Choosing Readings for a Funeral

During funeral services at funeral homes in Warrensville Heights, OH, a portion of time is usually devoted to readings. Readings is an all-encompassing term that can refer to quotes, poetry, song lyrics, scriptures, prose, or something that is written by the family.

This part of the funeral service gives the mourners time to reflect and it can also serve to let them know more about who the deceased was and what they cared about. Readings are also a way to express feelings of sadness and sorrow about the loss of our loved one or memories of what our loved ones meant to us.

Readings may also be used to pay tribute or honor to our loved one or to provide us with comfort in our loss. In general, two or three readings are included in funeral services, but there is no limit on the number we can include to memorialize our loved one.

Choosing the readings to include in the funeral service for our loved ones can often be difficult. We may think of many things that we’d like to use and we may get overwhelmed with the process of making the final decision.

There are some practical ways to narrow down the choices that we finally decide to use. This includes asking some questions.

One question is whether the readings we are considering including in the funeral service are ones that were favorites of our loved ones. Another question is whether the readings will evoke memories of our loved one.

Next, we should ask if the readings will be a reflection of our loved one’s take on life or of their personality and temperament. Readings should always communicate emotions to mourners, so we should ask if the ones we are considering have an emotional spark to them.

Another question to ask is whether the readings we are thinking about are respectful and in good taste. Readings should also be meaningful to us, as well as reflective of our loved one, and they should offer comfort to all who are attending the funeral service.

One example of a piece of prose that could be used as a reading in a funeral service is: “Teach them the quiet verbs of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds.,” from The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy.

Poems are often chosen because they are more succinct in expressing feelings and heartfelt emotions. One great choice for funeral readings is Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken, which includes this concluding stanza: “I shall be telling this with a sigh/Somewhere ages and ages hence:/Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—/I took the one less traveled by,/And that has made all the difference.”

Another poem that is popular as a funeral reading is Dylan Thomas’ Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, which includes the poignant opening stanza: “Do not go gentle into that good night,/

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;/Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Popular scripture readings that are often included in funeral services are Psalm 23 and Revelation 21:4, which reads, “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”

If you’d like to learn more about funeral readings at funeral homes in Warrensville Heights, OH, our compassionate and experienced team at E. F. Boyd & Son Funeral Home is here to help. You can visit us at our funeral home at 25900 Emery Rd., Warrensville Heights, OH 44123, or you can call us today at (216) 831-7906.

Cremations 101

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With cremations as part of Cleveland, OH cremation services becoming a more common and popular choice among Americans, it’s important to understand what’s involved in the cremation process and what options are available with cremations.

Many people believe that when their loved one is cremated, the only service they can have to commemorate their loved one is a memorial service after the cremation. However, more often, people are choosing to have a visitation or viewing and funeral service before their loved one is cremated.

As is common with traditional burials, the deceased may be present during the visitation and the funeral service. The visitation is held a couple of hours before the funeral service, and offers an opportunity for mourners to pay their respects to the deceased and offer their sympathy to the family of the deceased.

The visitation is followed by a funeral service, which traditionally consists of favorite readings of the deceased, eulogies, spiritual comfort, and music. After the funeral service, the deceased is transported to the crematory and the cremation take places.

Cremation as a funeral disposition method has been around for thousands of years. In ancient Greece and Rome, it was very common for armies that were fighting in distant lands to cremated their fallen soldiers, and take their cremated remains back home after wars were over to be buried in their native lands.

Cremation fell out of favor during the reign of Emperor Constantine of Rome, and burial in the ground became common for people who had died. Only during outbreaks of worldwide, highly-contagious plagues was cremation, which ensured that the deadly diseases didn’t spread, more commonly used as a method of final disposition.

In the late 1800’s, during the reign of Queen Victoria in England, the practice of cremation was more generally revived by the queen’s personal physician, who promoted cremation as a sanitary measure – as graveyards became overcrowded and there were no general standards for how people were buried – and as a way to conserve land.

The practice of cremation, however, didn’t really gain traction among the general population until about the end of the 20th century. Much of this popularity is attributable to three factors: increased environmental awareness; decreased cemetery space in urban areas; and, more population mobility.

The process of cremation is one that has become standardized in the United States. To begin the process, the family of the deceased must sign a cremation authorization form and the funeral home must obtain a cremation permit. Cremations in the United States generally have a 24-48 hour waiting period before they take place.

When the deceased is at the crematory, they are first identified by a family member or a current picture. The deceased is tagged with a non-combustible identifying tag that will follow them through the entire cremation process.

