Though many feel that designing your own funeral service is a difficult activity combined with emotional pain, taking time to design your own service might also be considered an act of compassion for the future well-being of your family.
Pre-planning your funeral should be, but often isn’t, a natural part of your personal and family life processes. It provides you and your family with time to discuss end-of-life decisions in a calm atmosphere where grief is not yet part of the final equation. Pre-Planning is a caring option that honors and celebrates your life, and often allows a great deal of comfort to your family.
You are invited to explore these comforting yet needful reasons for you to consider pre-planning your own funeral service.
- Preparing a plan.
A Funeral Plan, involving decisions you have previously discussed with your family, will greatly ease the grief and sadness your family will feel after you have passed away. If your wishes are unknown when you pass on, confusion and disagreement may create greater pain for your family, during an extremely painful time. It is better to have a well-conceived Funeral Plan and disperse it and discuss it thoroughly with all family members.
- Organizing Financial Responsibilities
These responsibilities, part of the Funeral Plan, should cover all funeral costs. Funeral insurance and trusts also help with such costs, but whatever strategy is used, it is crucial that sufficient funds be left for family members to access for this important time of good byes.
- Designing a meaningful funeral and internment
A funeral is an important event for a grieving family as it provides the beginnings of a sense of closure, enabling the family to start the healing process. The grieving family benefit emotionally and socially by honoring your life with a meaningful ceremony. Without a well-known Funeral plan, it can be difficult for the family to design a funeral in a time-limited manner, especially during the pain of grieving and sorrow.
- Planning together
Creating a Funeral Plan together helps your family understand what matters to you most, and, of equal importance, the family is provided the comfort of knowing they are honoring your last, and perhaps most important, wishes.
- Assuring burdens are lessened at end of life.
Taking care of funeral arrangements is the caring option to do for your family. It is comforting to know that you have done all you can do to ease their burden. And you can be assured that they will appreciate that your caring for them continued after you are gone.
- Planning Ahead: The Most Important Decision
Jewish funeral services usually take place shortly after the loss of a loved one. Pre-planning for the funeral allows families time – which is now precious and limited— to know what to do, in all areas — based on the previously planned decisions in the Funeral Plan.