet and post thoughts, poems, pictures, funeral flowers, video tribute, stories, donations, and much more.
 Video Tribute
By creating and combining a series of pictures to tell a loved ones story, with beautiful special funeral music, a video tribute is one of the most helpful and healing additions to a memorial service, as well as a priceless keepsake.
 Gravestone Technology
Instead of just a name and date, gravestone technology is becoming a very common addition for cemetery gravestones, monuments, and tombstones to tell the story of someone special.
Funeral Webcasting
When family, friends, or co-workers cannot attend a funeral, funeral webcasting is becoming an extremely popular option for people to attend a LIVE funeral online via the internet as another way of coping with grief and loss.

Digital Time Capsule and SafeBeyond

Digital Legacy Planning

FuneralResources.com Recommends SafeBeyond

What is a Digital Time Capsule?

Throughout our lives most of us enjoy significant life events such as birthdays, graduations, weddings, and more.  Given the advent of the internet, explosive growth in technology, and new memorial technology tools and resources, individuals and families now have an amazing new option:  capture and store your all-important life events with a digital time capsule.

Who is SafeBeyond?

SafeBeyond recognizes that everyone’s life story is unique and constantly affected by change.  SafeBeyond is a user-friendly service for online digital legacy planning.  They offer a state-of-the-art digital time capsule that allows people to stay connected with their families and loved ones for generations to come.

What Makes SafeBeyond Different?

SafeBeyond.com has created the world’s most advanced digital legacy planning and asset management service.  This new and innovative technology allows you to remain a part of your loved ones lives forever.

Some of SafeBeyond’s key features and benefits:

  • An innovative online and mobile app solution
  • Easy and secure management of your life story and your meaningful digital content
  • Enhanced distribution capabilities for the future delivery of personalized messages and digital assets
  • Ability to choose when, where and with whom your messages and other digital assets will be shared
  • Capture and share life’s most meaningful moments in the form of video, audio, and/or text messages
  • Organize and securely store important digital asset management
  • Offer quick and easy access to key account and password information

Sign up for FREE through FuneralResources.com

SafeBeyond’s free service guarantees individuals and families the peace of mind they need and deserve.  By using their digital legacy planning, this ensures your words of wisdom, encouragement, and love are always accessible  – and when they are needed the most.

Click Here to learn more about SafeBeyond’s
FREE Digital Time Capsule and Digital Legacy Planning

 

Orbital Memorials Offers Memorial Spaceflights

Memorial Technology

New Memorial Spaceflight
Offered by Orbital Memorials

One of the most innovative and cutting-edge memorial technology tools is a memorial spaceflight.  Memorial spaceflights provide the opportunity for your loved one to experience space and be forever immortalized above earth, on the moon, or in deep space.

In the case of an orbital memorial package, your loved one’s cremated remains will orbit the earth from 3 weeks to 2 months, before its orbit naturally begins to reenter the atmosphere. This occurs at very high speeds and temperatures causing the satellite and its contents to become a trail of ionized gas, also known as a shooting star.

Benefits of Spaceflight

  1. Visit the final frontier: your loved one can visit a realm visited by few, and dreamed of by many.
  2. Shooting star: your loved one will be immortalized upon reentry into earth’s atmosphere in a shooting-star like blaze of glory.
  3. As cremations are becoming more popular, there are a growing number of ways to memorialize your loved one. Spaceflight allows sending only a portion of ashes, leaving the remainder for you to keep.
  4. Spaceflight is possible whether your loved one has recently passed, or if their remains have been preserved.

Our Preferred Provider:
Orbital Memorials

Orbital Memorials provides a low-cost entry point into spaceflight memorial services. In addition to hosting an online store for all services, making purchasing services easy, they include launch updates and a memorial package after the flight.

This memorial package includes a permanent keepsake replica of the pod sent to space, space flight tickets with the launch date, and a space flight patch.

Death is Not Failure

Death is Not Failure

As I am preparing this newsletter, I am awaiting a call from a longtime colleague with the knowledge that it will be the last time we have a chance to talk.  Recently diagnosed with multiple brain tumors that are inoperable she has chosen to let her life run its course and to enjoy what quality time she can for as long as the tumors allow.  Tragic, sad, emotional; you bet, but not a failure, as far as we can tell, on anyone’s part.  Remember I said before, death is not an option.  Fortunately, her healthcare providers understand this type of terminally ill planning.

In this day and age so many healthcare providers feel like they have failed if they are unable to cure their patients.  They frequently continue to offer alternative treatments when they know that the chances of doing anything truly helpful are miniscule.  They talk about end of life planning matters extending life, but not about the quality of that life.  They are also confronted by patients and/or loved ones who want “everything” done.   They offer treatments that they themselves would not take were they in the same condition.  The healthcare professionals’ role in life has always been to make people better, to cure them, and when they can’t they feel inadequate or like they have failed so they keep trying even as hope wanes.  It is a reasonable response considering their training focuses on the cure.  But, death is just a part of life and it is sometimes best to accept.

As you might guess, the call came before I had finished this.  I was floored.  In fact my friend was ecstatic when I spoke with her.  Hard to believe isn’t it?  She kept telling me how wonderful it is to have time to talk with people who love her and who share with her what a difference she has made in their lives.  She said that this truly has been the best experience of her life and she is so pleased that her life will be ending this way because she never really thought that she had made a difference in anyone’s life.

She’s living fully in the moment.  She is making plans for the “celebration” of her end of life, when she is gone and where to scatter her ashes.  And given the advent of the Internet and advanced technology tools today, there are many new memorial technology options for cremations.  She has made peace with what is happening to her and is embracing the experience better than anyone I have ever met.  Surely there are down times but to everyone with whom I have spoken who has spoken with her they all are getting the same vibe.

Death for her is not a failure but truly is an experience she is cherishing.  Talk about acceptance!  And yes, she has her advance directives in order.

The bigger question is when will you:  Have ‘The Conversation’ And Give ‘The Gift’

Courtesy of M Jane Markley Consulting 

 

Top Technology Tools to Plan a Funeral and Memorial Service

Memorial Technology

New Memorial Technology to Plan a Funeral
and Better Remember Loved Ones

MemorialTechnology.com is an online resource center designed to help families, Funeral Directors, and Cemetery Directors to learn more today’s new and creative ways to help cope with grief and loss and, most importantly, help celebrate the special life and memories of a loved one.