After the deceased gets their identifying tag, they are placed in a fully-combustible container and put into the crematory. The actual cremation takes only two or three hours on average. When the cremation is finished, all that is left is bone fragments.

There may be small pieces of metal, such as metal fillings or joint screws and pins, mixed among the bone fragments. After the cremation remains have cooled, the metal is removed, and the bone fragments are ground down to the consistency of fine sand.

These remains are put into a sealed plastic bag that is placed into a cremation container, which is returned to the family to do with as they and the deceased desired.

For more information about cremation and Cleveland, OH cremation services, our compassionate and experienced team at E. F. Boyd & Son Funeral Home is here to help. You can visit our funeral home at 2165 E. 89th Street, Cleveland, OH 44106, or you can call us today at (216) 791-0770.

Offering Condolences

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At and after funerals at funeral homes in Cleveland, OH, you may want to express condolences or do something to show your sympathy for the bereaved family. But you might be afraid that you’ll say or do the wrong thing and it will make things worse rather than better.

There are a few guidelines that can help make offering condolences easier and that will provide comfort and support for a grieving family. Not saying or doing anything, however, can make the family believe that you don’t care about them or that you’re indifferent to their loss.

The first guideline is to simply express that you’re sorry for the family’s loss. Letting someone who has lost someone they love that you share their sorrow forms a connection that is both comforting and supportive.

Another guideline is to let the grieving family members talk about their loved one. It can be instinctive when you hear about something that sparks your own memories to engage in an interactive conversation in which each party shares their experiences.

However, in the case of offering condolences, it’s not appropriate to share your own memories and experiences of losing someone you loved. This moment is about the grieving family and what they are feeling and going through. It is not a time to rehash your own losses and how they made you feel.

Not falling back on familiar clichés or platitudes is another guideline you should be aware of when you are offering condolences to a bereaved family. Saying things like, “They’re in a better place,” “It’s all for the best,” “At least they’re not suffering anymore,” or “Jesus needed another angel,” are not helpful when people are grieving because they are missing someone they loved.

In fact, clichés and platitudes often have the opposite effect of being encouraging. They can often come across as being dismissive or even callous about the death of a loved one. And they can create breaches, even in the closest friends, as the bereaved family replays the comments over and over in their minds.

Don’t make generic offers of help as a way to express your condolences to a family that is grieving after they have lost someone they loved. “Let me know if you need anything” is a comment we almost automatically say when we’re in a situation where we know that there are current needs or there will be future needs.

While we may sincerely mean that when we say it, we are often surprised days, weeks, and months later when we find out there were needs and the bereaved family never asked for our help or took us up on our offer. The reason is that most people, even those in the midst of deep sadness and sorrow, don’t always know if offers of help are sincere and they often don’t feel comfortable asking for help if they need it.

Instead of saying, do. You can do things like organize a meal train for the grieving family and set up a delivery system that ensures they have meals to eat for a couple of weeks after the death of a loved one, offering to pick up groceries when you’re shopping for your own groceries, or taking care of yard work that needs to be done.

If you’d like to learn more about offering condolences at funeral homes in Cleveland, OH, our compassionate and experienced team at E. F. Boyd & Son Funeral Home is here to help. You can visit us at our funeral home at 2165 E 89th St., Cleveland, OH 44106, or you can call us today at (216) 791-0770.

Understanding Autopsy Reports

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Before cremations as part of cremations services offered in Warrensville Heights, OH, there may be an autopsy performed on the body of the person who died. Autopsies are not performed on everyone one who dies. If a person is elderly or is suffering from a terminal illness, no autopsy will be performed unless something about the death seems out of the ordinary.

However, when people die unexpectedly or their deaths seem to indicate something other than natural causes, an autopsy will be performed to find out the exact cause of death.

Autopsies are usually performed by a pathologist who has extensive training in examining deceased people and inferring conclusions about what led to their deaths. However, there is more than one type of autopsy that might be performed.

Complete autopsies examine every part of the body for an indication of what led to the person’s death. This will include the external surface of the body and all the major organs, including the lungs, the brain, the heart, the kidneys, and the liver.

Partial autopsies are performed on a specific internal part of the body. While the entire external surface of the body will be examined, only a single internal organ or a single internal region of the body, such as the head, neck, and shoulders will be looked at for causes of death.

Observation autopsies are autopsies that are performed by a pathologist or teacher in an instruction setting, usually as part of medical school curriculum.

