Planning a funeral can be overwhelming and stressful, increasing the chance that you and family members will argue and disagree while making all the plans. Luckily, there are a few things you can do to help keep the peace throughout the planning process such as the following.
Always Meet at the Funeral Home
Once your family has chosen a mortuary to hold the funeral in, it's a good idea to have all of your meetings at the facility throughout the planning phase. Many funeral homes have onsite counselors that can be present during your meetings and help ensure that decisions are made from an unbiased perspective and with the deceased always in mind. If a counselor isn't present, bring along your own to guide the family through each meeting.
Just being at the funeral home while plans are being made will help remind everyone why they're there and what the end goal really is. When all is said and done, you should experience less bickering and more compromising when all your meetings are held at the funeral home.
Use Votes to Make Big Decisions
Consider utilizing an anonymous voting system to make big decisions that your family just can't seem to come to an agreement on. Whether it's the kind of music that will be played, who will speak, or what photos will be featured at the funeral, you can have everyone make an anonymous vote and whichever decision gets the most votes is the decision everyone will agree to go with. Everyone can simply write their choices down on a piece of paper and fold them up. Then put the paper in a container and mix the pieces around so it can't be known whose paper is whose. Everyone can read and tally the votes at the same time to get the results.
Delegate Food Prep for the Memorial
If you plan to serve food at the memorial service, you can save yourself and your family members a lot of time and stress by hiring a caterer to handle all the food details. You won't have to talk about the food more than once while choosing a caterer and menu, then pass off the rest of the legwork to the caterer and start focusing on the other more important aspects of the funeral.
If you can't or don't want to hire a caterer, you can have a potluck instead. Ask everyone who will be attending the funeral and memorial service to bring along a dish that reminds them of the deceased. Aside from one dish each, family members who are planning the funeral can still skip the meal service planning altogether even without a caterer.
Share30 April 2018
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