This family-friendly online resource center was specifically designed for three main purposes:

1.  Raise awareness about today’s most popular, newest, and most innovative technology tools, all of which can help remember loved ones in a more meaningful way.
2.  Offer valuable information and education on exactly how these new memorial technology tools work.
3.  Provide access to the most qualified and credible companies offering these funeral  home services.

MemorialTechnology.com features six of the most commonly sought-after and utilized memorial technology options families are choosing to add to their funeral, memorial, burial, or cremation planning.  These six options include:

1.  Memorial Website
2.  Video Tribute
3.  Gravestone Technology
4.  Funeral Webcasting
5.  Memorial Diamonds and Jewelry
6.  Memorial Reefs

Unfortunately after my family lost a dear loved one, we were not aware that any these excellent memorial technology tools existed.  Therefore, we did not know how they worked, nor did we know who to turn to for help.

My sincere hope and prayer is this helps families make a difficult situation a little easier.

Christopher P. Hill, Founder
FuneralResources.com

Advance Directives and Advance Care Planning

Advance Directives

Are We at a “Tipping” Point?

How is it that 24 years after the Patient Self-Determination Act went into effect we have not made significant progress in increasing the percentage of people who have Advance Directives?  Death has been hidden behind hospital doors for almost a century, new funeral and memorial technology has advanced, and people still seem to think that death is optional and prefer to avoid the end of life discussion.

Current research shows that only about 25% of the population has completed Advance Directives, yet 80% of the population states that they wish to die at home.  Many of us have talked till we are blue in the face, much money has been spent, and many different initiatives have been started but the number hasn’t budged.

All of this may seem discouraging but there are several different moves afoot that may open the subject up and bring it into the mainstream.  Things like:

  • Respecting Choices – an advance care planning model that has been inculcated into the fabric of the community in La Crosse, WI and has been around long enough to demonstrate significant community, personal, and financial impacts that are being noticed and shared.
  • Institutes of higher learning have started and/or increased their emphasis on end of life care and Advance Directives in their medical and nursing school curriculums planting the seed for better communications with patients in the future.
  • Accountable Care Organizations and Medical Home models are being encouraged by Health and Human Services to collect and report data on the advance care planning, that they are providing to seniors, which will eventually impact their reimbursements.
  • Ever increasing numbers of people, bothered by the lack of discussion and emphasis placed on the needs of people at the end of life, have taken the initiative to develop electronic tools on the internet to guide and help people address these issues before the need arises.
  • And, as I referred to in last month’s newsletter, Death and Dying Cafes and Dinner Parties are becoming increasingly popular in the U.S. as the underlying need to talk about death and our beliefs about it are being met through this informal yet growing medium.

Making advance care planning and Advance Directives a part of the mainstream of American life, where it is considered inappropriate not to discuss our thoughts and feelings on these issues, will go a long way towards increasing percentages in the future.  With the pace of change upon us we may just be at the beginning of that tipping point.  More people will be willing to have “the conversation” and give “the gift”.

Contributed by M Jane Markley LLC, www.mjmarkley.com

By |March 17th, 2014|Categories: Advance Directives, Death, death cafes, death dinner parties, end of life, Memorial Technology|Tags: , , , , , , |Comments Off on Advance Directives and Advance Care Planning

Talking About Death and Funeral Planning

Death and Funeral Planning

Why are Funeral Planning and Death

Considered Taboo Conversations?

There are few things in life that are certain, but one thing that can be relied upon is that we will all die. Although death is an absolute certainty for every single one of us, society at large still seems to find it difficult to discuss funeral planning, death and dying. Death has always been something of a taboo subject, but even in these relatively enlightened times it is still a topic that causes some to react with disgust, fear or denial.

As a result, to plan a funeral for yourself or a loved one can be tricky at best. It is important that everyone gets the kind of funeral plan that respects their beliefs and wishes.  However, if these are not discussed in advance, it is difficult for those left behind to know how the best ways to handle these difficult decisions after a person has died.

Fear of Death and Dying

It’s understandable that, as a species intent on survival, we are reticent about discussing our inevitable demise. Fear of death can encompass a number of things including concerns about grief and loss, worry about pain or suffering, fear of the unknown, and bereavement.  There is also the sense that in death, things that an individual values such as family, friends and loved ones will be lost.

Many people have superstitious beliefs concerning death and dying that can hinder their willingness to talk about their end of life plans and preferences – and what should happen after they’re gone. The belief that talking about death is somehow “tempting fate” or will hasten death is common and will cause problems with making clear plans for what should happen after death.

Some deaths are more predictable than others, and those people who are diagnosed with a medical condition with a prognosis of shortened life may be in a better position for terminally ill planning since they have “some” idea of how much life they have left. Still, even those people for whom death is imminent may not wish to talk about it.

Death and Money – The Perfect Storm of Taboos

If there is one topic that draws an equal amount of discomfort for open discussion, it is an individual’s personal financial affairs. In working through a funeral planning checklist, the subjects of money and death are brought together in a clash of two of the strongest taboo subjects for discussion in polite conversation.

According to AARP, today’s average funeral costs can run upwards of $10,000.  Clearly this is no small consideration when facing things like funeral estate planning and finding the money to pay for the essentials after a death. In addition to adding the stress of finding this money to the worry about doing the right thing, you also have the drawbacks of not discussing how to plan your funeral with loved ones when the opportunity has always been available.  So these drawbacks significantly outweigh the discomfort of talking about things that are often left unsaid.

An Open Conversation About Death

Although it is hard for some people to talk about dying, it is an extremely important conversation to have. Without an understanding of what a person’s wishes are for their end of life funeral arrangements, families can be left in a difficult position of trying to second guess what their loved one would have wanted after their death. Don’t leave it too late to have the conversation.

If you preplan a funeral, it gives you the opportunity to talk about preferences, funeral costs, and the way in which you want to be remembered.  This includes even the little details such what you want to say in your obituary, what kind of memorial service you would like, what to put on your monuments or head stone, or even new memorial technology for gravestones.

Getting your funeral plan, preferences, and finances in place early means that both the dying person and the family left behind have the peace of mind to knowing that the right thing was done, and the funeral plan and money are available to ensure the deceased’s wishes are fulfilled.

Conclusion

Death and dying is one of the final taboos for discussion in our society. However, making sure that everyone is clear about what they want in death and their wishes for their funeral can bring peace of mind to all concerned.

