While most high school students take after school jobs in restaurants or car washes to put themselves through college, Michael Godsey started working the night shift in a morgue.
From there Michael developed a real passion for his profession. “The profession always stayed with me because it is a people serving business – helping those in need during what often is the most troubling time in their life. I pursued this career as a personal interest when seeking a way to help people. It is personally comforting to me to assist individuals in the creation and implementation of a fitting tribute for their loved one. Whether the arrangement is simply the implementation of immediate cremation with scattering at sea to a more elaborate tribute involving video tributes, musical performers, many orators, and hosting hundreds in attendance, it is always a role I cherish and honor to achieve.” Michael is the Owner of Fond Remembrance Cremation Services located in Orange County, California. The service is all-encompassing, involving anything from memorial tributes to cremation and burial services. “We are a Neighborly Funeral Establishment springing to the privilege and opportunity to serve. We make the time to spend with our clients – and to serve local families. We feel that when everything is centrally coordinated, our customers remain in control and secure in the knowledge that the people who are assuming the ultimate responsibility of their loved one are their neighbors, who care about quality, who care about service, and most of all, who care about them.” “We excel at assisting the bereaved through the mourning process. We have developed a multi-step system to create comfort by providing unique ways to capture, share, and preserve memories of life.” With over 40 years of experience in the funeral industry, Michael has always been able to focus on the positives that come with his job. “The best part about my job is watching the expressions on client’s faces change from uncertainty and high stress, to comfort knowing that their loved one will be cared for exactly as they intend for it to be. Often we can physically watch an emotional burden lift via body-language, and progressively hear the stress in their voices diminish by the words they choose when communicating throughout the arrangement process.” People choose to commemorate the life of loved ones, and grieve in many different ways. Dealing with grief is never easy, but Michael believes that funerals play an important role in the grieving process. “Like many events, such as a wedding, birthday, or an anniversary, a commemorative event, even in its most simplistic state, satisfies the basic human need to ritualize death – an important initial step in the process of mourning. Mourning, by way of a ritual, grants survivor family and friends a time to support each other, to share memories, and an opportunity for them to celebrate the survivor’s life or the life of another, and to come into alignment with the separation.” Michael acknowledges that there is no one-way approach to funeral services. In order to respectfully engage with his clients, Michael needs to take several additional factors into account. “We provide answers and options few others may offer. It’s important to acknowledge any religious factors that come into play. We remain elastic to respect all faiths, customs, traditions and lifestyles. We also must consider economics. In today’s market, many people feel that their loved one really would not want them to spend an average of $7,500 on a funeral when on the other hand, cremation can range from $800-$1,200. Perhaps the most important factor is understanding our client’s desire for a wide range of memorialization options that uniquely commemorate a loved one from keepsake jewelry and urns, to placement in a columbarium or cemetery, to lawful scattering at locations meaningful to the decedent. New choices for final disposition have entered the market such as green burials that offer a natural solution of all biodegradable elements and the introduction of kit caskets that are available online – so those are now factors too.” Michael believes that the funeral industry needs to change in order to adapt to changing times where communication needs to be as streamlined as possible, so one year ago he decided to take Fond Remembrances online. “Too often the industry mandates respondents to travel to their facility to make arrangements. No one relishes the inevitable trip to a local mortuary to discuss the making of funeral arrangements before or after a death occurs. The experience of meeting with an undertaker when the death of a loved one has occurred requires the recall and recording of information needed for the director to complete the necessary forms and legal documents and requires answers to many decisions.” “I wanted to change all of that by introducing a new approach when seeking funeral final-need arrangements. We developed an efficient and effective process for online funeral arranging. It allows those who seek this need, both before and at the time of need, to do so in a way that enables them to determine for their self, in a private and respectful way that which they feel be most appropriate to commemorate the life of a loved one.” “All arrangements can be done online in the privacy of the client’s home, without any sales pitch or having to step foot into a funeral home. Since our overhead expenditures are minimal, we can offer quality service the client expects at affordable prices.” As Fond Remembrances began to grow, Michael was brought to Yondo via a recommendation from Weebly. “I am just getting started with Yondo, I like the ease of posting an upcoming webinar, and the count-down the posting provides when accepting the invitation to join.” If you want a chance to be selected for our Yondo business of the month – forward your expressions of interest to: mariah@yondomarketing.com There is no right way to grieve. We can look to three simple patterns of grief to recognize how we might mourn; notably, an intuitive griever feels their grief and expresses their emotions openly as they grieve. Secondly, an Instrumental griever thinks and remembers as they grieve and express grief by doing something related to the loss. And thirdly, a dissonant griever experiences grief in a specific way but does not feel free to express it openly. Grieving is personal and when we experience the pain of grieving; we know we have a direct indication that we have begun the mourning process. To learn more about the grieving process, contact Fond Remembrance or catch one of our Webinar’s on the subject.
There is no right way to grieve, and the bereavement experience is different for all of us. For some, it may be the creation of a public event designed to signify, in a social context, that someone dear to us has passed. Or, perhaps we gather with family and friends to share stories over a simple dinner. Others may simply seek solace by going to a very private place in nature and sitting quietly while experiencing the solemn perfection of the natural surroundings. It is important to know that it is all okay. Our response to death is personal, and I encourage you to know that when death occurs, all that fettered the life of our loved one is gone, and all that we love in them lives on.
