Gee & Hickton's Christmas Services Important for Families [Gee & Hickton Funeral Services]

The annual Christmas memorial service at the Hutt Valley’s well known Gee & Hickton Funeral Directors has received tremendously popular appreciation from the many families who have lost a loved one during the year.

“The first Christmas without the family member you loved can be particularly hard,” says Gee & Hickton’s bereavement support person, Hazel Neser. “Attending a special remembrance service can help people through that difficult time.”

Hazel adds that grief is our natural response to loss in our lives.

“There is no right or wrong way to grieve and people have different ways of grieving,” she says. “When someone dies, family and friends can find it difficult to cope with the tremendous grief they experience and can be unprepared for important decisions and arrangements that need to be made.”

Gee & Hickton manager Gavin Murphy says they want to help people as much as possible after a bereavement. “The service doesn’t stop after the funeral is over, because that can be the time of someone’s greatest need.”

Gavin says his funeral directors’ flexibility in making sure they listen and then provide the type of service people want is widely acknowledged and their job is greatly enhanced by being able to help people plan in advance.

“Attitudes are slowly changing and people are more understanding about the need to plan ahead. These days, funeral services are a personal celebration of a person’s life, with a lot of family participation. The preparations can become somewhat fraught if nobody knows what that person wanted,” he says.

“Most people have a pretty good idea what they want to happen – the music, the readings, the special remembrances – but if they haven’t written it down somewhere and handed it on to a family member, their lawyer or a funeral firm, no one will know what they wanted,” he says.

Increasingly, people are asking Gee & Hickton to record their wishes as part of their retirement planning.

As a member of the Funeral Directors’ Association of New Zealand professional body, Gee & Hickton offers the FDANZ Funeral Trust bereavement plan which allows for payment by easy instalments of $20 a fortnight, or lump sum payments, which are exempt from asset testing for long-term residential care.

For more information, please contact Gavin Murphy at Gee & Hickton, Phone 04 566 3103

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