If you’ve recently cremated a loved one and are looking for creative yet respectful ways to dispose of the ashes, an ash scattering ceremony is a good choice. Although not every public or private area allows for this kind of option, these locations are some of the favorites for scattering ashes and saying goodbye.
Garden or Flowerbed: There’s no reason why you have to travel to the ocean or far away to send the proper respects to the deceased. One of the most popular places to scatter ashes is in the deceased’s garden, orchard, or flowerbed. Because it’s your own land, you don’t have to worry about getting permission, and you can erect any kind of monument you want afterwards.
There are many reasons to delay a funeral. Maybe it’s a difficult time of year for family members to get time off work or to make travel arrangements. Perhaps the deceased wished for a springtime service. Maybe you don’t currently have the money to cover funeral costs.
Whatever the reasons, it’s becoming more common to opt for direct cremation or direct burial immediately following death—and to hold a formal “funeral” or memorial service sometime in the future. You can wait weeks, months, or even years to do this, which gives you greater flexibility and more options when it comes to saying goodbye.
One of the nice things about funeral options today is that families have choices when it comes to how they want to take care of a loved one’s final remains. Burial, cremation, body donation, sending your body into space—with enough money, you can do almost anything to make your final farewell special.
While most of us will probably skip the space step, burial and cremation remain the top choices across cultures and religions. Cremation is less expensive and generally comes with less fanfare than burial, but burial itself can also be streamlined thanks to options in DIY casketry and direct burial.
From time to time, those of us at iMortuary find great resources from within the industry we are delighted to share. Une Belle Vie Memorial Urns, is a company we admire for their commitment to customer service and quality to the consumers they serve online and over the phone. They empathize with their customers’ challenges in managing estate finances and administration; to help families facing these tasks, they have developed a free downloadable guide to managing a loved one’s finances after they’re gone.
When a loved one passes, the family’s first and most pertinent task is to organize the funeral and/or memorial, which can be daunting during this time of mourning. After the funeral, families often struggle with what to do next regarding their loved one’s possessions, property and, most importantly, their finances.
Une Belle Vie Memorial Urns, a company that offers unique and custom cremation urns, offers a free downloadable step-by-step guide to managing a loved one’s finances after they are gone. The guide includes how to contact the appropriate government and financial agencies, how to close or transfer accounts, and how to claim death benefits.
Especially during a time of mourning, everyone can use some guidance and direction.
Although it might sound preemptive and a bit macabre to plan your own funeral, this kind of advance arrangement is becoming more and more common. Not only does pre-planning a funeral allow you to have more control over what happens to your remains after you pass, but it can also save your family quite a bit of grief and money.
Planning your own funeral can be as simple as making a list of your wishes and ensuring your family knows where it is, or as complex as paying for everything in advance (even going so far as to purchase the casket or arrange every detail with the funeral home). There is no wrong way to go about it, but here are a few suggestions for getting started.
The unexpected funeral costs that arise after a death often put a strain on family finances. With a total price tag anywhere from a few thousand dollars to over ten thousand dollars, paying for a funeral out of pocket is like asking a family to buy a new car. This is a cost few families can cover outright, which is why it’s no wonder that the question of whether or not you can make funeral expenses deductible on your taxes is one that regularly pops up.
The easy answer is no. For the majority of families, the costs they must lay out for a funeral are like any other major purchase (along the lines of a car or new furniture). Funeral expenses are your responsibility, and the government won’t give you any tax breaks come April 15.
The cremation process is difficult for many people to picture happening to their loved one’s remains. Unlike burial, which gives a feeling of calm quiet and eternal rest, cremation is hot, messy, and oftentimes frightening. You might be afraid that the body won’t be treated with respect, or that the incredibly high temperatures required to break a body down are uncontrolled and dangerous.
While historical cremation practices might hold this to be true, modern-day cremation and cremation ovens are quite safe, sanitary, and practical. The cremation process is regulated so that it becomes more of a scientific breakdown of bodily remains than a blazing inferno, with the result that it is actually more decorous than the slow decay of a body underground.
The cremation process is an ethical, low-cost way to dispose of both human and animal remains. Not only can you avoid the costly steps associated with traditional burial by choosing cremation, but you can also receive the ashes afterward, to be buried or contained in an urn for safekeeping.
For decades, families have opted to cremate both their beloved pets and their loved ones. Although the two processes are similar, there are some differences between human cremation and pet cremation that should be noted by anyone considering either option.
The behind-the-scenes aspect of the funeral industry is one that remains a mystery to many people. Often because we don’t care to know the gritty details of death and burial, and sometimes because we aren’t sure what kinds of questions to ask, or what funeral directors and funeral homes do to care for your loved ones isn’t always widespread knowledge.
One of the often overlooked details of burial is what happens during the winter months in colder climates, when the ground is frozen. Frozen turf is difficult (and expensive) to dig into, especially at the depth required for human burial. When combined with other harsh winter hazards like unplowed roads, unsafe driving conditions, and the snowfall on the cemetery itself, the results are not conducive to immediate burial. That’s why many of the colder states (think Alaska and North Dakota) have contingency plans in place.
Burial in Cold Climates
Few states have laws in place to regulate winter burials. Some, like Minnesota, Wisconsin, and New York, require burial in the winter regardless of weather conditions. Others might allow you to opt for a “cold storage” option to avoid the heavier fees of opening a grave in the winter.
In this instance, “cold storage” isn’t as terrible as it seems. Funeral directors may keep bodies in cemetery crypts or inside the funeral home until a date when the ground thaws enough to allow for burial. This practice is one that has existed for hundreds of years. If winter burials are difficult in our age of backhoes and jackhammers, it’s easy to imagine how hard it would have been in centuries past. And because older generations didn’t have access to morgues and other indoor body storage options, it was common to keep bodies in a crypt until spring.
Advance funeral planning is becoming an increasingly popular choice for people who want to handle the burden of burial before death occurs. With so many different funeral pre-plan packages to choose from and the opportunity to relieve your loved ones of the costs and stress associated with burial, it’s no wonder why.
Because it is impossible to predict death, the only way to ensure that pre-planned funerals work is to bind everything in a legal contract or agreement. Every contract is a little bit different depending on where you go and what type of service you choose, but one thing that everyone should be aware of before signing on the dotted line is what the fine print says regarding cash advance items.
If you’ve recently cremated a loved one and are looking for creative yet respectful ways to dispose of the ashes, an ash scattering ceremony is a good choice. Although not every public or private area allows for this kind of option, these locations are some of the favorites for scattering ashes and saying goodbye.
