Importance of Trust
Select a Locally Owned Funeral Home
Of course we would recommend that you select a funeral home that is locally owned versus corporately owned.
We believe that you will find a deeper and more personal commitment to the families in a funeral home that is locally owned. In a family owned business, the only goal is to serve each family with the utmost care.
Decisions are made concerning their business by the owners and not in an impersonal corporate headquarters in another state or even another country by people that don’t have a real feel for what the local families need.
In a family owned business you will have the owners present on a daily basis ensuring that families are taken care of. After all it is the family’s reputation, business and livelihood that are on the line.
Know Who Is Taking Care of your Loved One
What does this mean?
Many families don’t realize that many funeral homes are owned by large corporations and that many funeral homes in a localized area are owned by the same large corporation. In many instances, these funeral homes have decided that it is more cost effective for them to do all of the embalming in a central location or to use a completely separate company to embalm the remains of your loved one.
We believe that is negligent of your trust to do this. You have called upon a particular funeral home to take care of your loved one and you should expect that they are the ones that are doing so. Unfortunately, that is not always the case.
Many large funeral homes use answering services and embalming services to the point that if someone passes away in the night, that funeral home may not even know about the death until the next day when the embalming service informs them about the death.
We believe it is important that the funeral home you select be there to take care of your loved one 24 hours a day 365 days a year. That is what you expect and will receive with Matthews Funeral Home.
The University of Central Oklahoma (UCO) plays a vital role in the development of employees here at Matthews Funeral Home. Many of our Funeral Directors are graduates of UCO.
Experience and Commitment
When visiting a funeral home you need to feel the staff is helpful and listens to your wishes. They also should give advice and options available to you without you having to ask each and every question. The staff who works in the funeral home should realize the families they serve do not deal with death and funerals very often. Therefore, they should anticipate the questions you have and make every effort to make sure that you understand what they will do and what options are available to you. You should not experience any surprises in services or costs.
All costs associated with the funeral are to be disclosed in detail as mandated by the Federal Trade Commission.
When selecting a funeral home to take care of your family and your loved one, you should at all times feel comfortable and also have a deep feeling that the funeral home cares about your family and is willing to do everything in their power to make sure you and your family have a meaningful service to help you in your time of grief and help you celebrate the life of your loved one.
Thoughts about Families Needs When Preparing for a Funeral
Everyone needs to understand that making decisions about funeral services has a profound effect on those left behind to deal with their grief. What we would like to accomplish in this section is to bring your awareness to the point that you are truly thinking about the emotional needs of your family.We all tend to minimize our self worth. We make the mistake sometimes of thinking, “If I make my funeral as quick and easy as possible, I have saved those left behind from their grief.” This is simply not true.
Grief is a process that must be experienced. Everyone will experience the grief process in some degree. Generally, these are the recognized stages of grief:
1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance
Each person will experience one stage or another for longer periods of time than will someone else. Some will seem to skip a stage all together. The important point to remember is we all will experience our grief.
Finding out and thinking about what your family needs is the key to helping them through their grief in a healthy way. The funeral is a very important, sometimes the most important tool for you or your family to get a healthy start to their grief process.
Minimizing your self worth even with good intentions can sometimes lead to a family is not having the opportunity to express their grief and feelings.
Some of the statements we hear from people are:
“I don’t want anyone looking at me after I’m gone.”
Or
“If they wanted to see me they should have come to see me when I was alive.”
Or
“Dad didn’t want a funeral, he just wanted to be cremated and his ashes spread somewhere.”
These statements and intentions are fine if they take into consideration what your family needs. (If you will look at the statements above, the person’s intentions are clear). They are trying to make their death and passing as easy on their family as they think is possible.
We all want to help our family in every way we can. Sometimes we see that a person’s wishes expressed like this can do not meet the family’s needs, and can make the death harder for them.