Heritage Coach Dealer Blog USA

I’m a curious person. One of the things I always wonder about is how some of our customs became popular. I wonder a lot about our funeral customs and how they’ve changed over the last few hundred years and even before that. How did they embalm bodies? How did the families get the body to the cemetery without any funeral cars? If you have similar questions, why not check out the Museum of Funeral Customs in Springfield, Illinois?

The Museum of Funeral Customs is designed to give people a better understanding of death and the traditions associated with it. The museum collects and preserves a number of funeral objects that showcase and explore how mourning rituals occur in various cultures and various time periods. It’s an educational facility that is designed for interested people of all ages.

Although death is a universal characteristic of all living beings, humans are unique in that they grieve following the death of a loved one. As such, the Museum of Funeral Customs strives to help people deal with the unexpected event productively and humanely through exhibits and other related materials.

The Museum of Funeral Customs offers a number of tours throughout the week and the weekends. Adults can get in for $4 and children can get in for $2 or less. There are also special senior rates. If you’re in the area, why not pay this interesting facility a visit? I know it’s on the itinerary for the next time I’m in Illinois.

Since the 1990s, more and more people have been doing funerals for loved ones without the help of a licensed funeral director. Family members are taking a more active role in preparing the body of their deceased loved ones and they are getting more closure from the death as a result. For some, it’s a way to save money on the rising costs of funerals. For others, it’s a special way to tell your loved one “goodbye” one last time. Some people even express the desire to have family members take care of the situation if it’s possible.

Lisa Carlson is the President of the Funeral and Memorial Societies of America. Her husband recently passed away and she took the initiative to do a funeral for him. After doing some shopping around, she found a funeral home that took care of the embalming for $700. She also purchased a cardboard casket for $60. That’s much less than the typical funeral costs that include a tombstone and burial plot. Afterwards, she said she enjoyed doing this for her husband because it became more personal. As a result of her experiences, she created a handbook of local laws and permits for others who want to do this type of thing for their loved ones.

Would you be able to do something like this? Could you forget about the traditional funeral service and procession in a line of funeral cars to the cemetery? Or would you rather leave it to the professionals? We’d love to hear your comments or stories related to this topic.

Here are some more facts about funeral directors, including some of the things they must do in order to get licensed in the industry.

• Many funeral directors embalm bodies themselves. However, a large number of them hire a licensed embalmer to take care of this job for them.

• Funeral directors take care of any paperwork involving a person’s death. They submit papers that are necessary so the family can collect life insurance if there was a policy. They also take care of obtaining copies of the death certificate for the family. If the deceased was a veteran, they also take care any paperwork for family benefits.

• Funeral directors will work with people who want to plan their funeral in advance. They can do as much of the planning for you or as little of the planning that you want them to do.

• As for training and education, college programs in mortuary science are usually between two and four years long. The American Board of Funeral Service Education oversees the various mortuary science programs. Classes that are included in a mortuary science major include physiology, anatomy, restorative art, accounting and many others. Counseling and ethics are also important classes for funeral directors.

• In most states, a funeral director must complete a one-year apprenticeship after receiving their education in order to become licensed. They must also pass an exam.

Would you make a good funeral director? Could you be compassionate with grieving families and take care of everything from the obituaries to the funeral cars and everything in between? Tell us your thoughts.

The funeral industry is one of the more secure and recession-proof industries in the nation. However, it takes a special person to become a funeral director. A person needs to be compassionate, understanding, business savvy and willing to work with dead bodies in order to be successful. The profession is also quite misunderstood. Following are some facts about funeral directors so you can understand them better and hopefully have a new appreciation for them.

• Funeral directors who are licensed to embalm have better job opportunities than those who are not trained in that area.
• Funeral directors must be licensed in the state in which they practice. If they relocate, they must receive licensing in the other state before practicing their profession.
• In the past (and even sometimes today), funeral directors are also called morticians and undertakers. Those names have negative connotations, though. That’s why “funeral director” is the preferred term.
• Funeral directors arrange all parts of the funeral in conjunction with the family, including the times of wakes, who performs the ceremony and the number of funeral cars involved in the procession to the cemetery.
• In addition to that, funeral directors also prepare the obituary and arrange for it to be placed in the newspaper.
• Funeral directors arrange the burial in conjunction with a representative from the burial site. If the burial is in another state, they also arrange the transportation to make that happen successfully.