Exhumation autopsies are autopsies that are performed after a buried body has been excavated from its grave. These kinds of autopsies are conducted if there are unanswered questions about the cause of death after the body has been buried or if new evidence comes to light to warrant an autopsy.

If a first autopsy has inconclusive results or the findings are not reliable, a second autopsy may be ordered to determine the exact cause of death.

In most cases, autopsies are ordered by a coroner or a medical examiner. Autopsies can be performed without the permission of the family of the deceased. Many autopsies are ordered because of information given by someone who is concerned about how the person died. This can include medical staff or law enforcement. This kind of autopsy is deemed a “reportable” death.

The family of the deceased can ask for an autopsy. However, that doesn’t mean that an autopsy will be performed. Only if the coroner or medical examiner believes the family’s concerns about how their loved one died are worth investigating will an autopsy be ordered and performed.

If the family wants an autopsy and the coroner or medical examiner doesn’t believe the circumstances of death warrant an autopsy, then the family will be responsible for paying for the autopsy. This cost is not covered by Medicaid, Medicare, or other insurance plans, so it’s an out-of-pocket cost for the family of the deceased.

Ordered autopsies are usually done for very specific reasons.

One of these is, of course, uncertainty about what caused the person to die. If the person’s death was unexpected and sudden, and they were not ill or elderly, then it’s likely that an autopsy will be performed.

Autopsies will also be done for people who’ve died as a result of a work-related illness or injury, in order to see if the family should be compensated for the death.

An autopsy may be ordered for conditions that can only be confirmed after death. An example of this would be Lewy Body dementia. While the symptoms of this type of dementia are evident while the person is alive, the actual presence of the Lewy Body protein in the brain can’t be confirmed without an autopsy.

For more information about cremations services in Warrensville Heights, OH, our compassionate and experienced team at E. F. Boyd & Son Funeral Home is here to help. You can visit our funeral home at 25900 Emery Road, Warrensville Heights, OH 44123, or you can call us today at (216) 831-7906.

Downsizing Before Death

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Before funerals at funeral homes in Warrensville Heights, OH, one of the things we should be considering is downsizing our lives. As we age and draw closer to the time when we will be no more, downsizing and decluttering can seem like an insurmountable task.

We spend our lives accumulating stuff. If we’ve moved a lot with our careers, we may have a little less stuff than most people, because downsizing and decluttering is an integral part of frequent moving, but if we’ve retired and settled down somewhere for several years, the odds are that we’ve started accumulating extra stuff.

If we’ve lived in our homes for decades, then we certainly have amassed a lot of stuff over the years. We’ve filled closets, basements, shelves, and sheds with every piece of our lives for as long as we’ve been in our homes.

There are the things we’ve kept just in case. There are the things we’ve kept for our children. There are the things we’ve inherited as our older loved ones have died. There are the memories that we haven’t wanted to part with. And then there are just those things that we didn’t know what to do with, so we threw them in boxes and stored them.

We may think we don’t need to downsize and declutter because our kids will do it when we’re gone. But we don’t realize that we are adding an additional burden to them while they’re grieving our loss to have to go through all our possessions and decide what to keep and what to throw away.

Additionally, many of the conflicts that occur in families after the death of a loved one happen because of disputes over the stuff we leave behind. Some of these conflicts can escalate to the point that they cause permanent rifts in the family. Some of these rifts may be so severe that family members never see or speak to each other again.

It’s important to downsize before we die.

One reason is that we can get rid of things that we don’t need and no one else wants. Much of what people leave behind when they die is of little or no value. Those cancelled checks and receipts from 30 years ago aren’t something you will need or anyone else will need. Shred them and take to them to the curb with the trash.

Another reason to downsize before we die is that we can make sure our possessions go the family members that we want to have them and who will appreciate them. This resolves the issue of most of the conflicts over stuff after we die. We can give things away while we’re living, and all the family members can be satisfied with our decisions.

Downsizing also lets us give to those within our communities who are in need. Many of us have a lot of clothes that we don’t wear anymore or maybe even that we’ve never worn. We have furniture that we don’t need. All of these things can be donated to charities that provide them at no charge to, for instance, homeless people or battered women.

A final reason to downsize before we die is that we let our loved ones focus on remembering us when we die, instead of having to focus on trying to clean out our homes and figure out what to do with our stuff.

If you’d like to learn more about downsizing at funeral homes in Warrensville Heights, OH, our compassionate and experienced team at E. F. Boyd & Son Funeral Home is here to help. You can visit us at our funeral home at 25900 Emery Rd., Warrensville Heights, OH 44123, or you can call us today at (216) 831-7906.

