4 Ways To Honor Your Loved One By Celebrating Their Life
When you lose someone very important to you, it is an overwhelming and challenging experience. Not only are you faced with losing this loved person, but you also have to figure out their final arrangements. With obstacles like costs, Covid-19, and geographic distance from other loved ones to consider, dealing with all the logistics while you’re mourning can be just about impossible. We want to make a few suggestions to help you celebrate and memorialize your lost loved ones.
Throw a Party In Their Honor
Celebration of life parties are more common now than ever, with many baby boomers planning their own celebration of life parties. These can be a much more fitting way to celebrate a loved one than a traditional funeral. While funerals are very serious rituals intended to give grief a place to be expressed, a celebration of life parties are more about honoring the spirit of the deceased person.
Here are a few examples of celebration of life party themes to consider.
Bucket List Parties
If your loved one died unexpectedly, this can be a great way to honor some of the experiences they missed out on. If they always wanted to try something but didn’t have the chance, such as skydiving or visiting a particular monument or venue, you can plan a celebration that includes or fulfills this unchecked “bucket list” item.
Scavenger Hunt
The idea here is to have all those who are celebrating their loved ones go on a short adventure. You can create a list of the deceased loved one’s favorite foods, places, and art; guests then venture off in pairs and take selfies in the locations, with or near the foods and art, and celebrate the lost life by experiencing its highlights.
Favorite Fiction Costume Party
If your loved one was a huge fan of period romances, rocky horror, anime, or just about anything else, a costume party themed around their passion is a great way to highlight their passion and help those mourning them to experience it first hand. Sharing the things we love with those who matter to us is something everyone enjoys, why shouldn’t this be celebrated beyond life?
Commission a Slideshow or Video
Often when we’re mourning it’s cathartic and helpful to re-experience our best memories. There are many funeral homes and video producers who are able to turn your photos, social media video clips, and the person’s favorite song into a memorial video or slideshow that captures the personality, interests, and affection of your loved one.
One of the great things about this option is that it’s not only a way of experiencing your treasured memories but a way of sharing them with others. Merely talking about your loved one often can’t get the message across like an audio-visual story can. Best of all, this is something you can revisit any time you feel that you need to. It’s a way to keep your loved one’s memory alive and accessible to friends and family for years to come.
Get a Permanent Reminder
Permanent memorials are in no way a new idea. Thousands of monuments, works of art, and structures have been built to honor the dead going back millennia. However, your reminder can be a lot simpler, less expensive, and more personal. Here are a few ideas about permanent reminders you can make for your lost loved one.
Get a Tattoo
Tattoos have become a much more common and accepted means of self-expression in recent years. Memorial tattoos, in particular, have become a very popular way to remember our beloved dead. There are hundreds of styles and concepts behind memorial tattoos out there, and many tattoo artists will help you come up with a unique custom design that incorporates important symbols of your loved one.
Commission a Portrait
Many artists these days work primarily from photos, so if you want a piece of art to commemorate your loved one, and have photos of them, it’s never too late to commission a portrait of them. Many artists and services specialize in this kind of memorializing art. Making your lost loved one a permanent fixture in your home, or envisioning moments they missed with them included is a common practice to help with the loss of a loved one.
Plant a Tree or Perennial Garden
Planting a tree in honor of a loved one, or over their cremated remains, can be a very powerful way to celebrate a loved one. Especially if you can plant their favorite tree, tending it can become a way of celebrating and working through your grief around the loved one. The same can be accomplished with decorative memorial gardens with perennial flowers. In both cases, life and beauty coming from death and loss is a powerful healing theme.
Taking this idea a small step further, many commission permanent fixtures to accompany their tree or garden, such as plaques or benches, that are inscribed with the loved one’s information and memorial wishes.
Make a Digital Memorial Website
A modern solution to the ancient problem of grief and mourning lost loved ones is a digital memorial website. There are many services available for creating and hosting these online memorial walls, many of which let you celebrate your loved one in a wide range of ways.
Name a Star For Them
This trend was more popular some years ago, but there are a lot of services around purchasing naming rights for stars. You can even use online services to view the purchased start with other surviving loved ones using the online Worldwide telescope. This permanently associates your loved one’s name with the star.
This is an amazing tribute for any amateur astronomer or night sky lover, but also a great comfort to loved ones. Every time you look up at night, it can be a small but persistent comfort that up there, in the sea of distant suns is one dedicated to your lost loved one.
Maine Cremation Care offers simple, affordable, and dignified cremation services for your loved ones. We are available 24 hours a day and strive to make this difficult time as seamless and quick as possible. We serve Greater Portland, Cumberland County, Oxford County, Androsgoggin County, York County, Sagadahoc County, and Kennebec County.