Article contributed by Memorials of Distinction

Funeral Memorial Technology Services Options

MemorialTechnology.com Offers Families and Funeral Industry New Ways to Memorialize Loved Ones

Vienna, VA – The beginning of a New Year is always special for those who have lost loved ones, as well as the funeral and cemetery industries.  However, 2012 is going to be particularly special because families can now take advantage of some of today’s new and innovative memorial technology and memorial services options.

Christopher P. Hill, Founder of FuneralResources.com, recalls “When my family and I lost my mother on Thanksgiving Day, we never knew these new memorial options existed.  I can assure you we would have used at least three of these memorial tools.”

Hill’s personal loss inspired him to create www.memorialtechnology.com, a new educational website which simply makes it easier for families and Funeral Directors to raise awareness, education, and access to these new ways to better heal and remember.

MemorialTechnology.com particularly helps the funeral and cemetery industry by offering Funeral and Cemetery Directors a quick and easy way to educate every family on excellent additions to their funeral and memorial services planning.

Top Six New Funeral and Memorial Technology Options

MemorialTechnology.com contains six options that studies show most families are choosing to add to their funeral, memorial, or cremation planning:

1. New Gravestone Technology – Amazing way to see much more than a name and date
2. Video Tribute – A very powerful combination of video, pictures, and funeral music
3. Funeral Webcasting – Allows families to “attend” a memorial service “live” online
4. Memorial Diamond – Customized Genuine Diamonds for family heirlooms
5. Memorial Reefs – Green Burials at sea offer an underwater living legacy
6. Memorial Website – Personalized websites so families can share together anywhere

View This Brief Video Which Explains Today’s New Memorial Technology Options:

As we approach the New Year, Hill stated; “You will see that MemorialTechnology.com provides a true win-win situation.  For the Funeral and Cemetery Directors, they can now offer even more valuable services.  For the families, the can learn and maybe take advantage of ways to enhance and improved a loved one’s life tribute. I hope my mother is proud to know she inspired such a wonderful opportunity.”

FuneralResources.com is the funeral industry’s leading online Resource Center for both families and Funeral Directors.  This comprehensive website offers easy access to help regarding how to plan a funeral, memorial services, and end of life plan services.

For more information or media contact, you can call (800) 379-2511, or email at info@memorialtechnology.com

Digital Death Online and Digitial Estate Planning

Digital Death and Estate Planning

What Happens Online When You Die?

While it’s a scary thought, the thought usually passes quickly, possibly accompanied with a new status update and a quick image change. However, there are a lot of people who have given the issue of digital death a lot more thought.  This is particularly true given today’s new and innovative funeral and memorial services technology options.

Leading technologists around the world are grappling with the possibilities of what will happen to our online selves when we die. Currently there are no uniform policies across social media and online profiling sites regarding what happens when one of their users dies. As a result this raises questions about:

Privacy. Do you want anyone else accessing your Facebook or Twitter profiles and going through your emails after you’ve died? What about digital assets which are jointly held?

Access. Are you leaving behind the login details and passwords needed for a friend or family member to deactivate your accounts? Should the sites themselves automatically grant access to a deceased profile if a family member wants to close the account?

Legacy. Do you want your online self to remain ‘live’ as a legacy? Do you want friends and family to continue posting in your name? How do you want to preserve your digital estate planning online interactions, and how will that data stay relevant as file formats and technology change and develop?

Digital Death Day

While there may not be a holistic approach to what happens online when you die, there are a number of unique initiatives raising awareness and trialling new ideas and systems to make digital death easier to manage. For example, when the Digital Death Day conferences were held in North America in May 2011 this was the third time that attorneys, entrepreneurs, funeral directors, estate planners, researchers, archivists and leading thinkers gathered to have the conversation about the issues of family, privacy, digital property rights and the archiving and curating of data for anthropologists and future generations.

Digital Death Day calls itself an ‘unconference’ where all of the attendees work closely together to explore options for dealing with online profiles after death. Everyone is able to contribute and the first morning is spent creating a multi-track agenda from the feedback of all attendees, which makes for vibrant and relevant content. Digital Death Day explores the fact that while death is a part of life, what does that mean when most people’s end of life planning become largely digital?

Digital Death Resources

The conversation about what happens online when you die is of course taking place online too with blogs such as Death and Digital Legacy http://www.deathanddigitallegacy.com which covers topics such as how to download data from a deceased Facebook profile, how to make sure your online storage of posts, photos and files are really preserved electronically and whether you’d want your family to notify your friends of your death using your own Facebook profile.

John Romano and Evan Carroll have even written a book called Your Digital Afterlife http://www.yourdigitalafterlife.com which compares the legacy of photo albums, diaries and video tapes left behind by our grandparents, to the plethora of thoughts, feelings, images and memories we leave behind online. Your Digital Afterlife also discusses the issues surrounding passwords and who really owns your online content, as well as how that content can be preserved as file formats change.

Adam Ostrow takes the preservation of our online selves a step further in his speech at a TED conference http://www.thedigitalbeyond.com/2011/08/digital-legacy-presented-at-ted-global-2011.  Ostrow’s speech titled After Your Final Status Update asks whether we could, or should, be putting our online profiles in the hands of evolving technology in order to live on – there are already programs which can predict your next tweet based on your past posts, so why not upload the collective of your online interactions into a robot, or project your personality as a hologram to go on interacting with your family and friends after you die?

Digital Death Used to Save Lives

The conversation around digital death is also being used to stop unnecessary deaths from HIV and AIDS in Africa and India. The Digital Death Campaign to Keep a Child Alive began on World AIDS Day, 1 December, with the world’s most followed celebrities sacrificing their digital selves. This means that the celebrities’ Facebook and Twitter profiles go silent until a donation of $1,000,000 is reached to bring their online selves back to life. Plus, you can sacrifice your own digital life and encourage your friends and family to donate to the Keep a Child Alive campaign, and bring you back to life online.

Three Facebook Users Die Every Minute

At this rate that means that there will be 1.78 million Facebook accounts in limbo in 2011 because those users hadn’t prepared for their digital death. That’s the equivalent of the population of Western Australia, and as users and status updates continue to grow exponentially, how many deceased pages will there be in 10 years, how will Facebook and the probably non-tech savvy families of these people manage this amount of digital content?

