Two Situations in Which You Should Order a Small and Simple Headstone

About Me
Sharing The Burden: Ideas For Funeral Arrangements

Hello, everybody. My name is Lois, and I am in my seventies. It might be hard to believe, but I attended my first funeral when I was sixty-five years old. Since then, I have suffered the loss of quite a few family members and close friends. In fact, I have now organised over a dozen funerals. As someone who had been so blessed, it really came as a shock when I first experienced the trauma of making funeral arrangements whilst still finding time to grieve. It really taught me the importance of having an empathetic and creative funeral director that can help share the burden and honour your loved one appropriately. Hopefully, this blog will help those who, like me, had no idea about the enormity of the task a funeral organiser faces. I trust that the ideas within will prove comforting and inspiring during this difficult time. Thank you.

Two Situations in Which You Should Order a Small and Simple Headstone

26 March 2021
 Categories: , Blog

Whilst there are many circumstances in which it is best to order a large and wonderfully-elaborate headstone, here are two situations in which it might be better to pick a small and simple one.

You will not have lots of time to clean the headstone

When choosing headstones, many funeral home clients forget to consider how often the particular style they want will need to be cleaned. If, for instance, it is a very long drive from your home to the cemetery, and your visits to the grave will have to be quite brief, then you must pick a simple and small headstone that will not take long to clean.

If in these circumstances, you were to select a thick and tall headstone that featured many engraved sections, you would not only need to spend a long time wiping down the entire headstone but would also need to use cloths, brushes and cotton buds to get the dirt out of the engraved sections. This could take a long time. As such, if you can only spend ten minutes at most tending to the grave each time you visit it, you would probably find that, over time, the headstone would just get increasingly dirty.

Conversely, if you pick, for example, a two-foot square headstone that does not have any intricate images carved onto its surface, you should not have to spend more than a few minutes of each visit wiping it down in order to keep it clean.

The budget is small and you want the service to be big and memorable

Whilst ideally, it would be wonderful to give every deceased person an elaborate funeral service and a large, beautiful headstone, this is not always possible. If, for example, the funeral budget you are working with is quite small, and you are hoping to invite and cater to as many people who knew the deceased as possible, then the funeral home owner might advise you to pick an inexpensive, simple headstone. This could be the best decision if the deceased did not care much for material possessions, but valued the people in their life and preferred to spend their disposable income on social events rather than trinkets. In this scenario, prioritising the organisation of a somewhat expensive funeral service and opting for an affordable but tasteful headstone would probably be more in line with the deceased's outlook. 

For more information about headstones, contact a funeral home.