Today’s clients have a whole new set of expectations for funerals. As a result, funeral home directors are being prompted to think outside the box. One critical area that needs adjusting is the funeral service itself. Continuing to promote traditional funeral services will only allow you to appeal to a shrinking segment of your potential [...]
What do people really think when they drive by your funeral home? Do they think, “I hope it’s a long time before I ever need to call a funeral home,” or “What a miserable business to be in. How do they do it day in and day out?” As funeral directors, we have a lot [...]
Throughout all of history, people have expressed their joys and sorrows through music. They celebrated births and marriages, praised and honored their God or gods, and mourned the death of their loved ones by putting melody and rhythm to their feelings. With song, harmonies or the beat of drums, these mourners joined in the procession [...]
Today, as a funeral director, you have a new-found freedom to introduce unique and meaningful elements into funeral services. More and more people are becoming comfortable with actively celebrating the life of their loved one during the funeral as opposed to the expected traditional service. This opens up effective ways for you to help grievers [...]
As you help grieving families prepare the funeral service for their loved one, explore their religious background with probing questions. Even if people are not particularly religious as adults, when death hits close to home, many of them grab onto the symbols of faith they remember from their childhood in church, synagogue or mosque. These [...]
The long-held tradition of having a hushed funeral service with family and friends whispering and tiptoeing around may have been formally broken. Respect for the deceased has been recast, replacing passive mourning with active celebration. When did this happen? Funeral celebrations have actually been around for centuries in various cultures and in certain religious groups, [...]
That is what the Golden Gate Funeral Home does very effectively, according to their happy clients. Featured on The Learning Channel’s pilot show, “Best Funeral Ever” Sunday, January 6th at 9 EST/10CST, viewers were able to discover a whole new approach to funerals that makes everyone re-think the way funerals have traditionally been done. The [...]
The intense emotions expressed at funerals can range from stoicism to uncontrollable sobbing and loud wailing. How do you handle the overt emotions of total strangers who have gathered in your funeral home to pay respect to the deceased? The fact is, you can’t control them—not per say. In a way, you are like a [...]
In the process of trying to be sensitive to your grieving family, it is possible to be overrun by them. This is not something they do intentionally. Their world has been turned upside down, so in self-preservation, they try to deal only with the crisis and not “sweat the small stuff.” As a result, they [...]
Most people associate funerals and setting up funeral arrangements with dread, which makes sense, since these are things they have to do immediately after losing a loved one. You know that the family’s deep grieving is on standby, and you are dealing with the mixed emotions that precede it. An innovative way to help the [...]
