The Family Plot Blog
Video: Personalization Products from Funeral Home Gifts
Funeral Home Gifts started offering tribute blankets to funeral directors in 2008. Over nine years, they expanded their line of photo-based personalized memorial products to include casket cap panels, portraits, keepsake pillows and photographic urns. In this video, Karl Weisenbeck, Division President of Funeral Home Gifts, discusses these items on display at the 2017 ICCFA convention and expo. The photographic woven blankets are very popular...
Video: Everdays Gathers Supportive Family and Friends
Mom's dog-eared personal phone book in the kitchen drawer is a thing of the past. How will you contact all of the family and friends who need to know about a death in the family? The answer is right there in your smart phone, with help of the Everdays app. Everdays introduced the Everdays Partner Dashboard to funeral directors attending the ICCFA convention and expo. It allows the funeral home to easily create and give elegant digital memorial...
A New Way to Scatter Cremated Remains
When the cremated remains he was scattering ended up dropping in clumps on his shoes, Scotty Crandlemire knew he needed to invent a better way to disperse ashes at a memorial service. After that negative memorial experience, he created an answer to the problem: AngelAire release urns. "As with most inventions, necessity is the mother of invention," said Crandlemire at his booth at the ICCFA expo. "I had a bad experience scattering ashes.... I...
Video: How Answering Services Help Funeral Directors
When a loved one dies at 2:00 a.m. and a family member calls a funeral home, who answers the phone at that hour? While some funeral directors answer the phone themselves 24/7, in many cases, a midnight call will be taken by an answering service. In this interview with Kathy Kelley with ASD, the Answering Service for Directors, she explains the benefits for both families and funeral directors. ASD has been in business since 1972, specializing in...
Video: Discreetly Scatter Ashes with Walking Stick Urn
Wout Brink came from the Netherlands to show his brilliant idea to folks at the ICCFA convention. His TOLAD aluminum walking stick doubles as an urn that discreetly scatters ashes over the course of a one-mile memorial hike. In the video below, he demonstrates how it works. TOLAD stands for Totem Of Life And Death. Every time the staff hits the ground, it releases a circle of cremated remains. You could take the cremated remains of a loved one...
April 29: Downsizing Talk to Delta Kappa Gamma
Delta Kappa Gamma, the International Society for Key Women Educators, is holding its Theta State convention in Albuquerque, New Mexico, April 28 through 30, 2017. On Saturday, April 29 at 3:45 p.m., Gail Rubin will present "Keys to Downsize and Organize Your Life." Here is the description of the 45-minute talk: You don’t have to be old or dying to downsize. When you’ve lived in the same place for a decade or three, stuff accumulates. We get...
Fun News About Funerals – Really
The 2017 Frozen Dead Guy Days festival was another huge success! More than 20,000 people flooded the streets of Nederland, Colorado for this crazy celebration of the dead and the frozen. We had more than a thousand people, a 25% increase over last year's number, who came to see the documentary "Grandpa's in the TUFF Shed" and cheer on the couples who played The Newly-Dead Game®. You can watch videos of all three games through this Family Plot...
How to Make Moving Less Stressful
The New York Times ran an article, "How to Avoid Stress When You're Moving" by Jen A. Miller, which had lots of great tips for planning ahead and being prepared for one of life's most stressful events (almost as stressful as a death in the family). Moving has lots of moving parts, made even more stressful when you have to move out sooner than you originally planned. A helpful checklist sidebar of what to do when provided detailed guidance in a...
Video: Bourbon Tasting and Preneed Funeral Insurance
Offering free bourbon and chocolate tastings is an effective way to get people to visit your trade show booth. The fine folks at Global Atlantic Financial Group hit all the right notes at ICCFA in Nashville. In this video, Maureen Carney, Director of Business Development - Sales for Global Atlantic, shares how they are able to get 6% growth on their preneed insurance policies. A note to those who preplan and prepay - in most states, you buy an...
What You’ll See at the 2017 ICCFA Expo
Fresh from attending the 2017 International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association convention and expo in Nashville, TN, here come the videos! Learn about new developments in the funeral industry on display at the exposition through the videos coming online through The Family Plot Blog and our YouTube channel. Upon entering the doors to the exposition hall, you immediately run into the greeting booth put together by FuneralOne. It's a...
