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Personal Planning Guide
Video Documents
What to do?
Do you remember?

Dignity Memorial Funeral Homes have prepared a certain number of tools to help families who suffered the loss of a loved one. Apart from the hundreds of books of reference and written documents, there is also an audiotape library dealing with crucial subject matters. These visual documents have been prepared meticulously in cooperation with a group of experts.

You can request any of these by filling the form or calling one of our family consultants.

Personal Planning Guide

The Personal Planning Guide's goal is to help you gather relevant information (personal elements and financial data) that will be helpful to your loved ones once you are gone. This document also gives you the opportunity to specify your last wishes as far as funeral arrangements, organ donations, etc.

Video Documents

You can benefit from this segment of the family support program. It is offered to Dignity Network members on a continuous basis. You simply need to make a request by filling the form or calling a family consultant.

The audiotape library includes books such as the following:

• Someone you love is dying. How do you cope?
• Living With Grief After Sudden Loss
• A Child's View of Grief
• Escape School preview (A special document to help children and parents control their fears and prevent child abduction).

What to do?

Did you know that benefits, annuities and allowances are available to survivors according to certain eligibility criteria? Here is some general information that can be used to examine your own situation.

Insurance

You should verify if the deceased had taken out life insurance policies. To ask for a life insurance policy search, you can contact the Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association at 514-845-6173. Families must contact the insurance companies as soon as possible.

Financial Institutions

Financial institutions can pay up certain sums of money in case of need.

Death Benefit

The Death Benefit is an amount paid after the Régime des rentes contributor dies. A request must be made within 60 days of the person's death.

• The Surviving Spouse's Pension and the Pension for Children of a Deceased Contributor

  For more information on these benefits, contact the Régie des rentes du Québec offices at 514-873-2433.

• Compensation from the Société de l'Assurance automobile du Québec.

  When a person dies in a car accident, his or her heirs are entitled to receive a death benefit. For more details, call 514-873-7620.

• Compensation from the Workplace Health, Safety and Compensation Commission.

  This compensation is paid if the person dies further to a work-related accident or an occupational disease. There are other types of compensation paid to dependents when a person dies when performing a good citizen action or he or she is a victim of a criminal act.

  For more information, please check your telephone directory under the Gouvernement du Québec and Commission de la santé et de la sécurité du travail sections.

• The Income Security's Death Benefit.

  Even if the person was not an income security recipient at time of their death, special benefits are paid by the ministry of income security to settle the funeral charges incurred by a member of the family or successor (if eligible). The Travail-Québec centres can provide all of the necessary information.

• The Veterans' Benefit

  The Last Post Fund should be reached to validate the possibility of receiving such a benefit.

Do not hesitate to contact our family consultants to get additional information regarding amounts and assistance programs (subject to change) and any other information concerning immediate actions to be undertaken further to one's death.

Do you remember?

• At the end of the 1800s, Quebec's society was withdrawn. Family spirit and religion were strongly entrenched. Families stricken by death laid their loved ones' bodies in state in their own homes for several days. A mourning crape hanging at the entrance door was the sign that someone had died.

• The self-propelled hearse made its appearance at the end of the 1920s. It slowly and surely replaced horses that pulled the magnificent wood-carved hearses.

• In days when the deceased were laid in state in their own homes, a great number of "hair-raising stories" were heard. There wasn't a family where such an incident didn't occur by coincidence during the night. The deceased person would suddenly sit straight in their coffin or lift their arm! At the time, there were no embalming methods and the lying corpse would move when muscles slackened or legs and feet stiffened. The deceased never came back to life. Only, people would have the jitters for quite some time!

• Are you familiar with the expression "to tread the boards"? People probably invented this expression because at that time, the deceased were laid in slate in their own homes and their corpse was laid on planks.

• Up until the arrival of funeral homes, friends and family would take turns night and day to stay with the deceased in the house's central room. Despite their grief, the family would receive and feed all of their guests. The family would ask a carpenter to make a coffin. They would put the deceased in it only before going to church for the funeral.