Some people want to let everyone know about someone who has passed away, as well as arrangements for their funeral. They want to make sure that as many people who knew the deceased as possible are able to attend the proceedings, and pay their respects one final time.
Others, however, may want to make the funeral a more private, intimate affair. They may choose to keep news of the death and funeral to themselves and the dead’s closest family and friends until after it has taken place. And with the current climate caused by the Coronavirus pandemic, this has become much more common.
In this blog, I’m going to take a further look into this, as well as answering the question:
The simple answer to the above question is yes. There are no restrictions on time when it comes to placing a funeral notice for someone who has passed away. Some private people have been known to wait for months after the fact to make the news public. Here on funeral-notices.co.uk we even offer what’s known as a
Lasting Tribute page for those who don’t think that a traditional funeral notice is for them.
However, until recently this practice was rarely employed. Having booked thousands of funeral notices, I would estimate that the average time between a passing and the funeral notice appearing online and in the newspaper is about a week. I’ve spoken to people in the past who have placed it on the day of the passing, and I’ve even spoken to someone who didn’t formally announce the death in the paper until a year after it had occurred.
Of course, the funeral notice doesn’t have to be the first announcement of someone’s passing, although most of the time it indeed is. Some people will place a ‘preliminary’ notice announcing a passing, inserting at the end of the message that “funeral details will follow.”
Some people will wait altogether to announce the passing until after the funeral, and will often include wording along the lines of “funeral has already taken place.” This is a practice which has become much more common in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, and looks set to continue as long as the virus affects our everyday lives.
As covered in a previous blog on our website, Coronavirus has placed serious limits on who can attend a funeral. This may make it more awkward to announce a funeral in the newspaper, as if many people want to attend then you may find yourself in the unenviable position of having to turn some people down.
Placing the funeral notice after the ceremony itself has taken place is a way around this conundrum, and is something which became much more commonplace in 2020 as a result.
In another blog on the website, we looked at how the Welsh Government went a step further, encouraging funeral planners to limit information about the time and location of the funeral in death notices and make clear that attendance at the funeral is by invitation only.
Thank you for taking the time to read today’s blog, I hope you found it interesting. For more blogs on a whole range of subjects, please visit
funeral-notices.co.uk/blog.
