The Funeral.com Journal

Resources to help you create tributes as unique as the people (and pets) you love. Learn how engraving, photos, colors, and symbols add meaning; discover scattering rituals and at-home memorial ideas. We focus on the details that matter—because small choices can carry a lifetime of comfort.

How to Choose a Health Care Proxy: The Traits That Prevent Crisis Confusion

How to Choose a Health Care Proxy: The Traits That Prevent Crisis Confusion

Choosing a health care proxy can feel like an emotional assignment: “Pick the person who loves you most.” But in real emergencies, love isn’t the only trait that matters. A...

Advance Care Planning 101: What It Is and Why It Reduces Family Conflict

Advance Care Planning 101: What It Is and Why It Reduces Family Conflict

Families don’t fight about end-of-life care because they don’t love each other. Most of the time, they fight because everyone is scared, everyone is interpreting the same person’s wishes differently,...

Hospice for Heart Failure and COPD: Planning for Breathlessness and Anxiety

Hospice for Heart Failure and COPD: Planning for Breathlessness and Anxiety

Heart failure and COPD often create a specific kind of fear at the end of life: the fear of not being able to breathe. Families can manage a lot—fatigue, weakness,...

What Families Mean by “Quality of Life” at End of Life (and How to Talk About It)

What Families Mean by “Quality of Life” at End of Life (and How to Talk About It)

At some point in serious illness, a family conversation shifts from “What’s the next treatment?” to something quieter and harder: “What kind of life are we trying to protect?” That...

Hospice and Chemotherapy/Radiation: When Comfort-Focused Treatment Can Still Happen

Hospice and Chemotherapy/Radiation: When Comfort-Focused Treatment Can Still Happen

Families often arrive at hospice carrying a sentence they do not want to say out loud: “We can’t keep doing this the way we’ve been doing it.” Sometimes that sentence...

Does Hospice Pay for Medications? What “Related to the Terminal Illness” Means

Does Hospice Pay for Medications? What “Related to the Terminal Illness” Means

When families start hospice, medication questions often become the center of everything. Not because people want to obsess over pills, but because medications are where comfort is won or lost....

In-Home Hospice vs Inpatient Hospice: How Families Decide (Without Guessing)

In-Home Hospice vs Inpatient Hospice: How Families Decide (Without Guessing)

When a family asks whether hospice should happen at home or in an inpatient setting, they are rarely choosing between “good” and “bad.” They are choosing between two kinds of...

What Hospice Actually Does at Home (and What Families Still Handle)

What Hospice Actually Does at Home (and What Families Still Handle)

When families first hear the words home hospice, they often imagine two extremes. One is fear: that hospice means “we’re out of options.” The other is relief: that hospice will...

What to Do When Death Is Near: Comfort, Logistics, and Family Communication

What to Do When Death Is Near: Comfort, Logistics, and Family Communication

When death is near, families often feel two kinds of pressure at the same time. One is emotional: the ache of watching someone you love change, the fear of doing...

POLST, DNR, and Advance Directives: What Each One Does in a Medical Emergency

POLST, DNR, and Advance Directives: What Each One Does in a Medical Emergency

In a medical emergency, families often discover something they did not know they needed: a shared language for decisions. The ambulance arrives, the room fills with people and questions, and...

Home Hospice and Advance Care Planning: What Families Need to Know Before a Crisis

Home Hospice and Advance Care Planning: What Families Need to Know Before a Crisis

Most families do not arrive at home hospice because they love planning. They arrive because something has changed. A parent is sleeping more. A spouse is losing weight. A doctor...

Home Hospice: What It Is, What It Covers, and How to Prepare

Home Hospice: What It Is, What It Covers, and How to Prepare

Families rarely start researching home hospice on a calm, ordinary afternoon. Most people begin because something has changed: more sleeping, less eating, a new diagnosis, a frightening hospital stay, or...

Pet End-of-Life Decisions: A Calm, Compassionate Way to Know What to Do Next

Pet End-of-Life Decisions: A Calm, Compassionate Way to Know What to Do Next

When families search for pet end-of-life decisions, they’re usually not looking for a generic checklist. They’re trying to steady themselves in a season that feels emotionally impossible and practically urgent....

Tracking Your Pet’s Decline Without Obsessing: A Humane Way to Document Changes

Tracking Your Pet’s Decline Without Obsessing: A Humane Way to Document Changes

When a pet is aging or living with a serious diagnosis, families often get caught between two fears that feel equally unbearable. The first is missing something important and waiting...

How to Preplan a Funeral: Checklist, Costs, and What to Watch for With Prepaid Plans

How to Preplan a Funeral: Checklist, Costs, and What to Watch for With Prepaid Plans

Most people don’t begin funeral planning because they enjoy paperwork. They begin because they’ve seen what happens when a family has to make financial and emotional decisions quickly, under pressure,...

Coordinating Pet and Human Ashes: Shared Scattering, Joint Memorials, and Future Planning

Coordinating Pet and Human Ashes: Shared Scattering, Joint Memorials, and Future Planning

There are some questions families don’t expect to face until they’re already carrying them. One of them is what it means to honor more than one set of ashes in...