Notifying Friends and Family after a Death

The first step in Adelphi, MD cremations is the notify friends and family members of our loved one’s death. In the age of social media, where nothing is sacrosanct and many people just hang their entire lives, including way too much information at times, out in public for the entire world to see, it might seem like social media is the best way to notify. friends and family members of the death of a loved one.  

Social media is not the best way to notify friends and family of a loved one’s death. Neither, for that matter, is a group or individual text message or email. These are impersonal and suggest – even if it’s untrue – a level of callousness and disrespect both toward the deceased person and toward those who are being notified of the death.  

Losing a loved one is deeply personal and will affect each friend and family member differently. Therefore, the notification of a loved one’s death should be made in a way that connects personally with each of those friends and family members, so that they hear you and you hear them and you’re able to share private emotions, reactions, and thoughts without the whole world watching and being involved.  

You need to notify friends and family of the death of a loved one through a phone call or in a video chat. While many traditions surround death and funerals have changed or disappeared altogether in the last twenty years, our human hearts and what they feel and experience have not. Therefore, we need, in the face of loss, human contact and human comfort. Social media, text messaging, and email can’t give that to us at a time when we need it most.  

Since phone calls and video chats are the only way that friends and family members should be notified of a loved one’s death, it’s important that we, while we’re living, created and keep updated a current list of who should be notified when we die. Make sure all phone numbers and video chat information is current – you should review the list at the beginning of each year – and keep it with your important papers, even in a home safe or a bank safety deposit box.  

There will likely be a single family member that makes the initial calls to immediate family members about their loved one’s death. Once those calls have been made, the remaining notifications should be split among the immediate family so that the burden of calling everyone on the list doesn’t fall on one person.   

This process will be emotionally draining for everyone involved, but if one person has to do it all, they will crumble under the emotional weight they will end up bearing.   

Why? Because in the process of notifying friends and family members, these people who are being notified will, not intentionally or consciously, transfer a part of their grief to those who are notifying them. So, in addition to their own grief, the people doing the notifications have extra grief to carry around. And it is impossible for one person to simultaneously carry both their own grief and portions of everyone else’s grief.  

For more guidance on notifying friends and family after a death and before Adelphi, MD cremations, our experienced staff at Donald V. Borgwardt Funeral Home, P.A. can assist you. You can visit 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.