Fun Photos from the ICCFA Convention
The annual convention and expo of the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association (ICCFA) opened yesterday in Nashville, Tennessee. The event was originally slated to be held in Charlotte, North Carolina, but was moved when that state passed its "Bathroom Bill" discriminating against transgender people. Here are some fun photos taken at the expo on Wednesday. More to come soon...
April 23: ABQ Death Cafe
The next Albuquerque Death Cafe is scheduled for Sunday, April 23, from 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. at Gail Rubin’s home. The objective of the Death Cafe is “To increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives.” It’s an interesting, unstructured conversation – open and free-flowing with no specific agenda and respectful of all points of view. It’s an opportunity to discuss what’s on your mind or in...
Favorite Film Harold and Maude Holds Time-Tested Laughs
In The New York Times article, "A Movie Date With My Younger Self," film writer Mark Caro asks if “Harold and Maude,” a favorite film from his youth, can still hold its charms all these years later. The 1971 movie received bad reviews in The New York Times and Variety when it first came out, yet it became a cult classic on the college circuit. Happy birthday to Bud Cort, who played Harold! Today is his 69th birthday. Has he aged as well as this...
Checklist: Memorable Life Celebration or Funeral Must-Haves
Funeral Checklist Wondering what information you'll need to create a moving, memorable memorial service or funeral? Use this handy checklist of questions to have answered BEFORE a loved one dies. Many of these questions are directed to "you," but you can direct them to someone else. Have arrangements been made for cremation or burial with a funeral home/cemetery, cremation service provider, or body donation service? What is the contact...
Respond to Friends’ Pet Loss with Sympathetic Calls, Letters
Today's Dear Abby column addresses how important it is to respond to friends who experience the death of beloved pets. Grief over pet loss can be more intense than reactions over people who die. If you see news about a friend's loss of a pet on Facebook, write a supportive comment. Even better, pick up the phone and talk to that person. If you are a card-sending person, send a sympathy card. There are cards specifically created for pet loss....
These Newly-Dead Game Couples Tested on Last Wishes
Couples scrambled to sign up to play The Newly-Dead Game® at the 2017 Frozen Dead Guy Days festival! What's The Newly-Dead Game? The Newly-Dead Game was conceived as a way to help start funeral planning conversations in a fun, non-threatening way. The game is based on elements of the classic TV show The Newlywed Game, but the questions in The Newly-Dead Game revolve around how well the couple knows each other's last wishes. Four questions are...
Why You Want a Physicist to Speak at Your Funeral
You Want a Physicist to Speak at Your Funeral A physicist can provide non-religious perspective on a death. For those who want a funeral or memorial service without any mention of religion, you may find this reading to be helpful. It comes from a transcript of a speech given by writer and performer Aaron Freeman on NPR News' "All Things Considered." You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving...
‘Patient’ is a Compelling, Honest Look at End-of-Life
One of the most compelling interviews I've done on A Good Goodbye Radio was the February 2014 conversation with Dr. Jeffrey Piehler. His New York Times essay about making his own casket while facing Stage 4 prostate cancer, titled “Ashes to Ashes, but First a Nice Pine Box” was incredibly powerful. The process of hand-building his casket with a woodworker friend revealed important lessons about life, love and death. Patient: A Surgeon's Journey...
Crazy Festival Gets Quirky Media Coverage
Frozen Dead Guy Days is a most unusual festival, and it generates international media coverage. The Daily Mirror in the United Kingdom featured the festival in this Weird News story, 'Enjoying being alive by celebrating death' at the Frozen Dead Guy festival. It was especially gratifying to see a mention of The Newly-Dead Game®, which first debuted at Frozen Dead Guy Days in 2011: Some of the activities are designed to test essential skills,...
Time to Be Cool at Frozen Dead Guy Days!
This weekend, the wild and wacky Frozen Dead Guy Days festival takes place in Nederland, Colorado. Yes, there is a real frozen dead guy at the center of it all, kept in a dry ice-filled crypt in a shed in this tiny mountain town west of Boulder. The festival includes a parade of hearses, coffin races on a snowy obstacle course, costumed polar plunging, frozen turkey bowling and salmon tossing, lots of live music, alcohol, and much more -...
Five Ways to Make Your Death More Eco-Friendly
As baby boomers start facing their own mortality, the idea of eco-friendly funerals is becoming more widespread. Have you seen the statistics about the staggering amount of resources used in conventional burial? According to National Geographic, “American funerals are responsible each year for the felling of 30 million board feet of casket wood (some of which comes from tropical hardwoods), 90,000 tons of steel, 1.6 million tons of concrete for...