We pride ourselves on the service we provide each family we serve.

Our funeral home provides a full range of funeral service options, from the traditional religious service to simple cremation. Each family is provided with the opportunity to learn about and discuss the wide variety of funeral service options available to them.

Why Have a Funeral??

Margaret Mead, a foremost anthropologist, described America’s increasingly common response to death as follows, “When a baby is born, we rejoice. When a couple is married, we celebrate. And when someone we loves dies, we pretend nothing happened.” Ample research has shown the epidemic of complicated grieving in our society today and the resulting problems from minimizing death’s impact on our lives. Personalized ceremonies provide an outlet for survivors to acknowledge their loss and experience their pain in ways that can be full of meaning. And for many, the presence of the body at the ceremony provides and opportunity to say goodbye and move more directly toward coping with the death.

We feel the best answer to “Why have a Funeral?” is to look at the purpose, and some misconceptions, of the funeral ceremony as explained by Dr. Alan D. Wolfelt, an internationally known grief educator and author.

Purpose of the Funeral Ceremony
Funerals have been with us since the beginning of human history because they help us move from life before death to life after death, because funerals…
*Confirm that someone we love has died
*Help us understand that death is final
*Allow us to say goodbye
*Help us care for the body with respect and honor
*Serve as a private and public transition between our lives before death and to our lives after the death.
*Assist us in creating sacred time
*Encourage us to embrace and express our pain
*Affirm the worth of our relationship with the one who died
*Help us remember the person who died and encourage us to share those memories with others.
*Offer a time and place for us to talk about the life and death of the person who died.
*Provide a social support system for us and other mourners
*Help integrate mourners back in to the community
*Allow us to search for meaning in life and death
*Transform the ordinary in to the spiritual
*Reinforce the fact of death in our lives
*Establish helping relationships among mourners

Funeral Misconceptions
Many people today don’t understand why we have funerals. And what we don’t understand we tend to be skeptical of, even fearful of. Here are some of the most common misconceptions.

*Funerals make us sad. When someone we love dies, we need to be sad. Funerals provide us with a safe, supportive place in which to embrace our pain.
*Funerals are barbaric. On the contrary, meaningful funeral ceremonies are civilized, socially binding rituals. Some feel that viewing the body is barbaric however viewing has many benefits for the survivors.
*Funerals are inconvenient. Taking a few hours out of your week to demonstrate your love for the person who died and your support for survivors is a privilege, not and inconvenience.
*Funerals are too expensive. The social and emotional benefits of personalizes funerals far outweigh their finical costs. Besides, a funeral doesn’t have to be lavishly expensive to be meaningful.
*Funerals are only for religious people. Not true. Non-religious ceremonies still help mourners begin to heal.
*Funerals are rote and meaningless. They don’t have to be. With forethought and planning, funerals can and should be personalized rituals reflecting the uniqueness of the grieving family.
*Funerals should reflect what the person who has died wanted. No. Funerals are primarily for the benefit of the living.
*Funerals are only form grown-ups. Anyone old enough to love is old enough to mourn. Children, too, have the right and the privilege to attend funerals.