Understanding Bereavement Leave

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Before cremations as part of Cleveland, OH cremation services, immediate family members of the person who died will have to ask their employers, if they’re still working, for time off of work to attend make funeral plans for their loved ones. Some employers have bereavement leave plans in place, while other employers do not.

Bereavement leave is leave granted from work for employees who’ve lost an immediate family member (spouse, child, sibling, parent, grandparent, grandchild, in-law, stepchild, or stepparent). While it would be logical to assume that all employers would have a bereavement leave policy, many employers do not.

There are no federal laws that require employers to grant bereavement leave to their employees.

At the state level, only Oregon has enacted a bereavement leave law for companies with 25 or more employees. These companies must give two weeks of bereavement leave – it doesn’t have to be paid – to all employees who’ve lost an immediate family member.

The state of Illinois has a bereavement law that requires companies with 50 or more employees to grant 10 days of unpaid leave to employees who’ve lost a child.

Therefore, most employers can decide whether or not to grant bereavement leave. If they do grant bereavement leave, they can decide how long the bereavement leave lasts and they can decide whether to grant it as paid or unpaid time off of work.

For those companies that do grant bereavement leave, the usually amount of time is three days after the death of an immediate family member. Often this puts family members who must travel long distances to the location of the funeral in a situation where there isn’t enough time to get there, take part in the funeral, and return home.

So, there are many instances where immediate family members miss the opportunity to say goodbye to their loved ones and miss the opportunity to grieve in person with other family members.

The bereavement leave policies in the United States are, for the most part, left up to the goodwill of employers. The federal government’s only real effort toward enabling family members to be with their dying loved ones and to be able to plan their funerals and share other family members’ grief is the Family Medical Leave Act.

However, the Family Medical Leave Act also has stipulations as to whether it can be used as part of bereavement leave. Only private employers with 50 or more employees during each of 20 or more weeks in the previous year are eligible to offer Family Medical Leave to their employees.

And, while the Family Medical Leave Act offers up to 12 weeks of family and medical leave, the time off is unpaid. Additionally, many employees who use the Family Medical Leave Act find that their jobs are not protected, and if they use the maximum time available (three months), often come back to find that they no longer have a job with their employer.

Other nations do a much better job taking care of their citizens and employees when a death in the family occurs. In Canada, for instance, all citizens who have been continuously employed for three months are guaranteed three days of bereavement leave following the death of a loved one in their immediate family. In Sweden, every employee is entitled to up to 10 days of paid bereavement leave each year.

For more information about bereavement leaved and Cleveland, OH cremation services, our compassionate and experienced team at E. F. Boyd & Son Funeral Home is here to help. You can visit our funeral home at 2165 E. 89th Street, Cleveland, OH 44106, or you can call us today at (216) 791-0770.

The Needs That Mourning Meets

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After funerals at funeral homes in Cleveland, OH, you and your family will go through two processes related to the death of someone you loved. One of these is grief. The other is mourning.

Although grief and mourning are often used interchangeably to mean the same thing, they, in fact, are not the process. Grief is what you feel internally after someone you love has died. Mourning, on the other hand, is what you do externally to express your grief. In other words, grief is centered around feelings, while mourning is centered around actions.

Grief is defined by feelings of sadness, sorrow, anger, and, sometimes, denial. These all happen on an internal level, and each person will experience some or all of them in their own unique configuration. Grief is not communal, even though you may be experiencing the same loss of a loved one as other people.

Mourning, on the other hand, encompasses the activities you do to express your grief. These are things like attending funeral services, wearing black, or sharing memories and photos of your loved one. Some of mourning is done with others and some of mourning is done in private.

Mourning is the way that you make your way through the grieving process. It is a tangible way to work toward acceptance and healing, even though the grief of losing someone you love will never go away.

One of the things that mourning does is help you to accept the reality that someone you love has died. As you think and talk about the death of your loved one, it becomes more real as a factual event that has occurred. It can take time to completely accept that someone you love is gone, but by sharing stories about them with friends and family, your feelings of disbelief about their death will turn to belief.

Mourning also helps you process the pain of losing someone you love. At first, you will feel a pain unlike almost any other pain you will ever experience in life. That pain will bring tears, fears, feelings of weakness, and, at times, feelings of being out of control. Instead of avoiding the pain, it’s important to acknowledge it by feeling it in its full intensity for short periods of time, and then moving to other things so that it doesn’t overwhelm you.

