Posts Categorized: Marc’s Musings

It’s true that more people are choosing cremation today. Sometimes following the cremation there may be a memorial service or there may not be one.  Sometimes there is a very personal gathering of family at the graveside to say goodbye and sometimes there is a boat chartered out into the waves of Lake Erie…any funeral… Read more »

Nineteen years ago a wonderful thing happened in our lives…we were given the chance to be parents just one more time. On Saturday, the first day of being an “adult” and the beginning of the last year of being a teenager, Makaila chose to spend the day with her parents and go to the Festival Theatre… Read more »

I read a good article about helping children grieve. The article talks about how we as parents tend to protect the innocence of our children from the realities of death by keeping them away from funerals, viewings and the dead. Although the desire to protect our children is understandable, the reality is that death is… Read more »

There was a moment of panic this morning when I realized that August had crept up on me and I felt that I wasn’t ready! For as long as I have had children in school, summer has been defined as the period of time between the last day of school in June and the first… Read more »

Despite the changes that I have seen in the world of funeral services, there does remain one consistent component and that is the importance of music. I don’t think that I have ever been involved in a single funeral service where there hasn’t been any music played.  The music that we like is a true… Read more »

Growing up, there were times of the year when our extended families would come together…one of them being the summer picnic. Because we didn’t travel far or often back then (going to London was a big thing), the summer picnic was a significant event.  Everybody who came was well dressed…my mother and my aunts all… Read more »

As I sit at my desk getting ready to write this musing, I am remembering the many “last days of school” that took place in our house over the years and the special ways that we celebrated it. It’s funny how things change over the years. I was raised on a dairy farm just outside… Read more »

And so the question was raised “I’m nervous going to a funeral home when someone dies. What am I supposed to do?” This is an answer from a lady who lost her husband… The best thing to do at a funeral is just go. I didn’t know the majority of the people who were at… Read more »

When someone dies, much of the concern that we show is directed to that person’s family, and rightly so. But there are significant people in everyone’s life who will also grieve a loss…those people who we call “friends”. Webster’s Dictionary includes the definition of friend to be a favoured companion and in that vein, it… Read more »