Interested in being a funeral director yet? Come back tomorrow for more facts about funeral directors and the profession as a whole!

These days, you can spend as little or as much on a loved one’s funeral as you want to. With DIY funerals, green funerals and all the other options, prices can range in the hundreds to the thousands of dollars. But in order to estimate how much you want to spend, you have to know which items you want. Following are some decisions you’ll need to make in order to figure out how much you’ll be spending for a funeral.

Type of Service
Are you going to choose an open casket, closed casket or memorial service for your loved one? The costs are different for each one. The memorial service is the least expensive because you can have it in your home or somewhere else that seems appropriate.

Cremation vs. Burial
A cremation costs less than a burial and it’s sometimes cheaper because you can save on other costs, such as embalming and casket costs.

Family Cars
Funeral homes generally charge for the funeral cars you want involved in the procession. Usually, there is a family car, a hearse, and a lead car. But you can add more to this or do without the family car if you want to.

Caskets and Urns
Caskets are obviously more costly than urns. With a casket, you also need to consider the cost of a burial plot.

Funeral Homes
Some funeral homes are owned by large corporations while some are small, family-owned facilities. Many times, the smaller ones will offer a price break, but they can also be more expensive.

The best way to estimate the costs for a funeral is to start researching prices before you need the services. This helps you make more logical decisions when the time actually comes to use funeral services.

Funerals are the last time we have a chance to say goodbye to someone. For the most part, they are solemn occasions where people cry and hang their head in sadness. But there are some funerals that celebrate the person’s life more than mourning their death. These are the ones that personalize the ceremony to make it more meaningful. Here are some suggestions for making a funeral more of a personal goodbye instead of the heart-wrenching occasion that it usually is.

• Bring in your deceased loved one’s favorite song or songs on a CD. Most funeral homes will have equipment to play this over the speakers in the room so everybody can enjoy it.
• Have some helium balloons that mourners can release at the grave. Ask somebody to say a few words about the deceased before letting the balloons fly into the air.
• Put together a picture board that includes the deceased having fun with various friends and members of the family. There’s no better way to personalize and celebrate a person’s life than to have pictures of them having fun for everybody to see.
• If your deceased loved one was a classic car enthusiast, ask the funeral director about renting a couple old cars to use instead of the traditional funeral cars. If you have a family member with classic cars, that’s a good option, too.
• Read their favorite scriptures at the ceremony or a particularly poignant passage from one of their favorite books.
• Hold the funeral somewhere unique. If they enjoyed the sea, have the funeral at a marina. If they were a church member, have the funeral at their church.
• Ask the funeral director about passing by your loved one’s favorite local place on the way to the burial site.

Do you know what the Funeral Consumers Alliance (FCA) is? If not, they are the people you should thank for making funerals and burials dignified and affordable. Following is a list of just some of the things they do to accomplish this goal.

• The FCA serves as a monitoring agent for funeral trends and practices. If it finds abuses, the organization exposes them to avoid further abuse.
• The FCA offers consumers the resources and information they need so they know about other options they can use besides a funeral home.
• The FCA is a consumer advocate group that lobbies for legislation and reform when it is needed in the funeral industry.
• The FCA provides credible and accurate information to the media about the funeral industry and death and dying in general.
• The FCA gives guidance to local funeral businesses about planning, memorials and other issues in the industry.
• The FCA helps keep more than 100 funeral planning societies in contact so they can exchange information and ideas regarding the industry.

The FCA works with national organizations to provide options for grieving families, including burial options, funeral cars and other necessities for a dignified funeral.

As you can see, the FCA is there for you. It’s also a non-profit organization that strives to help people understand the concept of death and make them respectful of it.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you died and nobody knew about it? Of course, your immediate family would find out one way or another. But what if your friends and co-workers had no idea? Would the funeral home be nearly empty on the day of your funeral? Would your friends start hating you because you simple stopped contacting them?

