By Andrew Hoffman
Hello all and welcome to the third part of how you can personalize your funeral service. In the last two articles, I was talking to you about all the different and unique caskets and how you can use them to personalize your services. Moving right along I would like to focus on the Ying to the Yang of the burial process which is the burial vault. The vault as you know (or maybe you don’t) is the outer container that the casket goes inside of at the cemetery. It is typically made of concrete but can also be made of metal which is used in bell vault construction. I will be focusing on the concrete versions or the burial vault as they are the ones that you can personalize more easily.
How are the vaults personalized, you ask? Well, you can start with the exterior paint color of choice. Or perhaps you would like the colors of a favorite sports team. If the deceased was a huge Pittsburgh Steelers fan it would be Black and Gold. Then, there is the option of having an emblem on the top of the vault lid. Most traditionally, there are religious emblems to choose from such as a Cross or Star of David. You can also have things the deceased enjoyed like fishing, golfing, flowers, etc. A new option of personalizing the vault with photos and pictures is becoming popular. You can literally have a photo and artwork collage of the deceased on the lid of the vault. This may be a theme for the deceased, such as a golfing theme with the 18th hole or a military theme with the American flag. We can do a theme for a police officer with his shield and squad car on the vault lid, or a fireman with a picture of his fire house on the vault lid. The possibilities are endless.
Continuing on, we move to the cremation side of funeral service. Now if you want to talk about personalization, cremation gives you a huge number of possibilities for families to honor their loved one. What I am referring to is the vast, and I mean VAST, number of options of urns. I could also get into the huge number of options available to a family member as to what to do with the ashes of a loved one, but that is another article, so we will stick with the urn itself.
Urns are the receptacle that holds the cremated remains of an individual. One option to personalize these vessels is what they’re made of. Typical urns are made of wood, metal, granite and plastic. Of the wooden urns the species of wood are Mahogany, Cherry, Oak, Poplar, Walnut and Pine. The metal urns are made up of Bronze, Copper and Steel. The granite is just that, granite, but there are different colors and the same for plastic urns. A lot of people are drawn to certain materials for personal reasons, such as if the individual was a wood worker or carpenter. We’ll go into more detail in my next article. Bye for now.
Andrew B. Hoffman is a funeral director at Jeffries and Keates and Keates-Plum Funeral Homes. He is a twenty-two year veteran of the funeral industry.
