Designing Your Funeral

There are two facets of the design process. First, we ask you to consider how you wish to honor and celebrate the life. When those important decisions are made, we’ll turn to the issue of how you wish to care for the physical remains.

How to Honor a Life

How to Honor a Life

It’s about bringing those you love together, at a time of loss. It’s a natural thing to do, and over time, has become a socially-expected practice. More importantly, a funeral or memorial service, whether traditional, or contemporary, is the first step in healing.

You can have your service anywhere, and any way, you want. Your choices include the place of celebration, day of the week, and time of day; the musical selection, what prayers will be said or songs you’d like sung. We can arrange to have doves, butterflies, or balloons released at the close of the service. Keepsake gifts of wildflower seeds or a tree seedling can be given. We’re here to help you create the most memorable and meaningful service to honor your loved one.

Burial or Cremation

Burial or Cremation?

Your next consideration focuses on choosing between burial and cremation. Usually, people are clear on this point. In fact, your loved one may have told you, or someone else, exactly how they wish to be cared for. But it can be a hard decision for some families, especially when the wishes of the deceased were never clearly stated. If that's the case, please know we're able to help you come to the perfect decision for your loved one, and for you.

Once you decide, the finer details come into focus. If you've chosen burial, then selection of the casket, vault, and desired cemetery follows. Naturally, we’re here to help you.

If cremation is your choice, then you'll need to make the next decision: whether the cremated remains will come home with you or be placed in a mausoleum niche or buried on the cemetery grounds.

In some communities, there's the option for a 'green burial.' If that's what your loved one would prefer, we'll help you select an environmentally-friendly choice.

Graveside service

Graveside service

A graveside or committal service is typically held immediately following the funeral service, but it can also be a small intimate gathering of those closest to you.

Visitation

Visitation

This time is set aside for family and friends to gather to say goodbye, while being in the comfort of those closest to them. We can personalize the visitation to be as unique as your loved one with a tribute video, items or displays that were important to your loved one, or simply pictures displayed. We will work with your family to design the perfect gathering experience.

Traditional Funeral Service followed by Cremation

Traditional Funeral Service followed by Cremation

Many families find meaning and beauty in a traditional funeral service. With a traditional service combined with cremation, you can still choose to have a final viewing, visitation or wake, and a funeral service. However instead of in-ground burial, the funeral will be followed by cremation. 

Depending on your wishes, the cremated remains may be either returned to your family for storage in a temporary container, an urn, scattered, or interred in a columbarium. This option will include fees for the funeral services as well as the fees associated with the cremation itself.

Celebration of life

Celebration of life

We work with our families to design a service that honors their loved ones with personalized register books, memorial folders, and keepsakes. 

The Celebration of Life event can be done as close or as far away from the death as needed, to give you and your family more time to plan the perfect way to honor the life you are remembering.  

Use our facilities to host your Celebration of life and let us worry about making the perfect memorialization.

What's Next?

Now that we've given you the basics, it's time to reflect more on exactly what is appropriate for you and your family. If possible, gather everyone together to speak of their feelings and desires.

Still looking for inspiration? Speaking with a professional funeral planner will help to clarify your thinking. Reach us at (304) 366-4671.