Before going to make funeral arrangements at funeral homes in the area of Blaine, WA, one of the things that families of deceased loved ones will need to do is notify people about their loved ones’ deaths.

Modern technology, which includes social media, has become the way most of society communicates information, whether it is trivial and mundane or important and serious. Using social media is such an integrated part of our daily lives, that you might believe that using it to notify your friends and family members about your loved one’s death makes sense.

However, in this situation, you should avoid using technology (social media, group texts, and group emails) to let friends and other family members know that your loved one has died.

There are several reasons for this.

One is that not all of the people that you need to notify will have social media accounts, email accounts, or text messaging. Using one of these methods to do a death announcement for your loved one’s death will raise the distinct possibility that some of your close friends or family members will not hear from you about the death, but from someone else who read it on social media or who received an email or text message about it.

That can be quite shocking, and it can also be quite offensive to the person who is hearing secondhand about your loved one’s death. They may come to the conclusion that you are treating your loved one’s death cavalierly and that you are being disrespectful to their memory and to the people who love and care about them.

Your loved one’s death will be very personal to each person who needs to be notified. Because of this, you should make every effort to make personal contact with them individually so that they can share the experience with you, and you can communicate privately about how your loved one’s death has affected each of you.

The best way to let people who need to know about your loved one’s death is with a phone call or, if you both have the technology, a video chat. This enables you to connect with everyone in a way that is deeply personal and is comfortable and comforting.

Since these two ways are the best ways to use to notify people of your loved one’s death, you should maintain an updated notification list to ensure that you have accurate contact information for each person.

Do not forget about work notifications. If your loved one was still working at the time of their death, then you will need to let their employer’s Human Resources department know that they have died. (Later, you should call back and inquire about any benefits or pay your loved one may have been entitled to.)

Trying to make all of these phone calls and video chats by yourself will be too overwhelming. While you should make the immediate family member notifications yourself, divide the remaining list of people who need to be divided among other family members or friends who are with you, so that the entire burden does not fall on you to do.

There will likely be a single family member that makes the initial calls to immediate family members about their loved one’s death. Once those calls have been made, the remaining notifications should be split among the immediate family so that the burden of calling everyone on the list does not fall on one person.

For information on planning funerals at funeral homes in Blaine, WA, our compassionate and experienced team at Moles Farewell Tributes & Crematory – Bayview Chapel is here to help.