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 family deal with this jumble of feelings is to recognize that certain emotions are attached to family habits and events, like family reunions and holiday gatherings. Connected with these emotions are particular aromas and tastes. Most people associate certain foods with comfort, happiness, and family. Too often, the prospect of a funeral disconnects them from those feelings and memories.
People mentally compartmentalize many things in their lives. Their jobs fall into one compartment, their family in another. In a similar way, when there is a death in the family, the funeral arrangements become compartmentalized in an isolated place in their minds that is separate from their emotions and any thought of happiness or comfort. This is a defense mechanism.
Your job is to bridge that gap and show that it is okay to feel emotions—but not just sad emotions—happy memories, too. Helping your grieving family remember happy times with their loved one early on in the process will enable them to relax and make decisions that they will be satisfied with after the funeral is long over.
When you have your first meeting with the family, ask them about what their lost loved one loved to do. What hobbies, sports, activities. When did they remember him or her being the happiest? Were there family times, like vacations, reunions, holiday meals?
Did he or she have favorite dishes? What was typically served at the special meals?
Make a list of their family’s favorite activities and comfort foods. Offer this to your grieving family to use as a guide for preparing the post-funeral gathering. Remind them that these were the things that made their loved one the happiest. Suggest that they include some of the family’s favorite comfort foods in the menu. If there are photos of their loved one’s favorite activities, to make a collage or scrapbook, or even a short slide show of vacation pictures, etc.
By emphasizing the happier times with their loved ones, you can jump-start the healing process for your clients and enable them to see how the funeral is not a dreaded event that they have to go through, but a celebration of who their loved one was and why he or she was so precious to everyone.
Now, when you discuss the funeral arrangements, you already have an emotional connection with your clients. They will trust you more and be more open to your suggestions and to hearing the harder things you have to say.
