1. Cost

Cremation is a cost-effective funeral option. Depending on the type of ceremony you choose, cremation can be more cost-effective than a burial would. When pre-planning their funerals, people are conscious of the costs involved. They don’t want to pass on a financial burden to their families.

2. Environmentally Friendly

Burial has a high environmental cost. The gravesite will need to be maintained, releasing emissions. Furthermore, embalming fluid can damage the surrounding environment, including waterways.

On the other hand, cremation won’t produce any ongoing emissions. Planting a memorial tree will allow you to offset cremation emissions while commemorating the life of your loved one.

3. Change in Societal Attitude

Over time the societal and religious attitudes towards cremation have changed. This is especially apparent in younger generations. Increasingly, they want the funeral to celebrate the life of their loved ones. As we’ll discuss, cremation creates more flexibility for families, allowing them to create the perfect farewell.

4. Simplicity

Cremation will take the complications out of planning a funeral. For example, you won’t need to choose a gravesite or organize a headstone. This will allow you to spend more time with your family during this difficult time.

5. All Family Members Can Attend

Due to the nature of a burial, the ceremony needs to occur shortly after your loved one passes away. Typically, you’ll need to have the funeral within ten days, to help manage the decomposition of the body.

Not all family members will be able to attend the funeral within such a short time frame. Thankfully, funeral homes can organize the ceremony to be live-streamed. But this won’t provide the same experience as attending in person and being able to hold hands with your family members. Ashes, though, can last for years, giving you plenty of time to arrange the right time and place for the ceremony.

6. Remaining Close to Your Loved Ones

Following a burial, you will need to visit the gravesite to be close to your loved ones. This can make it difficult to move house.

On the other hand, you’ll be able to take the urn with you when you move. Sometimes, urns can be passed down through the generations, keeping the memories of your loved one alive.

7. Creating Jewellery

Some people opt to turn a small portion of the ashes into jewellery, creating necklaces or rings. This will allow you to carry the memory of your loved ones with you at all times.

8. Flexibility

There are multiple ways that you can use ashes, depending on what your loved one would have wanted. For example, you can sprinkle the ashes in a special location. Another option is to inter them in a cemetery. Alternatively, you can choose a biodegradable urn. This can be placed under a memorial tree.

Conclusion

Increasingly, people in Australia are choosing to be cremated rather than buried. There are several reasons for this, from the lower cost to the flexibility to give your loved ones the farewell they wanted. Because of these benefits, the trend is likely to grow stronger.

Necessary Information Immediately When Planning a Funeral

When you are planning a funeral service, you need to make sure that you provide the following information:

● Full name, occupation, religion, and address of the deceased
● Date of birth and place of birth
● How long they’ve lived in Australia
● Full name of the deceased person’s mother (including maiden surname) and father
● Full name of spouse(s) from all marriages (both living and deceased), as well as place and date for those marriages
● Full name and ages of any children (both living and deceased)

This information will remain confidential with your funeral director but is important for when they help you fill out any necessary paperwork for the government and other related bodies. Then they can help you draw up any documents that are necessary. The funeral director can also help you here by assisting in notifications after a death has occurred, though there are people that you will want to contact on your own.

What to Do Within One Week of a Death

There are some agencies that you will need to speak to on your own after a loved one has passed away. Some of these organizations include:

● The Solicitor or Trustee that has the deceased person’s Last Will and Testament, as well as the Executor.
● If the deceased was receiving benefits, Centrelink, Veteran’s Affairs, and overseas pension agency need to be contacted.
● Any business partners, employees, or employers
● Go through any future medical appointments to cancel them
● Any care agencies or services.

During this time, you should also look for essential documents including any licenses for gravesites, memorial plots, or crypt agreements. You should also look for any pre-planned funeral arrangement documents, insurance, or funeral bonds. These are essential for planning a funeral.

Throughout the Next Month

Other things that you need to take care of include:
● Title change for any of the deceased’s estate’s jointly owned assets.
● Handle anything that needs to be taken care of at the motor vehicle registry.
● Cancel any utilities and speak to a landlord, if applicable.

If you need any help in this process, a funeral director can give you a clear idea of what you need to take care of after your loved one as passed away.

Conclusion

Integrity Funerals is a premium funeral home that strives to make this process as easy as possible for grieving families. By educating people on the essential documents to arrange a funeral, the family will have fewer issues to deal with during the process. This time is difficult enough to deal with. This is why it’s so important to offer valuable information for families.

Civil Funeral Services

If your loved one didn’t have any real relationship with a religion, you may want to consider choosing a civil funeral service instead of a religious one. Civil funerals are unique in the fact that while they may not be centered on a religion, you can add as many or as few religious elements as your loved one would want for their funeral. These types of funeral services can be held wherever the family wants to have the ceremony. With a civil funeral service, the family will come together to create a special service that truly honours their loved one. You can custom create a format that is as unique as your loved one is.

