Some of the cremation services in Chesterfield Township, MI may be for people that you have worked with. You have had friends and family members who have died, so you are familiar with how to pay tribute to and honor their memories.

However, when you have a coworker die, you may be unsure about what appropriate ways to honor them are. It’s not uncommon for someone in the office to pass a sympathy card around the office for everybody to sign. Occasionally, you will be asked to make a donation so the office can send flowers to the funeral home.

Many people from the office may attend the cremation services, regardless of how well they knew their coworker.

But you may have known the coworker very well because you worked closely together, or you developed a friendship over the year. You believe you should do more for your coworker than what the office. So, how do you do that?

Many offices tend to push to move past an employee’s death. After the sympathy card is sent, the flowers are sent to the funeral home, and employees have attended cremation services, your office may simply act as though your coworker was never there.

This is a reflection of Western society’s relationship with death, but it can negatively affect the whole office’s morale, because it can imply that employees are expendable, and they don’t really matter to the company.

You can do something about this by leading the office, as a whole, to do something meaningful to remember your coworker who died.

You could organize a special memorial service for your coworker. Planning a lunch where everyone in office brings a dish is a great way to get everyone together to remember and share stories about your coworker. To include your deceased coworker’s immediate family in your office’s tribute lunch, you could invite them to come for the lunch as well.

Another way that you could honor your coworker is to ask if you can plant a memory tree for them in a place where other employees gather during breaks or for lunch when it’s nice outdoors.

You can create a memory board in a break room or cafeteria to honor your deceased coworker. You might ask your coworker’s immediate family if they’d be willing to participate by donating photos and other mementos that highlight what they loved about your coworker.

You could keep the memory board up in the breakroom or cafeteria for a short period of time (two to four weeks is common), and then have everything on the memory board turned into a printed photo book. You can ask everyone to sign it and then present it to your deceased coworker’s immediate family.

You could approach your company about creating a scholarship in your deceased coworker’s name. Companies often like to these kinds of things because it shows that they are charitable.

The scholarship doesn’t have to be for a large amount of money, but it should go to someone in need in the community. This might be a local non-profit group that your deceased coworker supported (a local animal shelter, a homeless shelter, a food bank, etc.) or some other institution or social issue that was important to your deceased coworker.

If, for whatever reason, your coworker needs help with medical expenses or funeral expenses, you could ask your company if you can solicit other employees to contribute money that can be given to your coworker’s immediate family to help them out financially.

For information about cremation services in Chesterfield Township, MI, our caring and knowledgeable staff at Lee-Ellena Funeral is here to assist you.