Sharing memories of your loved one who has died is another aspect of mourning. You can do this through telling stories about them, listening to their favorite music, tuning in when something reminds you of them, and even dreaming about them. Over time, the initial pain of remembering your loved one will be largely replaced by happy memories of the time you shared together.

Mourning serves another purpose: the adaptation of a new identity that doesn’t include your loved one. This can be one of the hardest parts of the grieving process, especially for spouses, who had well-defined roles within their relationship. If your deceased spouse, for example, handled all the car and lawn maintenance, you will now have to take those responsibilities on yourself. It can be quite uncomfortable at first, but over time, you will adjust and adapt to handling them adroitly.

If you’d like to learn more about grief resources at funeral homes in Cleveland, OH, our compassionate and experienced team at E. F. Boyd & Son Funeral Home is here to help. You can visit us at our funeral home at 2165 E 89th St., Cleveland, OH 44106, or you can call us today at (216) 791-0770.

The Paperwork You Need after a Loved One Dies

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With cremations as part of cremation services offered in Cleveland, OH, important paperwork will be needed through the funeral process and after the funeral is over. All of this paperwork should be kept in one place and the person handling everything should know where it is and have complete access to it.

When a family is grieving over the loss of someone they love, they will not have enough clarity to think of everything they will need to take care of funeral arrangements and take care of their loved one’s affairs afterward. If you take care of making sure all of these are together now, then it will make it a lot easier for your family when you die.

If you are the executor of your loved one’s estate, you will need to get two different documents to fulfill your responsibilities.

One document is a certified death certificate. You should ask for at least 20 in your meeting with the funeral home director (you can also get more later if you need them) if the estate is small. Larger estates may need more.

The second document you will likely need to execute the estate is an Employer Identification Number (EIN). This document makes the estate of your loved one a legal entity that can pay outstanding bills, pay funeral expenses, and distribute assets to the estate’s heirs.

You will also need identification papers and personal papers. For identification, you will need a birth certificate, citizenship papers, social security card, driver’s license, and passport (if applicable). The personal papers you will need include a marriage certificate, divorce/annulment papers, prenuptial agreements, military discharge papers, and birth and death certificates (if applicable) for the rest of the immediate family.

You may not need all the personal papers, but it’s good to have them in case you do. Make sure to keep your loved one’s purse or wallet (if they died some place other than home) so you have their driver’s license. In hospitals, hospice houses, assisted living facilities, and nursing homes, these should be among the effects of your loved one that are given to you after they die.

To make funeral arrangements according to your deceased loved one’s wishes, you will need any documentation they left that gave instructions for their funeral. You will also need biographical information for the obituary, and you will need contact information for anyone who needs to know that your loved one has died (don’t forget employers, if your loved one was not retired and still working).

There are some other papers that you’ll need at various times before and after your loved one dies. Before death, you will need your loved one’s durable power of attorney, living will, durable healthcare power of attorney, and organ donation papers. Without these, you will not be able to handle your loved one’s affairs if they are unable to do so themselves.

After your loved one has died, you will need either their will or revocable trust to execute the estate according to their wishes.

You will also need your loved one’s financial information. This can include bank accounts, investments, insurance policies, retirement accounts, pensions, payable on death accounts, and income tax returns.

For more information about cremation services in Cleveland, OH, our compassionate and experienced team at E. F. Boyd & Son Funeral Home is here to help. You can visit our funeral home at 25900 Emery Road, Warrensville Heights, OH 44123, or you can call us today at (216) 831-7906.

Unforgettable Epitaphs on Gravestones

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Part of the funeral process at funeral homes in Cleveland, OH includes having a gravestone engraved with pertinent details about the person who has died placed at the gravesite. Some people use their imaginations to come up with very unique gravestones that include great epitaphs.

These memorable gravestones may give you some inspiration for your own gravestone or the gravestone of a loved one.

When Gabriel “Gabe” Williams died at the age of 27 in 1995, his family had two gravestones placed at his grave. The first gravestone was traditional. The second gravestone gave a nod to Gabe’s two passions in life: rock music and gymnastics. The second gravestone has a caption at the top that says, “For those who about to rock, Gabe salutes you from heaven.” Just below the caption is a gymnast on gymnastic rings. And on the lower left corner is the official logo for the metal band, AC/DC.

