WHEN you suffer a bereavement, a funeral for a member of your family is one of the most difficult days of your life.

Everything your family and friends ever thought about a loved one is expressed on that day.

When someone dies it comes as a great shock.

Sometimes the death is unexpected but nothing prepares you for the emotional shock of losing someone.

Funeral directors are there to help and advise in whatever way they can.

They are dedicated professionals who provide a personal service at one of the most distressing times of your life and one of the first services of a funeral director is a shoulder to cry on.

But there is of course much more to the service than that.

The last thing anyone wants in their grief is to worry about forms and complying with the legalities of death when they have just lost a loved one.

So it is a relief to see the sympathetic face of a professional who can deal calmly and efficiently with all the practical details of a funeral.

Funeral directors expect and are prepared to spend time with their clients making arrangements and just listening.

Often relatives are only too glad to have a sympathetic outsider to whom they can talk to about the deceased.

At the time of bereavement, service and personal attention to the family is everything.

A funeral is the most personal event of your life and therefore must reflect your ideas, needs and circumstances.

The thought of arranging a funeral is not something any of us wants to do, especially in the case of a husband, wife or children.

This, together with the distress and emotional upset leaves the bereaved completely disorientated and unsure of what to do next.

This is exactly the situation that funeral directors understand and know how to cope with, endeavouring to provide the bereaved with full and fair information about all services they can provide.

The service from your funeral director starts from the moment you contact them, whether by phone or by calling personally.

It continues to a point beyond when the deceased is laid to rest.

On your initial contact they will ask you for preliminary details and a convenient time to meet and discuss the final arrangements when the funeral will be arranged to a standard and procedure meets the need of the family.

You can save your family extra distress by saving and planning your funeral now.

This way you can have the type of funeral you would like and it will save your family having to deal with even more things at a time which is heartbreaking enough for them.

You can even pay for your funeral now, so they don't need to worry about the cost or whether you have saved enough money.

Many funeral directors will let you pay in installments and spread the cost over a period of time if it is too much for you to pay all in one go.

No one likes thinking about funeral planning but eventually we are all going to need to do it.

If you take some time to sort things out now then you can then get on and enjoy the rest of your life knowing everything is taken care of.