Making Funeral Arrangements

Making funeral arrangements before cremations Greenbelt, MD involves several steps that must be taken once someone has died and continued until after the cremation. It is helpful if the deceased person has left funeral information and instructions, because it will make it easier to do each of these things.  

The first step of making funeral arrangements is make the initial calls after the person has died. The very first call, if the person died at home, is to emergency services or, if the deceased was in home hospice care, to the hospice organization. Hospice will contact the funeral home for transportation of the body; emergency services may or may not do this for you, so if they don’t, you will need to contact the funeral home. You will also need to contact immediate family, close friends, and, if the deceased was employed at the time of death, the workplace.  

The next step is the transportation of the deceased from the place of death to the funeral home. The funeral home will take care of transporting the body.  

If funeral services are to held before cremation, the next step will be to plan the services. If the deceased left instructions for this, that will make this step easier, but if not, a few general elements are part of most funeral services. Funeral home staff will help make the necessary arrangements for the funeral service.  

Someone will need to coordinate the service. Typically, services can include scriptural or literary readings, eulogies, and music that reflect the life of the deceased. You will need to appoint the people who will participate in the service and the order of the service.  

You will need to write an obituary. Since most funeral homes now have digital obituary pages, it will be most cost-effective to have the funeral home put a death notice in the newspaper – newspapers charge by the word, so long obituaries can be expensive to put in the newspaper – with a link to the full obituary on the funeral home’s website.  

Obituaries should include date of death (do not include exact date of birth because it doesn’t take much information for identity thieves to get enough to commit fraud), age, and city and state only. Do not include a street address. Unscrupulous people scan obituaries for houses that will be vacant during funeral services to target them for robbery. Obituaries should highlight milestones in the deceased’s life, include immediate family who died before the deceased, and surviving immediate family. Specify how the deceased’s memory should be honored – flowers or charitable donations – and include funeral service date, time, and location.  

For cremations, you can either purchase a fully-combustible casket from the funeral home for the viewing and funeral service, or you can rent one. If you rent, the body will be transferred to a fully-combustible casket after the funeral service and the body will be cremated.  

After cremations, the cremains will be returned to you and your family. Additionally, the funeral home will supplied death certificates, which you will need to wrap up the deceased’s affairs. Although you’ll have to pay for additional copies, it’s best to get at least 20 copies of the death certificate (if the deceased’s estate was large and extensive, you’ll need more copies).  

Once you have the cremains, you and your family can decide what you want to do with them.  

If you want to know more about funeral service arrangements before cremations Greenbelt, MD, our experienced staff at Donald V. Borgwardt Funeral Home, P.A. can assist you. You can come see us in person at our funeral home at 4400 Powder Mill Rd., Beltsville, MD, 20705, or you can call us today at (301) 937-1707.