Really good cooks often joke that they’ll take their most beloved recipes to the grave with them. In the case of Kay’s family, they took her literally and created a tombstone with the title “Kay’s Fudge.” Kay’s recipe for fudge follows: “2 sq. chocolate/2 TBS butter/Melt on low heat/Stir in 1 cup of milk/Bring to boil/3 cups of sugar/1 TBS vanilla/Pinch salt/Cook to softball stage/Pour on marble slab/Cool & beat & eat.” Kay (no last name) was remembered with an epitaph that says, “Wherever she goes, there’s laughter.”

Andrew Olszak died in 1979 at the age of 86. He expressed his bitterness at how his life ended in the inscription he had engraved on his gravestone. It says, “Abandoned in old age by wife and children/May God be more understanding and merciful.”

People die in unusual ways and unusual circumstances. When George Spencer died in 1909 at the age of 15, his parents decided to permanently detail how George came to die on his gravestone: “Lost life by stab in falling on ink eraser, evading six young women trying to give him birthday kisses in office of Metropolitan Life Building.”

When Nathaniel Grigsby died in 1890 at the age of 79, he had left his heirs a very specific inscription that he wanted on his monument. Grigsby was friends with Abraham Lincoln, who was a Republican. When Grigsby placed Lincoln’s name on the 1860 ballot for president of the United States, his Missouri neighbors, who sympathized with the South and were Democrats, plotted to kill him, and a friend advised him to leave town immediately in the cover of darkness.

Grigsby heeded the advice, but he made his feelings about the Democratic party clear on his grave monument: “Through this inscription I wish to enter my dying protest against what is called the Democratic party I have watched it closely since the days of Jackson and know that all the misfortunes of our nation has come to it through this so called party therefore beware of this party of treason. Put on in fulfillment of promise to Deceased.”

Sometimes it’s easier to sum up a person’s life with just one sentence. Such is the case with the gravestone of Robert Allison, who died in 1887 at the age of 47. His epitaph reads, “He never killed a man that didn’t need killing.”

If you’d like more guidance on personalizing gravestones at funeral homes in Cleveland, OH, our compassionate and experienced team at E. F. Boyd & Son Funeral Home is here to help. You can visit us at our funeral home at 25900 Emery Rd., Warrensville Heights, OH 44123, or you can call us today at (216) 831-7906.

Your Digital Life after Your Death

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After cremations as part of the cremation services offered in Shaker Heights, OH, whoever you’ve designated to take care of your final affairs should have access to your will or revocable trust (this will automatically transfer to them upon your death), any life and burial insurance policies you have, and access to your bank accounts and other financial accounts.

However, there is one other area of your life that you need to make sure your executor has, and that is all the login information (usernames and passwords) for everything you do digitally. Most of us have a gazillion of these. They include logins for digital devices, wireless routers, logins for online banking and other financial services, logins for streaming services, logins for credit card companies, logins for taxing filing sites, logins for airlines, and logins for online shopping sites.

You may also have social media logins for services like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. If you blog online, then you have a login for that as well.

We need a quick note about using face recognition or fingerprints to log in to your digital devices instead of a password. While this may be a very good way to secure your digital devices, it’s important to remember that faces and fingerprints are unique for each person, so no one else will be able to access devices where you have this as your login method after you die.

Almost every online password is now required to be at least eight characters, using capital letters, numbers, and special characters. Because different sites use different ways to login – for example, some require a username, while others require an email address – there is no way to standardize all our online logins to be the same.

Even if that was possible, though, it would be a huge security risk, because if someone was able to hack into one account, they could potentially hack every single online account you have.

We all have different strategies for keeping up with all these logins. Many people use free password managers on their digital devices to store all this login information (however, there’s a login for the password manager too). Other people store this information in a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet.

One of the potential problems with password managers on your computer is that no one will be able to access it because they don’t have the administrator password to access the program. Additionally, if the computer crashes, then all your login information is completely inaccessible.

The Word document or Excel spreadsheet is the best way to keep up with your logins and to update them when they change, because you can keep a current copy – printed or on flash drive – with your important papers (replace it when the document changes), so that all your digital information is available to the person you’ve chosen to take care of your final affairs.

Keep your current login document stored on flash drive, not the digital device you primarily use. Label the flash drive and keep it where your executor can easily access it in case you forget to print or provide a current copy to include in your important papers.

For more information about cremation services in Shaker Heights, OH, our compassionate and experienced team at E. F. Boyd & Son Funeral Home is here to help. You can visit our funeral home at 25900 Emery Road, Warrensville Heights, OH 44123, or you can call us today at (216) 831-7906.

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