Religious Services

Religious services are more traditional services that follow the guidelines of the specific religion your loved one was a part of. These can be comforting services as they rely on traditions and rituals that loved ones may find solace in during this period of mourning. If your loved one was active in their religion prior to their passing, you should contact the place of worship that they regularly attended to have them perform the services for your loved one. If they didn’t have a place of worship, but would like a religious service, a funeral director can help you find the right place for the funeral service.

How to Choose Which One is Better for Your Loved One

Which option is the right one for your loved one? The answer really comes down to what your loved one’s final wishes were. The decision can be incredibly easy if a loved one clearly stated their last wishes in a will or was a devout follower (or not) of a religion. However, if it isn’t clear, then you need to figure out which option will best represent them. If they aren’t part of a religious community, you may need to find a place of worship that will perform the services anyways. If the loved one didn’t have any affiliation with religion or clearly state that they don’t want a religious funeral service, anyone can perform this type of funeral, including yourself.

Conclusion

At Integrity Funerals, we want people to fully understand their options when planning a funeral service. You want to be able to create a funeral service that will truly represent the unique individual that your loved one was in life. You can choose between having a civil or religious service, or you could create a unique service that has both secular and religious elements.

“I’ve never done this before. I don’t really know what to do.”

This is the confused, often tearful call we hear all the time. And that’s OK. Looking after making the final arrangements for someone we love isn’t something we want anyone to have to do, but when you do, there are a lot of people there to support you when you need it.

As funeral directors, we have done this before, and we do know what to do. We know that it’s harder to contemplate this when it is someone close to you and we want to do everything we can to make it easier.

There are some things you will need to do, and I want to make it a bit more clear here what you have to do, what you can choose to do, and what you can leave until you are ready.

Firstly, you will have to choose a funeral home. I know it’s hard to think about phoning around, getting quotes, and figuring things out, but the most important thing is to feel comfortable with the people, company and funeral home you are dealing with. You are entrusting them with the care of your loved one and they should respect and honour this when they are talking to and meeting with you.

Sometimes you’re loved one will have already pre-arranged their funeral with a certain funeral director and that will help with this decision.

While it’s hard to think about the money, let’s be honest, your loved one would not have wanted you to be financially strapped to give them a funeral you can’t afford. Nor do we as a funeral director want to be chasing you for payment of your account – that makes all of us feel awful.

So when you are talking to a funeral director, they should be nice to you, and try to figure out in their discussion with you what you want and what your budget is. Not an easy ask when you are already in a emotionally raw way, but we’ll do our best.

What we will do, is absolutely everything we can to lighten your load. We’ll liaise with hospitals, doctors, and coroners. Basically whoever we need to speak to in order to get your loved one cared for appropriately, that’s who we’ll talk to.

We’ll complete all the paperwork we can for the cremation or burial, the registration of the death, and we’ll even do as much as we can to help you with celebrants or clergy to conduct the service, memorial cards, photo tributes, the works.

You can choose what sort of farewell you want. Don’t let anyone tell you that you have to do things a certain way. While there may be religious and cultural requirements, and you should talk to your priest or cultural leader about this. But if you want something small and private, or a large and boisterous farewell, it’s your choice.

What we as the funeral home can’t do is let everyone know. This is often the hardest job. How do you tell your siblings that mum has passed away? Obviously there will be people you will have to tell yourself. It might be best to make a quick list to put them in order of priority. You’ll probably need to take a break between telling people. That’s okay. You need to look after yourself too. Once you have told a couple of people, you might be able to get them to call others. Do what you can to lighten the load. As they say, a burden shared is a burden halved.

After the funeral service, whatever type you have, is often the hardest. What do I do now? While there are lots of practical things that will need to be done, and I’ll talk about some of that in another post, there will be varying degrees of urgency to those things. With regards to your loved one, I always encourage a family to take their time to do what is right for you.

If you’ve opted for cremation, what do you do with the ashes? Unless you know already from discussions with your loved one what they wanted to happen, there is no harm in waiting. Wait until the right time to scatter, wait until the right time to have the ashes interred in a memorial site, wait until you see the perfect urn to place the ashes in. You will know when the time is right.

For those of you who have chosen burial, again there is no rush to arrange anything with the gravesite until you are ready. Whether you have a full monumental headstone erected, or just a simple plaque, these things can take time to make, so you won’t have them on the grave the week after the funeral anyway. Make sure the words are right, decide if you want a picture, monuments are even more involved, and you are spending a lot of money on these. Make sure it’s right, when you are ready to. You can still visit the grave and put some flowers there until you do.

So while there are things to do right away, don’t fee that you have to do it all right now. Take the time you need when you need to, to grieve, to feel regret, anger, sadness, even happiness.

In the end, you’ve taken your first steps on a journey none of us want to take when someone we love dies. And while it’s important to keep taking those steps, there’s nothing that says how long your journey will take or whether you will get to different parts of your journey at the same time as others you know. Each day, each hour, sometimes even each minute, is another step along the path.

The most important thing to remember is that you aren’t doing it on your own. There will be others to help you at every step along the way. It won’t always be the same person, you won’t always even know they are there, but they are there all the same.

And if you know someone on this journey, don’t think that they are already through it just because they look okay. Be that silent support, even if you don’t know that they need it. Because we all need someone sometimes.