Updated: Amish Funerals

The Amish die as they live: no frills, simple, without many of the ornate trappings of a non-Amish funeral. There is no organ music, no candles, no flowers at the gravesite....a simple sermon and a plain pine box for burial is pretty much the extent.
 Some Amish settlements use simple wooden gravemarkers with only the initials etched.  Having been to several Amish funerals myself I will say that the Amish seem to have a very stoic outlook on death.  It's not something that is necessarily feared.  An elderly Amish man in Montana once told me that he was "so excited to get to Heaven that he could hardly wait."   It was a poignant, fearless view of death.  Such an acceptance of the end-of-life is ingrained in the Amish from the time they are very little.  Amish children are present at funerals and even the youngest will often view the deceased during visitations. The above photo is of mourners on their way to a funeral in the Swiss Amish settlement outside of Geneva, Indiana.  Below is a very no-frills cemetery outside of Grabill, Indiana.  Note the lack of flowers or other ornamentation.  Such plainness is typical of an Amish cemetery. As you can imagine, Amish funerals, can draw quite a crowd.  When you have an elderly Amish person pass and that person has 10 kids and they all have 10 kids and those kids have kids, well...yea, and you throw in cousins and in-laws and uncles and the guest list can become staggeringly large fast.  That is why visitations are often held in the home and a vigil kept with the body (yes, the Amish do most often embalm...a lot of this is dictated not just by belief, but local regulations) for a 48-hour period, including the middle of the night. With such a huge number of people wanting to pay their respects and people coming from all over, you'll have people coming at all hours of the day and night.