Burial outfit for the deceased

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My grandmother passed away this past January. She had a garment bag in the closet with the dress she wanted, all her undergarments and shoes. She coordinated her outfit with the one she buried my grandfather in when he died in 2006.
 
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Granny was buried in the feet length long white shirt symbolising the baptismal garment that is the tradition of the Evangelical Lutheran church in Sweden. I don’t know what my other grandparents wore but I think it is the same as they were Lutherans too. I found it strange (and still do) when I first heard that Catholics were buried in their finest suit or finest dress when there is so much talk about baptism and renewing baptismal promises in the Catholic Church compared to the Lutheran. It seemed that the logic would be to wear the white garment we received when we were baptised when we go to face Christ. In a larger size for most of us. 😃
 
:cry:

I just lost my grandmother a few weeks ago, so this post hits home for me. It was a closed casket so I don’t know what she was wearing 😦
 
I’m sorry.
Losing a grandparent is hard. Especially when you are older. I am almost 50, and have lived less than 10 minutes from my grandparents most of my life. I can’t tell you how many times I have said. “I should stop and see Grandma” in the past 8 months. 😔

Prayers for you and your grandma.
 
CilladeRoma said:
I’m sorry.
Losing a grandparent is hard. Especially when you are older. I am almost 50, and have lived less than 10 minutes from my grandparents most of my life. I can’t tell you how many times I have said. “I should stop and see Grandma” in the past 8 months. 😔

Prayers for you and your grandma.
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yeap, same here. I’m 42 and I wished I would have come to see my grandmother more. I move 1.5 hours away, but there were many times I could have seen her and put it off when I was visiting my parents. I’d give anything to have one more hour with her. 😭
 
I’m insisting on closed casket for myself, so I really don’t care what outfit is chosen. I’ll put hubby in jeans and a flannel shirt since that’s what he lives in 😉
 
Even though I helped pick out what my mother was buried in, I was so out of it, that I have no recollection of it.
 
I never saw anyone’s feet when in their coffin. The half of the lid was always down on the part that covers the feet. Who would know if the corpse was wearing shoes or not?
 
My sister and I looked in my mom’s closet and agreed on a dress and laid out an outfit on her bed to get a look at it.

We took a picture but TBH I’m not sure why. Just in case, for reference, I guess.

I’m pretty sure we didn’t put undergarments in the bag we took to the undertaker. They probably used whatever she had in the hospital.
 
Usually when I go to viewings the whole lid is open, but the deceased’s lower limbs are covered by a blanket. I don’t remember providing shoes for my husband or mom.
 
My mom kept her mother of the bride dress from my wedding with the idea that it would be her burial dress. At the time of her death, it was 28 years old and stained with age and improper storage. God bless our dry cleaner for making it look like new and the funeral home for making it appear to fit as she’d lost a ton of weight at the end. I bough new undies and a new tank as she hadn’t worn a bra in years. I also bought new white, comfy, inexpensive slippers for her as she had trouble with shoes in later years ( edema, arthritis).
This was only seen by the family as she didn’t want a viewing. She had always instructed, “I only want a Mass and to be buried next to your dad.”
 
Sorry for your loss and I pray your husband is waiting for you in Heaven
 
Tis_Bearself said:
If you are not planning on cremating the remains, embalming may be a requirement of the state or municipality depending on where you are planning to bury the person, whether the body needs to be transported a significant distance for the funeral, etc. It is not a Church requirement.
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My neighbor is a Justice of the State Supreme Court. Her husband died, and the little local hospital, not having a morgue, sends the bodies to local funeral homes. When she walked into the funeral home, they gave her the hard sell – trying to milk her for all they could.

She walked out, went to see a Menonite family that makes caskets, and bought one. She drove back to the funeral home with the casket in the bed of her pickup and said, “Put him in there.”

What an uproar! They sent for the company president (these funeral homes are all part of a chain) and he came with the corporate lawyer, who told her the law REQUIRED a funeral director at any funeral, As he was piling on the manure, he suddenly realized who he was talking to.

They put him in the casket and she drove off with him. A neighbor with a backhoe had already dug the grave at a little backwoods cemetery,
 
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That’s fine for her. The funeral directors who handled my parents and my husband were longtime friends of our respective families. The one who handled my parents was also affiliated over the long term with our parish (parishioners and the funeral home was directly across the street from the church). Nobody gave anybody the hard sell and if they were marking things up a bit to make some money I didn’t care. That is why we have life insurance, to pay for funerals (my mother told me that when I was a teenager). I guarantee you none of these funeral directors were particularly well off.

Often though not always there is a funeral director like this who works with one or more churches in town and is a member of Kiwanis, K of C etc, knows a lot of townspeople and is an all-around good bloke.

I appreciate that not everybody wants the embalming or whatever and not everybody has money, however in both my husband’s and my family the older generation expected things to be done a certain way - for example, lack of a viewing would suggest that the person in the casket looked so terrible that we couldn’t show them. Also I wanted to send my husband 5 hours away across the state line so he could have his funeral in his hometown where his brother lived and be buried alongside his parents who had just died, and the state required that he be embalmed for that as the body was already starting to deteriorate by the time I could even get it from the county morgue and on its way.

So please don’t assume that all this stuff is always unnecessary or that we’re all strongarmed into it by shady funeral directors when the funeral director is somebody who our parents were buddies with for like 20 years before the death happened.
 
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