The Families You Served This Year Face Their First Holidays Without Someone

Every family you served this year is about to spend its first holiday season without someone. Most of them will not hear from you again unless they need you again. That is a long silence to leave on a relationship that began on the worst week of their lives.

This is the one card in our catalog I would ask you to get right rather than get done.

The first season is the hard one

You know this better than I do, and better than any study I could put in front of you. The first Thanksgiving with a chair empty. The first box of decorations opened by one person instead of two. The cards that arrive addressed to both of them.

I am not going to dress that up with a statistic. It is the one thing in this business nobody needs convincing of, and the families on your list this year are the ones living it for the first time.

What I can tell you is what happens to the mail. The casseroles stop in about a fortnight. The calls stop a little after. December arrives with everyone else's good cheer in the mailbox, and a few handwritten lines from the person who sat with them in the worst week of their lives is not part of that pile. It is the opposite of it.

Why it matters to the business, said once

The National Funeral Directors Association counts 15,401 funeral homes operating in the United States, and says approximately 75% of them are family- or privately owned.

That is a trade of small businesses competing on being remembered by name. The families you served this year are the ones the next family will ask, and I do not know a cheaper way to be remembered than a card.

For hospices, it is already part of the job

Medicare's conditions of participation, at 42 CFR 418.64(d), require a hospice to make bereavement services available to the family for up to one year after the patient's death, under a bereavement plan of care. A separate section, 418.204(c), says bereavement counseling is a required hospice service that is not reimbursable.

A holiday card to the families in that year can be part of the plan. It costs a few dollars, and it reaches the family at the moment of the year that is hardest.

What to send, and what to leave out

A quiet design. No "merry," no "happy," no celebration language of any kind for the families of this year. Our Sympathy, Peace on Earth and Dove families exist for exactly this.

Nothing that sells. No preneed insert, no price list, no reply card. The card is worth something to a grieving family precisely because it asks for nothing.

A short line, and a real signature. "The holidays can be difficult. We are thinking of you, and we are here." Then the director who sat with them signs it by hand. If you include the name of the person who died, be sure your records are right, because a wrong name in that card is the one mistake a family will never forget.

A different card for the people who send you families. Clergy, hospice nurses, hospital social workers, estate attorneys, senior living directors. That card can be warmer and more ordinary, because it is going to a desk, not a kitchen table.

Senior living communities have two lists of their own: the residents, and the adult children who chose the community and talk to other families about it. The second list is the one most communities forget to mail. More wording, for every one of these lists, is on our page for funeral homes and senior living.

When to send it

Aim for the card to reach the family in the first week of December, before the season closes in. If you would rather send a Thanksgiving card, the dates in The Thanksgiving Card Deadline apply, and they are tight from here.

Either way, order this month and leave yourself time to proof the list. The 20% tier runs through November 16, but the real reason to order early is that this is a list that has to be right.

The short version

This December is the first one for every family you served this year. Send them something quiet, signed by someone they remember, asking for nothing. They will not forget who did.