In 2011 there are over 500 million people on Facebook and that number is expected to double by the end of the year to 1 billion users. As you think about those numbers, consider the fact that around 1 billion pieces of information are shared on Facebook every day. That is a staggering amount of information that we all felt compelled to share, so if it was important enough to post, isn’t it important enough to preserve?

However, despite digital content growing so rapidly, there are no plans for a way to manage, archive and remove our digital content when we die. For example, if you die and your friends or family want to close down your Facebook account they have to fill out a form and provide a link to your obituary search. If a copy of a key vital statistics such as a Death Certificate is sent to MySpace or eBay the account will be closed however, closing one of the 20 million eHarmony accounts can only be done by using a Last Will, Living Trust, and power of attorney who even then can’t gain access to the account.

There are 100 million tweets being posted each day from the 175 million users, and Twitter will allow a family member to save a copy of your tweets if you die, but no one else will be given access to your account.

Leave a Digital Legacy?  Or Have Your Digital Self Euthanized?

While you are alive you have absolute control over your online profiles and this is one of the main attractions of the medium – the fact that you can share your thoughts, your feelings, your questions and your experiences freely, with whomever you choose. As a result you are creating a rich database of yourself and your life experiences and isn’t that exactly why we put photos in photo albums, create a video tribute, keep diaries, have children and grow businesses – so we can leave something behind to be remembered by? So would you want to live on through your online self or would you rather leave the physical and the digital plane all together?

Digital Privacy

While most social media and online accounts have a policy to dictate what happens to your account when you die, there is still an overarching policy to protect your privacy when you are gone. For example, do you want your parents reading your Facebook status updates or do you want your partner reading through your private emails? Take a second to think about the contents of your inbox or the photos on your Facebook page – what digital dirty laundry would you be leaving behind if you died? However, it’s not only your own privacy that you should be protecting when you die, consider what would happen to the private messages stored in your Facebook or Twitter accounts, or emails which contain private information about friends, family, clients or colleagues. When you die, once private information is no longer bound by the terms and conditions of your friendship, but by the terms and conditions of your email provider or social network.

The various deceased policies of social media sites you may use include:

Twitter. Family and friends can notify Twitter of your death and your account will be removed. Family members can also save a backup of all of your public tweets. Twitter simply needs the name and contact details of the family or friend deactivating the deceased account and their relationship to the deceased, the username of the deceased Twitter account or a link to the profile page, and a link to a public obituary or news article. Twitter has the specific privacy@twitter.com email address for this process.

Facebook. Facebook has a feature where you can download all of your photos, videos, wall posts, notes, messages, events and friends which can be great for your records, as well as help your family manage your account after your death. Your family will need to know your username and password to access your account and archive the information and deactivate your account. However, even when a Facebook account has been deactivated, Facebook itself retains a copy of all information and there is currently no way to permanently delete a profile. Or family or friends can also complete a form and provide a link to an obituary to confirm your death and your profile will be officially memorialized. This means you won’t show up in Facebook suggestions and status updates won’t show up in the news feeds but your profile will remain as an online memorial technology.

MySpace. If MySpace are sent proof of death they will cancel a deceased user’s account.

LinkedIn. LinkedIn will also close your account if they receive confirmation of your death.

YouTube. YouTube allows your heir or power of attorney control of your account and all of the content.

Google + and Gmail. Google will provide account information to family members at their discretion.

Yahoo and Flickr. Yahoo owns Flickr and as a result both sites have a strict digital death policy, that once they receive a copy of your death certificate they will permanently delete all of your accounts and their contents so that no one but you can access them.

Hotmail. Hotmail will send a copy of all email messages which are stored on the account and the current contacts list to help your family notify your contacts of your death. Hotmail will then close the account on request.

eBay. Your family will need to fax a copy of your death certificate to eBay to close an account and all customer details are then deleted from the eBay database. eBay may also need to call to verify the account information.

PayPal. PayPal will need to view a death certificate before closing an account, and if there is money in the account a cheque will be issued in the name of the account holder.

Match.com. Match.com will block the account of a user who has died so that it is no longer visible on the site and your power of attorney will need to contact Match.com to retrieve account information.

eHarmony.com. Your eHarmony account will remain open until a family member or power of attorney contacts the site. Even then no third party will be allowed to access your account and eHarmony will close the account.

 

See Why a Video Tribute Helps Funeral Memorial Services

Tribute Video

Four Reasons to Offer DVD Tribute Videos to Families

DVD tribute videos are becoming a popular way to memorialize a loved one who has passed. Client families want to include a video tribute as part of the funeral or memorial services. They also wish to have these memorial tributes created so that they can watch them after the services are over as they work through their grief.

Client families are seeking out companies via the internet or are attempting to create these tribute videos themselves. Often their funeral professional has not made the service available to them. If your funeral home is not currently offering DVD tribute videos, here are four compelling reasons to rethink that choice:

1. Tribute Videos Fill a Need

Tribute videos help a client family tell the story of their loved ones life and relive cherished memories. They allow families to leave a legacy and connect generations by preserving memories and events. More and more client families are tech savvy and have seen tribute videos online or at a funeral service. While many would like to have a DVD tribute video created for their loved one, and may know how to make one themselves, during this stressful time they need someone to take the reins, relieve the burden and offer the service. Providing a world class professional tribute, one that far exceeds the quality of a homemade version, will ingrain you and your funeral home in their lives each and every time they watch the DVD tribute video.

2. Tribute Videos Are Easy to Create

Outsourcing a tribute video can be a nightmare to coordinate and to find a trustworthy company that won’t let you down. Thankfully, in-house funeral software has come a long way. Tribute video software has been developed that allows a funeral professional to create a professional, high quality tribute video in-house in just three simple steps. You simply import the photos, edit the copy, music, top funeral music, and motion effects, and burn the completed video to a DVD. The menu driven application guides you through the entire process. In minutes you’ll have created a stunning tribute video that will amaze the families you serve. Plus, the online tribute player allows you to upload your video to the web and link it to your website. Client families can direct friends and families to your website to view the tribute video.

3. Tribute Video Software Features Cutting Edge Memorial Technology

The quality of a DVD tribute video created in-house by a funeral professional utilizing today’s robust funeral software is unmatched. With the invention of high speed scanning technology, funeral professionals and funeral home services can now scan one photo every two seconds making the creation process a breeze. At the click of a button, innovative tribute video software can also bring life to each photo with motion effects, set transitions, sync funeral music, and create a stunning DVD menu. Every day, thousands of funeral home professionals rely on tribute video funeral software because of the state-of-the art memorial technology it provides and the results it delivers.

