What Type of Funeral Service Should I Have?

Types of Funeral Services

Planning what type of funeral service you should have is a relatively strange exercise because it’s like you’re planning a get-together in your honor that you know you won’t get to attend. However, leaving a well-detailed plan for your funeral service for your family will alleviating them of making difficult decisions at a really difficult time.

There are a handful of different types of funeral services you can choose from, and each has its benefits.

Which Funeral Service is Right for Me?

Whether it’s your religion, culture, tradition or style, a funeral service says a lot about you after you’re deceased.

Traditional Funeral Service

This would be what most Americans are used to, a funeral service held at a funeral home or a place of worship, where friends and family members will come to honor you and pay their respects.

While the service itself will differ greatly as far as rituals due to religious denomination, remember that a general funeral is going to be a place where your memory will be honored, and friends and family can come together to share their loss. That means they’ll want to share their love, grief and respect, and really, it’s their first step toward adjusting to the loss of your presence.

Private Funeral Service

Some people might choose to have a funeral or memorial that is open to just specific people that they knew during their life. This means that their private funeral would be by invitation only, with just a few friends and family members.

Memorial Service

A memorial is essentially a funeral service without the deceased body being present. This can also have a lot of different variations to it, according to family or religious tradition, but one can certainly request specific procedures done if they’re planning their own funeral service.

Graveside

Many times, people choose to have funerals held near the gravesite, prior to burial. This might be a service held in a nearby chapel inside the cemetery, or right next to the actual grave itself.

Wake or Visitation

A wake is basically a visitation period in a funeral home or even inside a person’s home, where over the course of varying lengths of time, people can come and pay their last respects to the body in the casket. The background and history behind this type of funeral service is rooted in ancient times when people felt the need to watch over a body to make sure the deceased didn’t regain consciousness.

No matter what type of funeral service you choose for yourself, talk to a funeral director at a funeral home like The Gardens of Boca Raton Cemetery & Funeral Services, and let them help you plan out how you’d like everyone to pay their final respects to you.