37-36 61st Str, Woodside, NY 11377
Every arrangement, in plain words
Everything on this page is either one of three shapes or a decision inside one of them. Nothing here has to be chosen today.
Start here
Burial with a service, cremation with a service, or direct cremation with no gathering at all. That is the decision underneath almost every other decision, it is the one that moves the cost and the timing more than anything else, and it is the one most families arrive without having named.
Everything further down this page is a variation on one of the three: whether there is a viewing beforehand, where the service is held, whether the gathering happens the same week or three months later, and what happens afterwards. Read the three first. The rest is detail that can wait until the morning.
A viewing, a service, and then the cemetery.
The traditional shape. The body is present, there is usually a viewing on one or two evenings beforehand, the service is held here or at a place of worship, and everyone goes on to the cemetery for the committal. It takes the longest to arrange, because it depends on the cemetery's diary as well as on ours.
Four to seven days from the death, most often.
The same service. A different ending.
Everything the burial version has — a viewing if you want one, a service with the body present, the same chapel — and then the crematory instead of the grave. The ashes come back to you, usually within a week or so, and what happens to them can be decided later or not at all for a while.
Five to ten days, and the ashes some days after that.
No viewing, no service, no ceremony here.
We collect the person, do the paperwork, and the cremation happens without a gathering. Families choose it because it is what the person asked for, because the family is scattered, or because it costs the least of the three by a wide margin. You can still hold a memorial afterwards, anywhere, at any time, with or without us.
Seven to fourteen days, mostly waiting on the permit.
All of it
The gathering, what happens afterwards, the care of the person, and getting somebody from one place to another. A family usually needs one thing from each of the first two groups and nothing at all from the last.
What happens, and where, and who is there.
The service most people picture: the body is present in the room, the family is seated at the front, and afterwards everyone travels together to the cemetery or the crematory.
The same gathering, held after the burial or the cremation has already happened. Nothing about it is second best; it simply separates the practical part from the remembering.
No chapel, no procession from here. Everyone meets at the cemetery, the service is held at the graveside, and that is the whole of it.
Hours set aside, usually in the late afternoon and evening, when family and friends come to sit with the person and with each other before the service.
Burial, cremation, and the choices inside each.
The person is collected, the paperwork is done, the cremation happens, and the ashes come back to you. There is no viewing and no ceremony, here or anywhere, unless you arrange one yourself afterwards.
Some families want to see the person one last time before the cremation, and some want to be present when it begins. Both are ordinary requests and neither is unusual to ask for.
What is done, what is optional, and what we ask you first.
Two different things get run together whenever a family asks about embalming, and separating them answers most of it.
Between states, and between countries.
People die away from home constantly — on holiday, visiting family, in a hospital in another state. It is arranged all the time and it is less complicated than it sounds.
Woodside is a neighbourhood where a great many families came from somewhere else, and a great many funerals end in a different country. It is slower and it is entirely normal.
The other half of the answer
These are not disclaimers and they are not modesty. Each one is a place where a family routinely gets told something that is not true, by somebody, and where the true version is short enough to fit on a page.
The worst version of each of them is the version a family finds out about on the day: that the cemetery's bill is separate and larger, that nobody can promise a date until three other people agree, that embalming was never required, that the grave was never ours to sell. Told in advance, each is a fact you can plan around. Told on the morning of a funeral, each is a shock with somebody's signature already on it.
Money
Not one of them carries a figure. That is the most deliberate decision on this site and it is explained wherever it would otherwise look like an omission.
No prices on this site. There is no price anywhere on this site, and that is deliberate. This is a demonstration and any figure here would be invented — a made-up price for a funeral is worse than none, because somebody would plan against it. What a real funeral home owes you is a printed list you can take away.
Describe what has happened and somebody will tell you which of the three shapes you are actually choosing between. Nothing said on that call is final and nothing has to be decided on it.