4. Tribute Videos Are a Value Added Service

Tribute video software has been designed specifically for the funeral industry.  Because of this, for funeral professionals, creating an in-house tribute video is simple and affordable. Tribute video software available today has no long term contracts, no upfront costs, no equipment to buy and no support fees required. With a simple pay as you go system, you can create an unlimited number of professional quality video tributes in house quickly and easily. The quality is competitive with professional video tribute services, yet costs you and the family a fraction of the price. And, the value added service you are providing is priceless.

Learn More About the Top 6 Memorial Technology Options

This article was contributed by Frazer Consultants.  This company has a solid reputation of developing high performing and reliable technology for the death care industry.

Custom Crafted Funeral Music

Custom Funeral Music

The Powerful Combination of Custom Crafted Funeral Music, Pictures, and Professional Video

Creating a Healing Thanksgiving Family Keepsake

With the rapid growth in the Internet and new funeral technology, families today have access to many new and innovative tools that can help significantly increase their funeral and memorial planning experience. At the top of this list are DVD Video Tributes, which most families are choosing as a common addition to their loved ones memorial service.

In addition, I am happy tell everyone there is also the ability to work with a professional singer/songwriter/producer who can help families create “custom crafted” funeral music, which is a song that is personalized for either a special loved one and/or a special event.

Listen to this Beautiful Custom Crafted Song:

“Since my family never knew this powerful funeral technology existed,  I strongly encourage every family to learn more about this option as a great addition to a Memorial Service.  These professionally designed Video Tributes allow you to combine the personalized music, photos, and message of your choice.  Watching this together with loved ones, this provides a great opportunity for everyone to celebrate, remember, and heal…and ultimately becomes a treasured family heirloom to keep forever.”
Christopher P. Hill, Founder, FuneralResources.com

Consider Using Custom Crafted Songs to Help Heal and Remember

If you are interested in selecting funeral songs with meaningful lyrics it may be easy to use the internet to search and read lyrics of popular songs.  However, I believe a much better and more personal solution is to opt for a more customized music selection and have a song written and recorded to play at the funeral service or memorial service.

This DVD Video Tribute below contains a customized song that was created for me by Anna Huckabee of Custom Crafted Songs.  By taking advantage of creating a custom crafted song, this helped me to express how I truly felt about my mother, but in a very special and meaningful way.

By combining these personalized lyrics that Anna helped me create with a DVD Video Tribute, this helped me in so many ways.  First, it helped me to better see what a wonderful and amazing person she really was.  Second, since Anna needed to ask many questions  to know as much as possible about her, this helped me to express my thoughts and discuss some things that significantly helped in my healing process.  But most importantly, this custom crafted song allowed me to express some feelings and emotions that I was not able to say to her before she passed.  These words are things that I regret every day not telling her before she was taken above.

My mother passed on Thanksgiving Day of 2008, which clearly means that Thanksgiving will never be the same.  But since everyone who knew her would tell you she was one of the most giving people on the planet, I truly thank Anna for creating this personal song and tribute for my mother, and fittingly calling this beautiful song “Thanks For Giving“.

Thanks for your giving ways too Anna!

Top 5 Reasons Video Tributes are Common Memorial Options

1. A Quality Memorial Tribute

Each custom DVD Video Tribute is hand-crafted by professional technicians who artfully tell your loved one’s story. With expert direction, the funeral music and imagery join together in perfect harmony to create a healing experience as individual as your loved one’s life. This memorial tribute will be a treasured family heirloom for generations to come.

2. Restore Your Loved One’s Photos

Your precious photos are carefully restored, enhanced and artfully arranged by talented multimedia technicians. These experts can combine faded, tattered, torn, static snapshots into moving cinematic video, bringing your treasured photos to life forever.

3. Create a Fitting Video Memorial

From majestic mountains and oceans to the simplicity and beauty of a single rose, a Funeral Video DVD utilizes custom thematic scenery, filmed in stunning High Definition by world-renown videographers, designed to personalize and illustrate your loved ones life.

4. Healing and Uplifting Funeral Music

A professionally crafted DVD Video Tribute utilizes therapeutic, customized soundtracks. This personalized funeral music is specifically composed, arranged and/or produced to heal a broken heart as well as provide the perfect accompaniment to your family photos.

5. A Memorial as Individual As Your Loved One

These Video Tributes are professionally produced tributes which celebrate your loved ones life in magnificent cinematic quality, and are available in standard or wide-screen format.

Visit our site to learn more information about some of the other new and innovative funeral technology tools now available when planning a funeral. You can also learn about things like a Memorial Website, Gravestone Technology, Memorial Reefs, Memorial Diamonds, as well as Funeral Webcasting.  In addition, you can also visit our other website www.memorialtechnology.com.

Christopher P. Hill, Founder

New Funeral Memorial Technologies Help Families Heal and Remember

Memorial Technology

Six Memorial Technology Options Helping to Share, Celebrate, Heal, and Remember!

Today, many new and innovative memorial technology tools that are widely-recognized in the funeral industry as common services that help make a difficult situation a little easier. New memorial technology is helping families and friends who have lost a one heal, remember, and celebrate. Below are the most common new memorial technology tools that most families are choosing:

1.  Memorial Website

A Memorial Website is a personalized website that is created to celebrate a person’s life. Friends and family can grieve and celebrate the memories of a loved one by sharing stories, kind thoughts, condolences, photos, and videos online. These online memorial tributes can be kept online for life so that friends and family can view the wonderful memories year after year and additional content can be added at any time.

2.  Video Tribute

See a Sample DVD Video Here:

 In its simplest definition, a Video Tribute is a professionally crafted video production which consists of digital images, video, and/or photos of your loved one, which are then combined and played simultaneously with the music or your choice. They can serve as an excellent presentation to complement your special funeral memorial service, and are a great way to help in the grief and healing process. A Video Tribute helps tell the story of your loved ones life, and also creates a family heirloom that can be treasured and kept for years to come.

