Jessica Fonseca was "the heart of the family, be it at home, at a party or on vacation" - that is how her "favourite nephew" remembered her at the funeral service on Tuesday.

"You showed us what family meant," he said about aunty Jessica.

The one-and-a-half-hour service of Jessica and her twin sons Darren and Joshua was held at Christ the King Church in Park Circus.

Jessica, 43, and the twins, 16, were found murdered with their skulls smashed and throats slit in their rented Palm Avenue apartment on Saturday morning.

Jessica's husband Neil Fonseca, 49, had a gash on his throat and wounds on his hands.

He has undergone surgery in a nursing home.

Three white coffins were placed side by side at the end of the aisle in the church - Jessica's was flanked by her sons'. After the service, people walked in a single file to pay their last respects to the trio.

The church was packed during the service, which started at 2pm.

In the audience were students from St. Xavier's Collegiate School, where Darren was a student of Class IX. He was also a member of the school's football team.

In his tribute, Jessica's cousin said he, with Darren and Joshua, would turn "the (Palm Avenue) house into a football field and have our grandmother's temperature go up....

"You were always stylish Josh and had the girls running after you. You loved the game football and was always ready to play whenever I asked you."

Another young man, almost choking on his words, described Darren as a "premier athlete".

Some in their tributes wished the incident was a nightmare and not real.

A family friend felt Jessica went to heaven because God needed "someone to sit down and manufacture smiley emojis... and who better than Jessica to take up there. I can promise she would manufacture those beautiful emojis because whenever I saw Jessica she was always smiling."

Amidst tears the three hearses left the church a little before 4pm.

The remains of the Fonsecas were interred in the AJC Bose Road cemetery at 5.30pm.

Neil's condition

Neil, in the intensive care unit after surgery on his windpipe, is yet to regain his ability to speak and is communicating through signs or by writing.

Nursing home officials said nobody came to meet him on Tuesday.

Neil's daughter Samantha and brother visited him on Monday.

"A tracheotomy has been done to enable him to breathe. The width of the tube was diminished on Tuesday, which means the wound is healing," an official of the nursing home said.

Neil was given semi-solid food on Tuesday. The team of doctors treating him include an ENT specialist, a general physician, an orthopaedic surgeon, a plastic surgeon and a cardio-thoracic surgeon.