Funeral Planning Checklist

The first few hours

Very little is genuinely urgent. The person can stay where they are for a while, and every funeral home in the country is used to a family who is not ready yet. If you need an hour in the room, take the hour.

1. 1

   Get the death pronounced

   In a hospital or nursing home, the staff handles this and will ask you which funeral home to call. At home with hospice, call the hospice number, not 911. A nurse comes out, makes the pronouncement, and disposes of the controlled medications. At home without hospice, or if the death was sudden or unexpected, call 911.

2. 2

   Check for prearrangements before you choose anything

   Many people prepay or preplan and never mention it. Look for a funeral home folder in the filing cabinet, a cemetery deed, a plot certificate, or an envelope marked with final wishes. Ask the oldest sibling and the person who handled the last death in the family. If the family has used one funeral home before, call and ask whether there is a record.

   Finding a prepaid plan an hour before the meeting saves a great deal of money and a great deal of second-guessing later.

3. 3

   Choose a funeral home and call them

   You may call more than one. Federal rules require them to give you prices over the phone if you ask, and to hand you an itemized general price list when you sit down. Ask two places for the cost of the exact service you want and you will usually find a real difference.

   Once you choose, they will collect the person, usually within a couple of hours, at any time of day or night.

4. 4

   Tell three people, and ask them to tell everyone else

   Pick one person on each side of the family and one friend, give them the list, and let them make the calls. Repeating the sentence twenty times in one evening is the part families describe as the hardest, and it is entirely delegable.

5. 5

   Handle only what will not keep

   Pets need feeding. Medication in the house should be secured. If the person lived alone, lock the house and take the mail in. If organ or tissue donation was their wish, the hospital or the state registry has to act within hours, so raise it now rather than tomorrow. Everything else keeps.

Day one: the funeral home meeting

The arrangement conference usually happens the day after the death and runs sixty to ninety minutes. It is where nearly every decision gets made at once, which is why arriving with the facts written down makes such a difference. Bring one other person with you, and let them take notes.

What you will be asked to decide

Burial or cremation. Casket or urn. Whether there will be a public viewing. The date, time and place of the service. Whether there is a visitation the night before. Where the obituary runs. How many certified death certificates you want. Who is being named as the informant on the certificate.

If the family is split on burial versus cremation and the person left no instruction, the funeral director can hold the decision for a day. Ask. It is a common request and it is better than deciding at the table.

Two sentences worth saying out loud

“Can I take the price list home and call you in the morning?” and “What is the cost of this without that item?” Neither is rude. Funeral directors hear both every week, and the good ones will help you cut the package down.

Day two: words, people and printing

The service date is now fixed, and everything on this day exists to meet it. Work down the list in order, because the obituary and the program both have deadlines that other people control.

For the obituary, start from a finished one rather than a blank document. The step-by-step guide walks through the six parts in order, and submitting it to a newspaper covers deadlines and what the paper charges for. The order of the service itself is set by tradition more than by taste, and the standard sequence is worth a glance before you talk to the clergy member.

The program is the item families most often leave until the last evening, and it is the one with a printing deadline attached. What goes on each panel is a short list. If you would rather not fight with a Word template at eleven at night, Reposa asks you the questions and lays out the program, the obituary sheet, matching prayer cards and the slideshow as one print-ready set.

The house-sitter is not paranoia. Published obituaries and service times tell anyone reading that the family will be out of the house for two hours on a known day.

Day three: the day of the service

By now the decisions are made and the day is mostly logistics. Assign each of these to a named person the night before, out loud, so nobody is looking around for whoever was supposed to do it.

Pack a small bag: water, tissues, a phone charger, a large-print copy of anything anyone is reading aloud, and a plain envelope if you are giving the officiant an honorarium. Ask the funeral director what is customary in your area; they answer that question constantly and will not make it awkward.

Family usually arrives about an hour ahead for a private viewing and to be seated. If guests are unsure what is expected of them, funeral etiquette answers the questions people are too polite to ask you directly.

What to hand to someone else

People keep saying let me know if there is anything I can do, and they mean it. The reason nobody helps is that nobody is given a specific task. Assign these by name, by text, without apologizing for it.

Paperwork to gather

Collect these into one folder as you find them. You will not need most of them this week, but hunting for them twice is worse than gathering them once.

The funeral home normally reports the death to Social Security. A surviving spouse or dependent child may be eligible for a one-time payment of $255 and, separately, for survivor benefits. Both usually take a call to Social Security, and the $255 has to be claimed within two years. The exception is a spouse already receiving benefits on the record of the person who died: Social Security switches those payments to survivor benefits once the death is reported. For a veteran, the DD-214 unlocks military honors at the graveside, a burial flag, a government headstone, and burial in a national cemetery at no cost to the family.

Costs, and the questions that lower them

Funeral costs vary enormously by region and by choices that are easy to make quickly and regret slowly. The pattern is consistent: burial with a viewing and a full service is the most expensive path, direct cremation without a viewing is the least, and the biggest single swings come from the casket, the outer burial container, the cemetery plot, and how much of the funeral home package you buy.

One caution that matters more than the price list: whoever signs the contract is personally responsible for the bill, even if everyone expects the estate to pay it back. Decide deliberately who signs.

The two weeks after

The week of the funeral is loud and the week after it is silent, and most families find the second one harder. Nothing on this list has a real deadline.

Thank-you notes are the one that generates guilt out of proportion to the task. Three sentences is a complete note, and wording you can copy removes most of the difficulty. Nobody is counting the days.

You are allowed to do less than this

Read the list above as a menu, not an obligation. Families put themselves through a great deal in the belief that the size of the funeral says something about the size of the love, and it does not.

You are allowed to skip the visitation. You are allowed to have no viewing. You are allowed to hold a short graveside service now and a proper gathering in the spring, when everyone can travel and the ground is not frozen. You are allowed to buy the plain casket. You are allowed to ask the funeral director to read the eulogy if nobody in the family can stand up. You are allowed to have no service at all, if that is what the person wanted.

The parts people remember years later are small and cheap: the photographs, one honest story told well, and the fact that everyone was in the same room. Spend your energy there and let the rest be ordinary.