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FeedFond Farewell
Sparing your family the grief of funeral arrangements.
(page 1 of 3)
T
he call came at 5 a.m. Reaching in the dark for the phone, I knew my father was dead. Six months earlier, a doctor told him to put his affairs in order. Pancreatic cancer takes no prisoners. At the time, I was living in Los Angeles. My parents were in Florida. The call was from my uncle in Devon. “Take the next plane to Palm Beach. You have to help your mother make arrangements,” he said.
Arrangements? The subject was taboo in my family. Death and dying were discussed in whispers or, preferably, not at all. I arrived in Florida totally unprepared. Suddenly, I was no longer the baby of the family, a role I’d happily assumed for more than 40 years. Someone had to identify my father’s body, accompany his casket and my mother to Philadelphia, pick out his coffin, and purchase his grave marker. That someone was me.
Papers had to be signed, checks written, relatives notified—all of it accomplished in a state of profound grief. Was I doing the right thing? Is this what Dad wanted? I’ll never know. I was afraid to ask.
“Adult children should talk to their aging parents about their final wishes long before a crisis occurs. If you don’t, you’re going to have a problem,” says Joseph Levine, president of Joseph Levine & Sons, a longtime funeral services provider on the Main Line.
Levine also advises people to consider pre-need funeral arrangements starting at age 55. Doing so protects against rising costs and inflation, lifts the financial burden from survivors, and ensures that the deceased’s wishes are carried out, thereby avoiding conflict within the family.
Another benefit of a pre-need funeral arrangement is that all paperwork is in one safe place. “Many years ago, a woman made arrangements that included her contract for a burial plot at a Delaware County cemetery,” Levine says. “When she died, her children contacted the cemetery and were told that there was no such contract on file. Apparently, the woman had lost the paperwork long ago, and the children didn’t have a copy. Fortunately, we did.”
Making one’s final wishes known involves a myriad of decisions. Do you want to be cremated or buried? Scattered from the top of the Eiffel Tower or kept in an urn in Avalon? Embalmed or dust-to-dust? Many choices have religious connotations—and even then, there are variations. For instance, cremation and embalming are against Jewish law. “This comes with the understanding that nothing should be done to speed up or slow down the process of the body returning to earth,” Levine explains.
Still, some Jews choose to be cremated, and many are embalmed. “We have to ask permission to embalm,” says Levine. “It’s only required in certain circumstances, and in many cases, it’s not necessary.”
Choosing a casket can be more intimidating than walking into a Porsche showroom. Orthodox Jews insist on a plain pine box and a simple linen shroud. Every Jewish funeral home has them, but they also have the high-priced spread—gleaming rosewood caskets with plush silk lining befitting Sleeping Beauty.
Squeamish about coffin shopping? Donohue Funeral Homes of Newtown Square and Wayne offers the convenience of choosing a casket online. Other funeral homes that offer website shopping include Chadwick & McKinney and William C. McConaghy, both in Ardmore.
