Why create my own funeral?

Why Would I Want To Create My Own Funeral?

In these excerpts from Creating Your Own Funeral Or Memorial Service: A Workbook, read many of the benefits -- for both you and your loved ones -- of designing your own unique end-of-life event.

Dear Reader,

Welcome. I am very glad you have decided to create your own funeral or memorial service. Doing so can provide you many benefits. When you complete this workbook, you will have designed a service that expresses who you are and how you want to be remembered. During the process of creation, you will make many choices, important choices you may not have thought about before. You will create a gift for yourself and for your loved ones. You may have discussions with your family about matters important to all who love you. And you will have a better sense of your life thus far.

Choice

Choice is a major theme and mission of this workbook. I want you to be aware of all the possible choices you can make in this creation process. Creating your funeral or memorial service will require many choices -- music, location, readings, and much more. You can make those choices now and create exactly the kind of service you want. As a result of these choices, your funeral or memorial service can be a work of art, expressing your personality, your values, your life.

A Gift To Your Loved Ones

This book is meant to help you prepare a gift. The gift is for both the people who will miss you after you die, and for you. Too often I have witnessed confusion and uncertainty after a death. In addition to sorrow and shock, survivors are left with the perplexing questions about how to remember the deceased. What would he or she have wanted? A funeral or a memorial service? When? Where? How?

When you complete the sections of this workbook, those you leave behind when you die will have the information they need to honor and commemorate you in the manner you desire. To have these questions answered will not necessarily ease the grief when you leave, but it will leave the survivors with a certainty that your last wishes were granted. And thus, you have given them a gift.

You have given them a gift for another reason, too. Making decisions can be very stressful. When as many decisions as possible have been made prior to your death, your family is relieved of these responsibilities, and so their stress is reduced during their time of grief.

A Gift To Yourself

In the beautiful and graceful best-seller Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom, Morrie tells us that making peace with our dying allows us to do the difficult work of making peace with our living. Peace-making with our death may not be easy for many of us.

. . . Yet the wisdom of Morrie and many other philosophers (famous and everyday), and of many cultures tells us that our death can inspire and invigorate our life while we are still living. To know that any moment may be our last and to live with that knowledge can be of extraordinary value. A new perspective is brought to our decisions, a new awareness of time informs our calendar, and a new sense of what is important is brought to our choices. Do I really want to spend energy worrying about this? Do I really want to wait until tomorrow to make this phone call? Is this the best use of my day? (or life?) Many of us would not be happy to know that the way we are choosing to spend this moment was our last choice.

. . .When you have completed this book, you will have thought about your last moment. In order to imagine your memorial service or funeral, you will have to imagine that you are no longer breathing. Will this heightened awareness of your mortality have an effect on your life? I hope so.

. . .I hope that working through this book moves you in the direction of more comfort with the inevitability of your death. I hope that at least once in a while you think of your death and that doing so gives that minute more importance and luster. If so, then completing this book is a gift to yourself.

The Role Of Your Loved Ones

For whom is the funeral or memorial service held? You? Or for the living, those left behind? It is for both. The service will be a tribute to you, expressing who you were. And when you create your service before you die, you will have given two things to your survivors. As said above, first, there is tremendous emotional fulfillment and satisfaction for them in carrying out your wishes. Second, you are relieving them of much stress in the time following your death; making choices and decisions are very real stressors and you remove those stressors from a time that will be very stressful anyway.

As you work through this book, you will very likely have discussions with your family. (By family, I mean both people related to us by blood and marriage, and people who have entered our lives and have become so important that they too are now family.) These discussions will include your thoughts, feelings, and ideas, as well as those of your loved ones. You may learn new things about each other. You may open new channels of communication. When the workbook is completed, your creation will reflect your life and the desires you have for your funeral or memorial service. Woven throughout your creation will probably be pieces that meet the needs of your family. Your creation is for you and for those you hold important. You will be the lead artist.

Who Are You, Reader?

For whom is this guidebook written? Since it is about funerals and memorial services, is it just for people who are terminally ill or very aged? No, this book is for everyone. None of us knows when we will die; tomorrow could be our last day. We begin our path to death the minute we are born; all of us are dying. The creation of a funeral or memorial service is appropriate and beneficial for any of us, no matter what our state of health or age.

This book also may be very helpful to those in professions that help people plan funerals or memorial services - clergy, counselors, funeral directors, nursing home staff, hospice workers, nurses, physicians, to name a few. You will learn more about planning. And working through the book yourself, with the related feeling, thinking, imagining and deciding, will heighten your empathy and ability to guide others.

Now you are ready to begin. I truly wish you a wonderful experience, a learning adventure, and a creative quest.

Yours in the spirit of gifts,

Stephanie West Allen

© Copyright 1998 Stephanie West Allen

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