Honoring And Remembering

Do we need shoes?

When a death occurs, even when ‘expected’, your brain goes into vapor lock. There are a million questions coursing through your mind but you can’t remember any of them. If that sounds familiar then you’re in good company. It proves the frailty of our human condition and is the most common and normal reaction to the news of the death of someone you love and who loved you back. 

Everybody only gets one mother and one father, and it doesn’t matter if they’re young, old or if their death was sudden or followed by a long illness. It still feels like someone just reached in and squeezed your heart. Those feelings are the same when our ears hear for the first time that any family member or friend is gone but our brain can’t react.

It’s very important for you to know that there are not any decisions that you need to make right away.

The almost crushing anguish that you feel is the very heavy price that we pay for loving someone and having them love us back. But you know that you wouldn’t have traded it for the world. Textbooks call it grief; it’s what we feel on the inside. Mourning is what we show on the outside. Two sides of the same coin if you will. And although it feels as far from normal as you’ve ever felt in your life, it becomes the new normal for a while. Anyone who’s ever experienced what you’re going through right now can remember what it was like for them. People that care about you will offer to help or to visit or run errands or answer the phone that won’t stop ringing. Let them.

Only by profoundly celebrating life; by honoring and remembering life can we make room to love again. Through the depths of our grief and our despair we can find new hope again . . . new life again . . . and new relationships again.

Next steps

If you’re not sure what to do next, call us.  That’s why there’s been a sign on the front lawn for over a hundred years that says funeral parlor.  It’s what we do and we’re good at it.  We’ll guide you through the next steps.  And it doesn’t matter if it’s two in the afternoon or two in the morning or on a Tuesday or on a Sunday. One of our most important jobs is to help you to bring order out of chaos and to give you the time that you need to gather up your family and your thoughts. Everybody who works here has suffered a loss in their own family. And although every life and every loss and every relationship is as unique as our fingerprint we remember what it was like for us.

Our Life Celebration Home is the place where people go to honor and to remember the lives of people who have made our community a better place to live.

We want to help you to begin healing . . . one moment at a time.