Organizing a memorial service. Help?

In My Humble Opinion
1

My parents both have dementia and are in a nursing home. While my dad is doing all right (considering the circumstances), my mom is not. Even before they were placed, she wasn’t eating well and over time that has gotten worse, which is a sign her dementia is advancing to its final stages. Hospice has been called and they will do what they can until the inevitable occurs.

Both of them have decided to be cremated and they did buy a burial plot where the cremains can be buried. Other than that, though, no plans have been made. I’ve been thinking a burial service for the cremains immediately after death would be good, with a memorial service to follow after we’ve had a chance to notify friends and family from a wider area of when and where the event will take place

I’ve never had to organize a memorial service though and I don’t really know how to start. While my mom was somewhat religious and did belong to a church for awhile, it’s been many years since she’s gone, and my dad is not religious at all.

I’m an only child and my parents’ siblings are all dead. No other family lives in the area where they live. So it’s pretty much on me to do this. Anyone else have to organize a service, if you did, what did you do?

Thanks for any insight, I appreciate it!

2

Someone at the hospice organization should be able to put you in touch with someone, or the nursing home might have a chaplain on staff that could give you some guidance.

We held a memorial service for my mother-in-law several months after she died. Her body was donated to the medical school, so we didn’t have remains to deal with. (My husband was her only child by the time she died. His only sibling had died several years before.)

You’ll need to decide on a venue. We chose to have it at the retirement facility where she had lived up until about a month before her death. That made it easy for her contemporaries to attend.

Most obituaries, beyond the two-line death notice, are paid nowadays, so you can choose to run the obituary closer to the memorial service date rather than immediately after her death. If you don’t want flowers or want gifts made to a charity in your mom’s memory, you can state that in the obituary.

Regardless of what you say, people will send flowers anyway, so make sure you keep track of who sent what for thank you notes.

Most ministers/chaplains have a standard framework for a memorial service that they will help you adjust to suit your needs: favorite scripture passages or hymns or the like. I was once was told by a minister that he always advised people NOT to choose the deceased’s favorite hymn for the memorial service, lest it be forever ruined for the rest of the family. (I kind of have that problem with one of the hymns that was sung at my sister-in-law’s service. It makes me cry just about every time I hear it.)

It’s entirely optional for you to speak or to allow/encourage others to. For my MIL, my husband did not speak other than to thank everyone for attending. We had a reception afterwards which allowed people to share remembrances.

Gather up lots of photos for display. People really appreciate seeing them and they often prompt stories you will not have heard before.

You’re the best judge of how much input to seek from your dad.

It’s very good that you are thinking these things through now. It’s not fun to be trying to figure all this stuff out when you are also in the midst of grieving.

3

a minor bit of advice: start making a written list of who you’ll want to notify.It’s harder than you think. Having an organized list avoids embarrassment 6 months later when you meet somebody who you forgot, and now have to tell him the bad news, and make up an excuse for not telling him at the time.*

Some people are hard to contact …
–the relatives you only see if there’s a printed invitation to somebody else’s wedding and you sit at the same table for a couple hours,
–cousins who you haven’t seen for 3 years and who moved, but only told your parents,figuring they would pass the news to you
– old friends from your father’s workplace who stopped visiting him at home a couple years ago, but still stayed in contact with regular phone calls, but you don’t remember their last name.
etc,etc

*don’t ask me how I know this …

4

This. You may also need your mother’s address book or Christmas card list to get the names and addresses.

5

I echo what people are saying about contact lists. We used the Christmas card list and heard back from many but not all of them. We sent out a copy of the obituary and invitations to the two things we planned.

We did two things because my father died, was cremated and buried in a town out of state from his home. In the town he had lived we had a memorial “celebration of life.” Basically we rented a local venue (a party room attached to the theater where my folks acted in amateur plays) and had it catered (a friend of the family suggested the company, we got a bid, and went with it). No one made a formal speech because my father would have hated the fuss.

Everyone enjoyed connecting and paying their respects to my mother. She has Alzheimer’s and we were afraid she’d panic, make a fuss and bail on the event after meeting all these people she didn’t remember. She was very calm throughout realizing the importance of the event, and she has developed great covering mechanisms to hide her lack of memory. People would pull us (myself, my brother, and sister) aside and ask: “how is she doing, really?”

People were also invited to the burial (because the two events happened in different states it ended up being two different groups of people attending the two), and an informal cookout afterward (we did this on Memorial Day weekend).

The burial was planned completely by the funeral home, including contacting the military which provided the stone an and honor guard (we knew about vets getting free stones, we didn’t know the honor guard was automatic), and getting a local minister to say some words. If I’d had my way we probably would have dispensed with the minster.

Because of the planned two different events and the need for the family to travel some distance they were held a month apart. My fathers remains were not buried until well after he died. The funeral home will hold the cremains indefinitely, so there is no rush to bury with cremation.

6

Thanks for all the suggestions so far. I really appreciate it.

8

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