Creating meaningful mementos and traditions to do as a family are all great ways to honor your loved one and feel close to them. These mementos and traditions can be passed down in your family from generation to generation, that way your loved one’s story lives on forever. If you want any assistance, suggestions, or want to learn about the memorial products we offer, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our staff.
Mementos
Mementos can be anything from a simple memorial craft to a more intricate tribute — both are just as special. You don’t have to be an avid crafter to make a memorial item to pay tribute to your loved one. The meaning by the memento is what truly matters, creating something to bring you comfort during your grief and celebrate their life story.
Below are a few mementos that you can make in tribute to your loved one:
- Decorate a memorial frame to place your loved one’s photo in.
- Make a scrapbook of your loved one’s trips, holidays, and other significant life events.
- Print your favorite photos of your loved one to place inside a photo album.
- Use their clothing to make a memorial blanket or memory teddy bear.
- Start a journal for expressing grief, sharing memories, or telling your loved one about your life.
Traditions
In addition to memorial items, you can gather your family members and friends of the deceased to start a meaningful tradition to honor your loved one’s memory. Or you also can create your own personal tradition to honor and remember your loved one by.
Below are a few memorial tradition ideas to get you started:
- Visit your loved one’s gravesite, ash scattering location, or a memorial location to leave flowers, talk out loud to them, or sit and think about them.
- Cook your loved one’s favorite food or famous recipe. You can invite your family and friends over for a meal to share memories of your loved one.
- Plan a trip to your loved one’s favorite places or visit a place that they always wanted to go see.
- Honor them at holiday gatherings by making a toast, leaving an empty chair open, or another meaningful gesture.
- Spend time doing something that they loved, whether that was gardening or watching movies.
Permanent Memorialization
This means creating a dedicated place for family and friends to connect and remember your loved one.
In our modern society, people aren't given enough time to grieve their losses. The pressures of work, even the simple emotional need to ‘be busy,’ often bring the bereaved back into the ‘real’ world far too soon.
Also, many families are choosing to scatter the cremated remains of their loved one in a favorite place; the ocean, or even in the skies above. While that may seem fitting at the time, it means that you do not have a consistent place to connect with the memories of the person you loved so dearly.
Having such permanent place - in a cemetery, mausoleum, or cremation garden - that can be visited regularly by family and friends is an essential part of the time following a death. It becomes a focal point of memorialization, and gives everyone a special place to go to remember your loved one, or to commemorate important occasions. It can help to make a birthday or anniversary less painful.
A permanent place to reflect on your loved one becomes a way of connecting to a family's past. Visiting the resting place of grandparents or great-grandparents may provide children with an anchor to their personal history. It is a connection to the past, to love shared. It truly honors the relationship you still have – and will always have – with that person.
Having such permanent place - in a cemetery, mausoleum, or cremation garden - that can be visited regularly by family and friends is an essential part of the time following a death. It becomes a focal point of memorialization, and gives everyone a special place to go to remember your loved one, or to commemorate important occasions. It can help to make a birthday or anniversary less painful.
A permanent place to reflect on your loved one becomes a way of connecting to a family's past. Visiting the resting place of grandparents or great-grandparents may provide children with an anchor to their personal history. It is a connection to the past, to love shared. It truly honors the relationship you still have – and will always have – with that person.