One blogger thought about this intently one day. He came up with the perfect solution: Notifying the contact list on your phone by text message in case of death.

Cell phones do pretty much everything you need them to do these days. Why not make an added feature that can tell when you’re dead? Once your pulse stops, it would send a customized text message to your friends to tell them you are no longer “of this world.” Or better yet, it could send a prerecorded voice message to them that you created before passing away.

The blogger had other things on his mind, too. What would happen to social websites and other online accounts once you die? Could you have a master list of account passwords that one trusted friend could have so they could shut down your accounts? Or would that be one unique way of becoming immortalized by having an Internet presence for eternity? Who would make the funeral arrangements and decide on such things like the casket, burial and funeral cars?

I’ve thought about these things before. But now that I’m married, my wife knows all of my wishes. I even have everything written down in my “Death Notebook” so know exactly want to do. If you don’t have one already, I suggest you start one today. It’s never too early to start planning for your own death.

In the last decade or so, some major corporations thought it was a good idea to “buy up” a bunch of independent funeral homes because of their financial certainty. After all, everybody has to die, right?

Of course that’s right. But what they don’t have to do is die at early ages like our grandparents did. People are living longer these days. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the average person born in the 1940s lives for 68 years. That number changed in 2001 to 77 years. That means the 1940s generation will likely be sticking around for another 10 years or so before major surges in death take place.

You can chalk that up to better medical car, better nutrition or just the “circle of life.” Either way, it’s a fact of life….er, death. As a result, the funeral home business has been, for lack of a better term, dying.

People are also choosing less expensive options when it comes to burial and funeral services. Cremations are much less expensive than traditional burials and people are choosing more cost-effective products to offset the average $5,000-6,000 cost of a typical funeral that includes a grave, casket, funeral cars and other features.

According to Joshua Slocum, the executive director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, the funeral business is no longer recession-proof. “What that model does not take into account,” he says, “is that more and more consumers are unwilling to be led around by their pocketbooks and charged outrageous prices.” And with corporations taking over the once family-owned funeral homes, high prices have also been a problem in this changing industry. He went on to say that the “cookie cutter approach” that corporations use in some industries is not effective in the funeral industry where personal attention and services are the backbone of success.

Have you ever been asked to write a eulogy for a family member or friend that passed away? If so, you’ve probably agonized over the process for hours as beads of sweat dripped down your forehead. But anybody who has ever given one of these memorial speeches will tell you it’s not easy. In fact, it might be the most difficult thing you ever have to do. One survey even shows that people are more afraid of public speaking than they are of death. According to Jerry Seinfeld, that means if you’re at a funeral, you’d rather be the person in the casket rather than the person giving the eulogy.

If someone has asked you to do a eulogy, though, you can’t refuse. So here are some basic things to remember to ensure your speech is memorable in a good way for those who are mourning.

Be honored. When somebody asks you to do a eulogy for someone, realize that it’s probably the greatest honor to be asked. Out of all the choices, the family chose you. That’s because they know you’ll do a good job and because they know you’ll want to say goodbye in a memorable way. This is the first step to calming your fears.

Understand the concept of a eulogy. The basic purpose for a eulogy is to make people remember the person you’re speaking about. Bring that person back to life (figuratively, of course) through your words and recreating moments that you remember vividly. Think of a few stories and attributes of the person that everybody can relate to.

Start with a personal story. The best way to start a eulogy is to start talking about how you met the deceased or a funny story that involves both of you. Talk about what you’re going to miss about the person, what you learned from the person and even what you admired about them. Remember, it might be a funeral, but it’s acceptable to laugh about stories as a celebration of the person’s life.

Do some research. Before you write your final copy, talk to a few family members and friends and ask if they have any funny stories or other things they’d like you to mention. Ask about special accomplishments, awards or hobbies. Include as much of this as you can in your eulogy.

If you recognize that a eulogy is basically the family’s way of saying goodbye through you, the task becomes more of an honor than a chore. By following these examples and being yourself, you’ll have the guests laughing and crying at the same time all the way out to the funeral cars and the gravesite.