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Resource Guide for Families: How to Create a Meaningful Virtual Ceremony (PDF)
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Summary of guide book below:
Celebrate a loved one with community and support each other in grief with a little help from live streaming; Covid-19 can’t stop love
Video webinar at link above
Depending where you live, the CDC guidance is against gatherings of 10+ people for an unknown period of time. The official guidance on social distancing from funeral homes translates this recommendation as limiting funeral attendance to immediate family, and live streaming (virtual funeral) or recording the service for other would-be attendees. But one of the most cathartic parts of a funeral is often the reception / wake / Shiva that follows, where everyone comes to share stories and be together.
If you’d like to host a virtual wake / funeral reception / Shiva for your loved one, you can use this step-by-step guide to make it a success. A virtual wake is a time for people who can’t all come together in person to come together all the same to celebrate the life of their loved one and support each other in grief. Friends and family can share stories, songs, and photos, just like they would at an in-person wake. COVID-19 can’t stop love.
Your step-by-step guiding to planning a virtual wake / memorial service / funeral reception / Shiva
1. Register for Zoom Pro
It’s strange to think that the service you might use for your company all-hands meeting could also be an elegant solution to support a grieving friend or family, but here we are — mourning in the time of coronavirus.
Zoom Pro is the cheapest plan that gives you all the functionality you need to host a virtual wake. For $15 / month, you can have up to 100 participants and meet as long as you’d like. 100 participants should be enough as that counts computers joining, not people, and families will likely be joining together from 1 computer.
2. Get your settings ready
Zoom has a number of different settings for different types of meetings and gatherings, including the ability to record the entire event; below are the settings we’d recommend for your virtual memorial.
3. Invite friends & family
Now it’s time to invite everyone to the virtual memorial. You can do this in whichever way feels most natural for you to communicate with your community — email, calendar invite, Facebook event. You can either create a calendar invitation directly from Zoom, or copy the information and paste in an email, Facebook event, etc. (see red circles below).
Zoom gives you a LOT of ways to join the meeting, mostly different dial-ins for people calling in on their phone. The only link you really need to send is the one circled in green below. However, if you plan to have less tech-enabled folks calling in, you should include at least 1 of the phone number options, as well, which you’ll find when you click “copy the invitation”.
In your invitation to friends and family, you can encourage those that are safely able to join together to do so (e.g. family in same household joining from same computer). You may also want to ask them to check in advance that that they have the following:
Computer or smartphone with a working webcam and microphone (unless joining by phone only)
Relatively quiet place to join the memorial from, or headphones in case there is background noise
Good internet connection
You can see an email invitation template to get you started, which includes a PDF attachment for attendees on how to join and participate in the virtual memorial. You can also use a more formal e-invitation (e-vite) tool like Paperless Post which feels more like opening a paper invitation.
4. Recruit someone to help you manage the flow of the memorial
We’d recommend you ask in advance who would like to share stories, songs, etc. during the memorial, and make a schedule so it’s clear whose turn it is to speak next. And of course, more attendees should be encouraged to share stories after you make it through this initial list.
You, or someone else designated in advance, should play the role of emcee or moderator. You will open the memorial event by welcoming everyone and laying out a few ground rules for a virtual memorial; specifically:
1 person speaks at a time
After you make it through the initial list, others can “raise their hand” or write in the “chat” feature that they would like to share a story
The emcee will say whose turn it is to speak next
If there’s a lot of background noise, you can mute all participants, then selectively unmute people based on whose turn it is to speak (or ask the speaker to unmute themselves):
Whew, you made it!
Please contact our team at LifeWeb 360 with any questions or have your funeral director reach out.