3.  Memorial Diamonds

Created from a lock of hair or small amount of cremated ashes, memorial diamonds are an unique, heirloom memorial that will forever contain the essence of your loved one. These genuine, certified diamonds are created in a laboratory using your loved ones personal carbon and a diamond seed. By mimicking the earth’s natural high pressure, high temperatures necessary to create a diamond, in 70 days or less a personal diamond will emerge in one of the five brilliant colors you have selected. These memorial diamonds can be a stunning reminder of a loved ones life and unique spirit. Set into a beautiful piece of cremation jewelry, a memorial diamond can be worn close to the heart in a pendant, or into a memorial ring, bracelet or even earrings.

4.  Gravestone Technology

Due to advances in microchip technology, your family can now include detailed text and a photo within a headstone to create a high tech, high end memorial. RFID-enabled data tags are an addition to a loved one’s tomb stone – you can enter the person’s name and choose some representative symbols, perhaps a small epitaph via the web – then you embed the tag into a larger traditional tombstone.

This new technology will allow future generations, visitors and historians to access both a story and genealogical information about the deceased from an internet enabled cell phone while at the markers physical location.

5.  Funeral Webcasting

See the Many Features and Benefits of Funeral Webcasting Here:

For a wide variety of reasons, family members and friends are often unable to travel or attend the actual funeral service of a loved one. Using this innovative memorial technology, families and loved ones can now view the actual LIVE Memorial Service from the comfort of their own home, or whatever location is most convenient. Funeral Webcasting can be viewed on a private and secure website page by using password protection. This ensures that ONLY the people you wish to join in this Memorial Service can participate LIVE.

6.  Memorial Reefs

A memorial reef is an environmentally-friendly burial option that is being used to replace the more traditional green burials and cremation ideas, such as cremation urns or ash scattering. The process includes mixing a loved ones remains into an environmentally safe concrete mixture and create a personalized memorial reef. These memorial reefs are then placed into the ocean. This combination of new memorial technology, cremation, memorial reefs, and green burials can now offer families to provide their loved ones with a living legacy at sea.

New Preferred Provider for Digital Estate Planning

Online Estate Plan

FuneralResources.com Selects Entrustet.com

Preferred Provider for Digital Estate Planning

FuneralResources.com, the nation’s leading family-focused online Resource Center for funeral planning and preplanning, announced today they will be selecting Entrustet as a Preferred Provider for their Digital Estate Planning services.

Entrustet’s Account Guardian is a free service that allows consumers to securely list all of their digital assets. Digital assets include any accounts which are currently being accessed through the Internet, as well as computer files.  By storing this digital information in a safe and secure place such as what Entrustet offers, this provides people and families with the option of transferring or deleting this information in the event someone passes.

To find our more information about this partnership, simply visit FuneralResources.com and click on their “Funeral Memorial Technology tab, and then click on the drop-down link entitled “Digital Estate Planning Services”.

Hill points out that; “Today, when a family or Funeral Director visits FuneralResources.com, our Resource Center is filled with helpful articles, brief educational videos, grief counseling and support, common  funeral planning merchandise and services, as well as just about every new and innovative funeral technology tool, such as Entrustet.”

Hill’s goal with FuneralResources.com is to help raise awareness about any helpful tools that can help make such a difficult situation a little easier.  Another goal is to provide quick and easy access to resources such as articles, free How-To Funeral Guides, and the constantly evolving and growing number of useful tools and technologies that most families and Funeral Directors are commonly searching for.  Given the growth of the Internet, Social Networking, and more, having a place to store your Digital Estate Planning Assets will inevitably continue to grow, becoming a larger part of Last Will, Living Trust, and/or Funeral Estate Planning process in the years ahead.

 
About Entrustet:

Entrustet is a free online service that allows you to securely list all of your digital assets, which are online accounts and files on your computer, and decide if you’d like them transferred to heirs or deleted when you pass away. Through its free Account Guardian service, individuals protect their digital assets by deleting them or designating heirs to oversee their personal information after their death. Users can also choose to delete private files and accounts by using the Account Incinerator. Other services include the Lawyer Directory for lawyer referrals and the Corporate Partner Program in which companies can protect their users’ last wishes.

Cremation Memorial Reefs Now in Texas

Green Funeral

Eternal Reefs Adds New Memorial Reef Site

New cremation memorial reef to be located in Galveston, Texas.

The new Texas location makes the twentieth approved site for the company to offer an eco-friendly alternative to spreading the ashes of a loved one:  participation in the preparation and placement of an individually-designed memorial reef ball that contributes to a new ecosystem.

An Eternal Reefs “memorial reefs” looks like a huge, hollow concrete ball with Swiss cheese holes specially designed to entice fish and other forms of sea life into the reef, building new habitats in and around the uneven structure.  Eternal Reefs takes cremated remains and incorporates them into an environmentally safe cast cement mixture weighing between 600 pounds (2’ high x 4’ wide) and 4500 pounds (4’ high x 6’ wide).

Eternal Reefs encourages family members and friends to become involved in creating their loved one’s memorial reef. If they wish, family members can mix the concrete and remains and have the opportunity to personalize the Eternal Reef with handprints, written messages and other memorabilia in the damp concrete. The entire Eternal Reefs process is designed to be a positive and healing experience for the families and the sea.

“While many people who participate in our programs have been vitally connected to the ocean their entire life, we get to memorialize people who just like the idea of making a meaningful contribution to the health of the planet and to benefit future generations,” George Frankel, Eternal Reefs CEO, said.  “We find it provides great joy for everyone involved to know their loved one will be surrounded by marine life and to know they leave behind an environmentally-sustainable, living legacy.”

Memorial reefs have become a solution for the “shelf people” crisis across the country.  An astonishing 45 percent of families that have chosen cremation still have their loved ones remains sitting on a shelf or in a closet.  Thousands of individuals pass away unexpectedly and don’t leave a will, leaving the next generation to handle their remains.  Eternal Reefs offers a final resting place for these individuals.

With every Memorial Reef, the executor of the estate receives two memorial certificates that identify the longitude and latitude of the memorials, which are marked with bronze plaques.  Loved ones can participate in every step of the Memorial Reef process and gather for the reef casting, viewing and placement ceremonies.  Throughout the year, families and friends often return to the memorial reef site to dive, fish or visit by boat.

The new reef site off Galveston, Texas will have its first memorial service and placement November 12, 2010 at Barr’s Reef, 11 miles off the water break in Galveston Bay.   It is anticipated the families of about 15 people will participate in the activities.