I encourage you to take the time to think about how others will recall your legacy and allow yourself the opportunity to share your thoughts with others? Perhaps you have had the experience of meeting with a funeral director when the death of a loved one has occurred. If so you may remember the many decisions you made and information you provided for the director to complete the necessary forms and legal documents. When I meet with people who have never experienced the process, they often feel unprepared and sometimes overwhelmed by the ordeal.
Creating a plan in advance helps. The data is exchanged and recorded so that it can be available when needed, including choices you make regarding the type of tribute you feel best resembles the way you want others to remember you. For some, it can be as basic as cremation and scattering of the cremated remains privately in nature. For others, it may involve the construction of a meaningful tribute that conveys the sentiment of a message that you want to share. People who pre-arrange tell us it is important to them because they what to lessen the burden of those left behind from wondering if they are doing the appropriate thing. Peace of mind and love for their family motivate their completion of the task. Creating a well-written advance plan is what makes Fond Remembrance a tremendous value, as the plan most importantly enables your wishes to be known, down to the last detail by your design. It is a valuable and insightful asset and is one of the kindest gifts you can give your family or those that survive you. It is with the complete understanding that making these same decisions during an immediate loss may be difficult and overwhelming to some because the grieving process has already begun. While making such decisions is difficult at any time, planning in advance for the death of a loved one can relieve you of that responsibility at the time of death, when you may be emotionally vulnerable. A ritual is often socio-religious driven which is carried out by the bereaved within a social context of friends, relatives, and neighbors. It incorporates social interaction of storytelling. Most importantly, storytelling can be effectively realized as part of a memorial ritual event, in tribute to show respect, gratitude, affection, or praise, and is focused on support for the survivors. When we hear about death, we tend to gather to provide emotional and social support that is directed to the bereaved family, and to each other, and it is in this setting where we share our stories. Our assembling as a community reassures us that we are part of a larger whole, thereby strengthening our individual lives. The wider community responds with sympathy to the occasion and support for the bereaved. When the inevitable happens, contact Fond Remembrance to assist you in the creation of a fitting Ritual for your loved one. Planning ahead . . . We are here to help! Our response to grief is through feelings or emotions. There may be no exact words that come to describe the feelings that surface at the moment we face bereavement. Any loss is painful – and it hurts. Nevertheless, feelings are real. It is natural to feel overwhelmed with emotions like pain, anger, and sadness. We can experience grief in physical, psychological and behavioral dimensions. For example, physical dimensions may be a feeling of hollowness in the stomach, a lump in the throat, or tightness in the chest; psychological dimensions may be disbelief, confusion, preoccupation; and behavioral dimensions might exhibit appetite disturbances, absentmindedness, and social withdrawal. To better understand mourning dimensions is to look further into grief. Fond Remembrance offers a workshop on Grief & Healthy Grieving. Contact Info@FondRemembrance.com for more information.
The loss of a loved one ranks high on the list of significant emotional events that we all must face in life. When we reflect on the loss of a loved one, we experience grief – our feelings or emotions that surface in different ways in response to the loss. We deal with grief through the process of mourning which requires our working through emotions as we reflect upon our loved one. Gathering together as a family unit to plan and offer support to each other is among the first steps in the mourning process – a social interaction that is psychologically important for the bereaved. The gathering corroborates the fact that the death has occurred, confirms the significance of the loss, and allows family and friends to support and comfort the bereaved so that they can come into alignment with the separation. Memorializing our loved one, by way of ritual, is a time of celebration that marks the passing of our loved one through metaphor and symbol, respect, gratitude, affection, or praise. Therefore, reflection through grief and mourning, along with the gathering of those closest to us, and performing a ritual are three important elements when creating a fitting tribute to our loved one. Fond Remembrance is here to help. The other day, an elderly lady stopped by to complete a few remaining details about her son’s funeral. As we took care of the remaining items, she began to tell the story of her son who had succumbed from a rare form of brain cancer. Her son was her only child and since he never married or had children, in his later years she took care of him at her home. Her husband lived there also but was afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease. Compacting the care that she had extended to her son and husband, came a sudden illness to herself; At first her illness was thought to be a minor concern, but soon thereafter resulted with unexpected bypass surgery. Upon recovery from surgery, she further developed additional illnesses that placed her into a complete care facility for an additional six weeks. Upon the day that she was finally released to return home, she learned that her son had been placed into hospice on that very same day. Soon thereafter, her son died with she and father at his bedside – a caring environment from within her own home. She and she alone had no one to help carry the burden of grief . . . And I sat there listening to her story . . . without much to say . . . but listening intently to each word she said as she conveyed her grief in a way that only a mother could. That experience reminded me of the work of Dr. J. William Worden did when studying bereavement. Dr. Worden identifies that the work of mourning has four tasks: to accept the reality of the loss, to process the pain of grief, to adjust to a world without the deceased, and to find an enduring connection with the deceased in the midst of embarking on a new life. Listening is sometimes the most important assistance we can render to those afflicted with grief. To learn more about the tasks of mourning, Fond Remembrance conducts an advance care planning workshop. Contact Fond Remembrance for more information.
We have been working non-stop on the upcoming Advance Planning Workshop. The workshop has expanded to include End-of-life care, Tribute Planning, Estate Planning and insight into the Mourning process. It is the most advanced and comprehensive workshop known to exist. By attending, you will glean a balanced awareness into preparing for end-of-life concerns. We are excited to offer this unique event and will keep you posted when it will launch. We at Fond Remembrance look forward to meeting you.
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