In the News
‘with Amazing Grace’ A Concierge ServiceFor The Bereaved
Custom Providers
When the opportunity presents itself, To Your Good Health, A Healthcare Newsletter, is happy to pass along information concerning companies or organizations coming on the scene to provide a new or unusual service for consumers and professional caregivers on the Cape.
Concierge: A usually multilingual hotel staff member…who handles luggage and mail, makes reservations, and arranges tours for guests.
This is the most common usage of a French word with Latin roots (for slave, incidentally, according to Webster’s Collegiate dictionary). But in recent times its has been expanded to include all sorts of special services, including blue ribbon medical care, as noted elsewhere in this issue.
Now, from East Dennis comes word of a new application for that word, one that describes special services to be performed during a family’s most trying times.
The new company is called “with Amazing Grace” and owner Annie Gibbons describes her fledgling enterprise as “a funeral concierge service.”
Ms. Gibbons says there are two aspects to her business.
Basically, she takes care of all the family details involved when there is a funeral.
“I don’t just hand out brochures or make suggestions about things like travel, accommodations, bereavement reception, flowers and sitting services. I actually pick up the phone and make any and all the arrangements required to allow family and friends to be together for the services at such an emotional time,” she says.
One example: The deceased resided in New York, her surviving daughters lived on the Cape with the services to be held in Brewster, the reception in Dennis and burial in Plymouth. And this was August, high season on the Cape.
While the funeral home took care of all the usual details having to do with cremation and transportation to the church and cemetery, Ms. Gibbons used her special connections with vendors to make arrangements for a bed-and-breakfast to waive its two-to-three night minimum requirement for out-of-town friends and relatives requiring accommodations for a single night; then dinner reservation for a party of 22 at 7:30 p.m.; family flowers, with the delivery charge waived; a personalized bereavement luncheon with 4x4 sugar cookies frosted and decorated with crossword puzzles, the deceased’s passion; and finally, a town car discreetly waiting at the cemetery to transport out-of-town guests to South Station for their trip back to New York.
In addition, if the family wishes, she offers what she calls “a Personal Tribute Celebration service, which provides a vehicle to create a film retrospective and celebration plan that reflects the essence of my client’s life to be left to all future generations.”
In any presentation, she stresses that she does not infringe on any services that might be provided by a funeral home.
Chance and necessity combined to inspire Ms. Gibbons to establish what she believes is the first service of this kind east of a sole listing in California.
Ms. Gibbons is also a personal trainer. One day a client was talking about all the planning that was involved in gathering the clan for a milestone birthday party. Then he commented that while there were party planners, no such service seemed to exist for funerals.
The light switch turned on and then necessity turned up the wattage. Ms. Gibbons’ husband is a contractor who had just been laid off. And “personal training” is not exactly a high priority item on most budgets in a recession.
So Ms. Gibbons did the research, created a Web site and “with Amazing Grace” was born.