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Hi Puss I have sent a pm
Teresa
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RR said what I was going to -- It's a good idea to have someone stay in the house (even without a newspaper announcement; news travels). A neighbour might do it for a couple of hours.
I'll just mention another unconventional idea, along the lines of maggiewinchester's.
Our situation was a bit like yours, Puss. My dad was diagnosed with cancer, then it was six weeks in hospital, and 3 days at home and then he died. Except we didn't know until close to the end that he was dying.
My dad died in the middle of Canadian winter, 100 miles from our hometown where all family and friends are. Travelling distances in winter here can be hard, and snowstorms can interrupt the best plans. There would have been no point in having a funeral in the small town where my mum and sister live; he didn't know a soul there, and having people travel there could have been a nightmare.
It also would have been a little hard to plan as we had to wait for a post mortem to be done, and that was added stress ... So my mum and sister went to the crematorium on the day, and me and No.1, 300 miles away, spent that hour under a big blankie with a brandy and an episode of Heartbeat, one of my dad's favourite shows.
So we waited until May, when the weather was good, and had a -- never know what to call it! -- a get-together in the home town. A friend reserved the common room at an apartment building where my parents once lived, and we had, oh, nearly 100 people there -- nieces and nephews, old neighbours, old work and business colleagues who saw the notice in the paper. In hindsight, we should have got catered food in, it was a lot of work, but we had made sandwiches and people brought deserts, and we had photos around the room, a book for people to sign, and people who hadn't seen one another in many years mingled and talked.
My mum made a little talk, thanking everyone for coming and all, my oldest girl cousin said a few words ... and my brother and I did a reading of a funny sketch about George Bush and Condoleezza Rice called "Hu's on First". My dad was a huge Laurel and Hardy fan, and when that parody of "Who's on first" hit the internet, my brother and I both emailed it to my dad in Florida, and he printed it out and gave it to all his Republican neighbours in the trailer park. ;)
The people who came were very pleased with this chance to see and meet my dad's old friends and family. And for us, it meant that the immediate grief and stress of his illness and death were over so we were able to see past it, and the others didn't feel so much like they were walking on eggshells around the grieving family.
We did something similar but much smaller when my grandmother died. For my grandfather, a church sloist, we had a big funeral in his Protestant church, co-officiated by the new minister (who didn't really know him), and a Mennonite music director and Roman Catholic nun who had ministered to him in the nursing home.
But my grandmother wasn't religious, so a few weeks after her death we had a small gathering of family and friends in the church basement, catered by the church ladies, with some guitar and singing by friends of a cousin, and a few words from people there, including the lesbian clergywoman who had known my grandparents as a child. ;) For my other grandmother, we had a smaller gathering, just family (mostly cousins who hadn't seen one another since childhood) at a cousin's house, with a time for people to say a few words, and again, no funeral.
Okay, blah blah, I talk too much. I just wanted to say: there are different ways of doing things when someone dies. You might want to consider the unconventional way we seem to do it in my family -- waiting a little bit until the immediate family is feeling better, and not having the stress of planning for your family member's death at the same time as coming to terms with it yourselves.
And just spending time with him. That's what you want to do now.
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We put an advert about gran's funeral in the paper as we had no idea who knew her. There was no danger of her house being burgled - she died in a care home!
We never 'advertised' my bil's funeral, as the majority of the town knew him - so they knew when he'd died and when the funeral was - so if anyone wanted to burgle the house I suppose they could.
However - the neighbours kept an eye open.
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