In the past, funeral services tended to be standardized ceremonies which rarely attempted to reflect or memorialize the deceased’s life and memory. While there is nothing particularly wrong with the typical standardized ceremony, many people find them too generic to leave a lasting impression on the memory of the deceased. For this reason, people are increasingly planning funeral services which are more personalized in an attempt to memorialize the deceased in a ceremony that reflects their personality and life. Thankfully, there are an endless amount of ways that a family can personalize funeral services to reflect the life of their loved one.
Here are some simple ways that you can personalize a funeral service.
1. Decorate the area with personal touches. This can include setting up photographs of the deceased, decorating the room with their favorite personal objects, or even placing snippets of their favorite books or poems (perhaps even something they wrote themselves!) around the area for people to read and remember.
2. Personalize the music used during the funeral service. Typical funeral service music has often included hymns or other worship songs played on a church organ. However, if you feel that your loved one would rather have something else playing, you can personalize the service by choosing music that they enjoyed or would have found more appropriate.
3. Create a slideshow montage of the person’s life. One way to inspire reflection on the person’s life is to create a slideshow with photographs that start at the beginning of their life and reflect various stages in their life. You could even include photographs of their children, indicating that they not only left behind wonderful memories but children who are loved and cherished.
4. Encourage the sharing of memories by passing out blank cards. Funeral service are often a time of remembrance and recollection about the deceased. You can encourage these memories to be shared and passed on by passing out blank cards and telling people to write down a favorite memory they had with the deceased. These cards can be passed along to the family, which may help with their grieving process, or simply displayed around the room at a funeral service for everyone to read.
5. Personalize the setting of the funeral service. You don’t have to have a funeral service at a licensed funeral home or memorial service building. You can have the funeral service just about wherever you would like. You could even host it in your home! Allowing yourself to consider the option of a more personal setting, as opposed to a ‘strange’ funeral home, may be the personal touch that you are looking for in your funeral service.
When you can’t plan it yourself
Sometimes, the burden of planning a funeral service by yourself is simply too much. This could be due to stress, a lack of time, or simply the inability to properly plan an event like a funeral service. If you are unable to plan the service entirely by yourself, you could look into companies which provide templates for funeral services. These templates make the process of planning a service much easier, and some companies can even provide over 1,500 templates to choose from, so you don’t have to worry about your ceremony being standardized or cookie cutter.