About Eternal Reefs Inc.
Eternal Reefs, Inc is an Atlanta-based company that provides creative environmentally enhancing means to memorialize the cremated remains of a loved one. The company incorporates cremated remains into a concrete mixture used to cast artificial reef formations. The artificial reefs are dedicated as permanent memorials while also bolstering natural coastal reef formations. Since 1998, the company has placed more than 300 Memorial Reefs in 20 locations off the coasts of Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Maryland, New Jersey, Texas and Virginia, substantially increasing the ocean’s diminishing reef systems.  Memorial reefs can only go in properly permitted locations by the US Government.  Contact Eternal Reefs Inc.

 

A Special Video Tribute With Custom Funeral Music

Memorial Technology

Sharing a Personal Story

The Powerful Combination of a DVD Video Tribute

and Custom Funeral Music

Talking About Losing a Loved One is NEVER Easy:

My name is Chris Hill, and many of you know I am the Founder of FuneralResources.com.

First of all, I must admit that is not easy for me to publicly talk about the fact that I lost my mother a few years ago, or to say how much I love her and miss her.

And quite frankly, it is even hard to admit that looking back, I wish I could have done things diffrerently.

Live Every Day Like There’s No Tomorrow:

The truth is I wish I was with her more.  I wish I could have told her how much she meant to me.  I wish I had told her how special and amazing she really was.  I wish I told her how much I appreciated everything she did for me.  I wish she knew how lucky I was that she was my mother and friend.  Most of all, I wish I would have been there with her…and shared more time with her…particularly in her final stages.  But as much as it haunts me, I can’t turn back the clock.

Truthfully, I will always believe she needed to hear these things from me, and I will always regret the fact that I never had the chance to tell her how much she meant to me, and how much I loved her.

However, knowing how special she was, how selfless she was, and how unconditional her love was for her family and friends, I truly believe she knows.  I also believe that she forgives me for not being there as much as I think I should have, and for not letting her know the things I wished I had told her.

See the Powerful Combination of New Funeral Technology and Custom Crafted Funeral Music:

Today I feel very blessed to share with you this great opportunity I was recently given.  I was able to create a special memorial video tribute for my mother, which is comprised of three all-important pieces:

1.  Creating a personalized DVD Video Tribute for my mother

2.  Choosing the best photos of my mother thoughout her life.  The ones that help me see her as I remember her, and also help me remember all of the great times and memories we shared together.

3.  Creating personalized funeral music which was specially written, produced, and sung by a very special and talented singer and songwriter, Anna Huckabee.  Anna creates custom crafted funeral music which is solely created to tell an individual’s story of their special and unique life.  You can hear Anna’s song she created exclusively for me and my mother in this video.

Learn About the New Funeral Technology Options Available:

I feel so lucky to have the opportunity to have this professionally crafted and personalized video tribute as a memorial, since someone like her truly deserves nothing but the best.  This video says so much, and helps me tell the story and message.  I hope she hears every day and knows and believes it in her heart.

Best of all, creating this video helped me in coping with loss, but also provided me with something truly special that I can always remember her as that amazing and beautiful person you can see.

It is never easy to talk about someone you love who has passed, but I share this with you because I truly hope anyone who has lost a loved also considers taking advantage of this great opportunity!

Also, there are many other great new memorial technology tools that you should learn more about that, like me, might help you make these difficult times a little easier.

Christopher P. Hill, Founder
FuneralResources.com

New Funeral and Memorial Technology for Fathers

Grief and Loss

New Memorial Tributes and Funeral Technology Options for Fathers

For those special Dad’s and Grandfathers who have passed and are dearly missed, creating a personalized and specialized memorial can provide an excellent opportunity to heal and remember.

Below is a list of some of the most popular memorial options that many families are choosing for a personalized and special memorial, tribute, keepsake, or family heirloom:

About New Funeral and Memorial Technology:

Technology is changing the face of the funeral industry and baby boomers, those ages 43 to 62 are at the root of it“, says John Reed, president of the National Funeral Directors Association based in Brookfield, Wis.

Today many new and innovative technologies are widely recognized in the funeral industry as common services that help make a difficult situation a little easier.  Boomers are memorializing their parents and loved ones in nontraditional ways and using new funeral technology to do it.

Technology is opening the doors to unique memorial ideas and expanding funeral planning and memorial service options.  With these tech-savvy Baby Boomers wanting to take the negativity out of funerals and find ways to celebrate a person’s life, using new funeral technology such as some of these listed below are among the most popular, common, and rapidly growing.

Top 5 New Memorials Options for Fathers:

1.   Video Tribute

2.  Gravestone Technology

3.  Memorial Website

4.  Memorial Diamonds

5.  Memorial Reefs

New Funeral Technology Offers Many Benefits:

Keep in mind that these gifts can serve as an excellent family tribute, keepsake, or family heirloom.  The main benefit from these gifts is that, although in different way, each of them offers a wonderful opportunity to honor and celebrate your Dad, as well as share many of the great stories and  memories you shared together.

Christopher P. Hill
FuneralResources.com

Funeral and Memorial Technology News

 Funeral and Memorial Technology

A Few Words Before I Go

The original Rosetta Stone helped translate the pictorial language of the ancient Egyptians, providing definitions of the imagery and bringing to life a long-gone culture. Now one company is offering personal versions of the stones to tell stories about an individual long after we’re gone.

Objecs LLC’s RosettaStone is an oblong — think full-sized iPod – piece of granite or travertine stone inscribed with pictorial images that stand for different aspects of an individual’s life. Seemlessly incorporated into tombstones and monuments, the stones invite cemetery visitors to plug into a website – or in some cases simply wave your phone in front of the stone – and see the meaning of each symbol.

Walk around a cemetery today and gravestones doesn’t tell you anything. Date of birth. Date of death. They’re cold and impersonal,” said Chris Hill, a financial advisor in northern Virginia and also Founder of FuneralResources.com, who personally owns two RosettaStones. “This will tell my story for thousands of years.”

Purchasers can choose up to six tablet symbols, reminiscent of hieroglyphics, from more than 300 options, including a striped pole for a barber, a caliper for an engineer, and a man behind bars for ne’er-do-wells who want to be remembered as such.

When selecting the symbols for his stone, Hill thought of his wife and two children, his passions for music and writing, his belief that life doesn’t end with death.

