Funeral Planning: Adding A Celebration of Life

Planning the funeral services of a loved one is never an easy task. Whether your plans involve community events, religious traditions, or an intimate family gathering, it can be easy to lose touch with the happier times spent with your loved one in the midst of grief. One way to ensure that funeral plans include the grief of those mourning and also highlight the full life lived by your loved one is by adding a celebration of their life to your services. 

There are many different ways to add a remembrance of life into funeral planning, and one of the most common and popular ways is with the addition of a memorial service to the more traditional ways that your family mourns. Oftentimes funerals or wakes will be private affairs attended by those closest to the departed person, and these are usually solemn services that allow you to more privately grieve. By adding a memorial service to the funeral plans for your loved one you can allow a wider group of people to gather and say goodbye to your loved one. You are also making sure that as you mourn you aren’t stuck in the sorrow of them being gone, but are actively remembering what they were like while still alive. The kind of memorial service you create can depend on the community that your loved one was a part of and how many people attend, but a common practice at memorial services is for anyone who wishes to share stories from the departed person’s life. This acts almost like a communal eulogy, but with the aim to specifically remember the person as were while they lived their life to help mourners grieve them in death.

There are also more nontraditional ways to add the celebration of life to your funeral services. Some families forego the standard funeral altogether and instead opt for a more open event where every mourner comes and shares different aspects of their relationship with the loved one. From favorite homemade meals cooked to share with everyone, renditions of their go-to karaoke song or their favorite tune from childhood, to a photo album or journal passed amongst guests, the addition of this communal celebration of life allows those in mourning to share their favorite moments from loving the person who has passed, and in turn gift a new memory to the others also grieving. 

Celebration of life services, regardless of how your family chooses to name the additional funeral event, is meant to be any gathering that connects you with your dearly departed loved one through a remembrance of their life and a celebration of it with other people. Whether you have dinner and drinks while sharing memories and favorite items, pile in a car and travel to their favorite place, wake up early and volunteer and their chosen charity, or any other event of your choosing, we hope that this additional event brings you closer with your loved one and helps ease the grieving process after they’ve passed by helping you recall the best moments of their life.

— K. Chandler