• A.W. Lymn Funeral Directors of Great Britain is taping funerals from above using drones.  They then put it to music and incorporate the product into a disc or upload to You Tube to create a lasting memory for the family.

Access is then given to those who attended so they can re-watch in their own time or share with friends and family who may have been unable to attend. The finished product allows family members and others who attended to watch the cemetery service from above and recapture the feelings that they felt while at the cemetery.

You can see an article on this feature here.

• And here you can see the annual Co-op Funeralcare Music Chart which indicates the top musical selections played at the British company’s funerals in the last year.  Topping the chart for 2021 was the 1963 hit “You’ll Never Walk Alone” by Gerry and the Pacemakers. The emotional melody has hit the top spot for the first time, knocking previous multi-time winner, Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ from the number one position.

Sinatra’s “My Way” finished in the 2nd Place position with Eric Idle’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” taking the 3rd most popular position on the chart.

Among traditional hymns, “Abide with Me” continued in the top position for another year, but did not reach into the Top 10 overall rankings.

The music chart, which is now in its 20th year is based on data and insights from Co-op Funeralcare’s own funeral directors and arrangers who conduct approximately 100,000 services per year.

• Finally, just this morning in reading The Hustle I was struck by a short article about weddings.  I’ve had in my head that pre-Covid, the United States had approximately 2.8 million deaths per year. . .and slightly growing because of the aging Baby Boomers. . and the number of weddings seemed very similar to that so I had to do a little more checking.  The Hustle mentioned that the United States will have approximately 2.6 million weddings this year. . . up from an average of about 2.2 million per year because some ceremonies were delayed during the pandemic.

Oh, by the way, because of inflation and travel costs, the average cost to be a Bridesmaid or Groomsman has, per a recent survey, moved up to about $825.

As for deaths, you can see in the provisional mortality data from the CDC that the United States had approximately 3,458,697 deaths in 2021.  Of those deaths, Covid-19 was listed as an underlying or contributing cause of 460,513 of them.  That would equate to 13.3% of all deaths, rising from 10.4% of all deaths in 2020.

Heart disease ranked #1 in causes of death at approximately 20.0% of all deaths with cancer ranking 2nd at 17.4%, followed then by Covid-19 as the #3 cause.

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