Our departed loved ones never truly leave our hearts and minds, whether they passed away just a few weeks or a few decades ago. That’s why many families look for ways to commemorate the deceased in creative, personalized ways. Here are a few of our favorite ways you can keep your loved one’s memory alive now and into the future.
Establish a College Scholarship
Creating a scholarship in the name of your loved one is an incredible way to keep his or her memory alive for years to come – it also means your loved one will be remembered in gratitude. Consider establishing a scholarship based on the deceased’s passions. Did he or she love acting in theater productions? Creating a scholarship for young actors would mean your loved one’s name will be celebrated. If he or she played an instrument, you can create a scholarship for rising musicians. You can also award scholarships to young people with academic and career interests from a certain community, region, or ethnic group.
To get started, contact the alma mater of the deceased and ask how to create a scholarship or grant in his or her name for students attending that school.
Stitch Together a Remembrance Quilt
A remembrance quilt is a wonderful way to commemorate your loved one through preserving and repurposing their clothing. Remembrance quilts can serve as a collage of various pieces of your loved one’s favorite clothing. You can give the clothing to a local quilter and commission them to create your quilt, or you can make the quilt yourself. A great resource for learning how to make a remembrance quilt can be found here.
Grow a Commemorative Garden
The growth of new things is one way to celebrate life a life passed. A commemorative garden is a wonderful way to keep a memory alive both literally and metaphorically. The garden could be comprised of your loved one’s favorite flowers, herbs, or other plants or shrubs. The plants or flowers could also be representative of places your loved one traveled in his or her life, or they could depict their favorite colors or scents.
Similarly, you could use a service like Trees for a Change which enables you to have a memorial tree or grove planted in the name of your loved one.
Create an Online Memorial
Nowadays, your options for memorializing your loved one are not limited to the physical world, but rather they extend to the digital world as well. Creating an online memorial to commemorate your loved one is a great way to honor his or her memory following the funeral, and it is one that can be easily shared with family and friends.
Funerals360 offers a free online memorial tool where you can quickly and easily memorialize your loved on online, where it can be visited for years to come. Through this platform, family members can upload photos of the deceased, write his or her life story, and share special memories. Friends and family can also leave messages on the memorial page, sharing stories and expressing condolences, and the online memorial can be shared effortlessly through social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter as well as email.
We hope you’ll find these ideas useful in commemorating your loved one for years to come. While he or she may no longer be with us, their memory will surely live on.