For his six symbols, he chose an “I” for general information, a U.S. map, stick figures representing a family, a music note, a hand holding a pen, and a telescope looking into space.

It’s just as important to document your life as it is to remember it”, Hill said.

John Bottorff, founder of Objecs LLC, said the tablet symbols spur interest and conversation.

When I see someone using a symbol I can relate to, I can’t help but be curious as to their life experience around it. We are seeing mini-meaning of life stuff here from common people, not a Dalai Lama,” Bottorff said. “I will never look at a barber pole symbol the same – I’m still awestruck at how a barber has learned the deepest values of life from his profession.  Not all of the messages are positive, but I think they are all gifts to future generations from today’s cooks, barbers, lawyers, fishermen and all kinds of people and professions.”

But it’s the memorial technology element that makes the RosettaStone special, Bottorff said. If the cell phone is NFC-enabled — something still rare in North America but common overseas – simply touching the phone to the tablet allows direct access to the story behind each symbol. The internal microchip uses the phone’s own magnetic field to work and transfer the data, then returns to a dormant state.

For a regular cell phone with Internet access, users can type in the web information on the tablet and have the same information appear. Each symbol can be accompanied by about 200 words of text.

So how is this better than including a memorial website’s address on a tombstone? The answer is permanence, Bottorff said.

Compare us to them and we look a bit primitive, he said. “The traditional memorial website is a much richer multimedia experience, but  not necessarily pursuing the long-term data survival  model we are. If you’re interested in a long genealogical surviving record, ours is a pretty good approach.”

RosettaStone boasts that the tablets’ information will remain accessible for the next 3,000 years. Even if the company folds, the tablets’ associated information will remain. In part, that’s because information is both hard-coded to the stones’ internal microchip and archived externally on the web. (Of course, without a time machine, it’s impossible to verify the 3,000-year claim, but the concept seems to sell nonetheless.)

Introduced a little over a month ago, Objecs has sold fewer than 100 of the products, which cost about $200. Among the buyers, Bottorff said, are a well-known American musician and a BBC Television personality.

Although Objecs initially offer for the product was a way to honor the dead, the living have quickly wanted it for themselves too. (In fact, the living are the product’s primarily buyers thus far.) On its website, Objecs notes that RosettaStones are also intended for “mature adults who have reached a stage in life with identifiable milestones and associations. Such milestones may include a profession, discipline, paternal capacity, love of music or skill….”

When people started buying it for themselves, it was an awakening that it was something people wanted to hold onto as a family heirloom, so we adjusted our message,” Bottorff said.

Hill has been updating and frequently rewriting the text he wants to accompany his RosettaStone entries frequently.

“If a truck hits me tomorrow, I’ve got some words that will last forever and that’s real,” he said. “It’s hard to write at first. You’re thinking, ‘Wow. These are my last words.’”

 

Remembering Fathers

Grief and Loss

For Those Who Have Lost Their Father

Finding ways to remember the happy times and keeping a father’s memory alive, even long after he has passed, can be challenging but rewarding.  This is especially true for younger generations. Telling funny stories or sharing memories about Grandpa or Great Granddad will help future generations to feel connected to their roots and get a true sense of the importance of family.

Given the advent of the Internet and new technology, we strongly suggest you learn more about today’s new memorial technology tools to help remember a loved one.  These new tools can also assist with the grief and loss process.

On special days such as birthdays and Father’s Day, we hope those who have lost their father may find comfort in this beautiful poem from our Preferred Provider, Grief Haven.

 

Bereavement and Grief

Grief and Loss

Inside the Grief Space

People who are coping with grief and loss are definitely operating out of a different place then people who are not grieving. I call this the “Grief Space”. Within this space different thoughts and feelings are occurring to the grieving person than occur to those that are not grieving. If you could see this ‘space’, and experiencing the five stages of grief, it would look like a bubble that surrounds the person. If you could look into this bubble you would find:

Limited Awareness of physical events: Grieving people who are coping with loss tend not to be too aware of their physical surroundings nor do they care as much about doing so. If the house stays dirty or they forget to eat it doesn’t cross their own internal radar. People can lose awareness of national events, local happenings and family news. It just blurs together. I have even heard of people breaking bones and not being aware of the pain from the break.

Acute Awareness of Emotions: People who are grieving are in acute emotional pain. This pain, most likely, is the worse, intense emotional pain they have ever felt. They know that they are in pain and don’t know what to do with it. Grieving people are highly aware of how other people react to their (the grieving person’s) grief. They know when people are not comfortable with the concept of death and the emotional loss that follows it. They know when others are uncomfortable with intense emotions that are being displayed.

Blurring the Hands of Time: Time is a subjective concept for people who are grieving. On one hand, every minute is a painful reminder that their loved one is no longer with them. The days can drag and their mind is full of the grief and loss that they have just suffered. On the other hand people lose track of time when it comes to non-emotional aspects of their life (eating, drinking water, working out, paying bills, mowing the lawn, etc.).

How to connect with families while they are grieving

Remember that you are seeing people when their bereavement and grief are the most intense. People at this point in their grief journey are not functioning well or at all. Here are some thoughts for you to keep in mind while speaking to families during this time.

1. Be aware of your concept of death: Remember that families can tell when you are not comfortable with the thought of loss. They will be expecting pleasant platitudes because what else do people say? Your families will know when you truly are not afraid of deep emotions, yet are able to guide them through the practical aspects of taking care of business. Word will spread that you understand and care.

2. Listening to your family: When listening to the grieving person tell his or her story, allow silent spaces in the conversation. Silence is helpful but sometimes hard for the listener. It is acceptable to rephrase what you heard from those grieving. This will let the family members know you are listening to them and they will feel understood.

3. Keep checking in with your families: After the funeral, your part in helping them through their loss is completed, but for the family their grief journey has just begun. After a funeral, most people stop talking about the loss and act like it hasn’t happened. By avoiding the loss, people don’t have to deal with the hard emotional issues that surround it. Grieving people want to talk about their loss. This is their grief space. Their loss fills this space. Call the families once in a while or send a note in the mail. This is a marvelous way to provide aftercare, and maintain a relationship with your families.

A memorial website is another great way to keep in touch with families.  These new memorial technology tools do not require great time commitments from your staff. With the proper software, your website becomes the 24×7 employee who keeps in touch with your families.

© 2010 Kelasan, Inc.