The One Thing You May Forget About Dying

You’ve preplanned your funeral service in Roanoke, VA and you’ve gotten all your end-of-life paperwork in order, as well as the legal documents your family will need to take care of your affairs after you die. You’re as ready for death as you can be when the time comes. 

But despite all your preparation for your own death, you may have forgotten a very important thing. 

We spend our lives preparing our families for life. We pass on values of integrity to our children. We teach them the value of a good education. We guide them in learning how to handle money and responsibility. We lead them toward independence by teaching them how to take care of themselves by letting them dress themselves, learn how to clean up after themselves, gain cooking skills, and master doing laundry. 

We educate them about how to take care of a home by teaching them how to maintain the inside and the outside of the house. We pass on the basics of auto mechanics and maintenance when they learn to drive. 

We even talk with them about how to form and nurture relationships, both as friends and as soulmates for life. 

But many of us forget to prepare our families for death. We simply don’t talk about our own deaths, the deaths of close friends, or the deaths of other family members. It is the conspicuous missing element in the knowledge and wisdom we pass down to our families. 

Perhaps it’s because no one ever prepared us for death. In many American households, death is the elephant in the room that no one wants to acknowledge or talk about. If there is absolutely no choice but to discuss death, then the talk is usually away from our families, in hushed tones. 

If our families never prepared us for death, then we probably don’t think about preparing our own families for death. But this is a mistake. 

To be able to talk about death, we need to be comfortable with death. Death is inevitable, and the more we know about death, the less mysterious and, perhaps, scary it is. While you don’t need to immerse yourself in macabre literature to learn about death, you do need to have a basic factual understanding of what happens when we die. 

Once you get this knowledge yourself, you will have opportunities to pass it on to family members when loved ones die. This opens the door to conversations among your own family about death. 

If you take your older children to a funeral where there is a viewing and visitation, followed by a funeral service with readings, eulogies, music, and more, then you may find that discussions follow about how everyone would want their death to be. 

It can start with the simplest things like the music that was chosen or the poems or scriptures that were read. One of the most common things that starts a conversation about death is “The song I want played at my funeral is…” 

Once your family is comfortable talking about what they want for death and knowing what you want for your own death, then they are better prepared for death – yours, others’, and their own. 

For information about arranging a funeral service in Roanoke, VA, our caring and knowledgeable staff at Lynch Conner-Bowman Funeral Home can assist you. You can visit our funeral home at 140 Floyd Ave, Rocky Mount, VA, 24151, or you can call us today at (540) 483-5533.