The launch of my website, My Last Song, and the publication of the Good Funeral Guide highlight the change in society’s view of funerals and planning for death.

I started My Last Song because I believe people should plan their own funerals, not leave it to grieving loved ones or to funeral directors who are likely to make the wrong choices.

The Good Funeral Guide, like My Last Song, empowers consumers with information.   “It is the first independent consumer guide and shines a spotlight on the secret world of the undertakers,” says author Charles Cowling, who also makes the following perceptive remark which has the added benefit of being an excellent sound-bite:

“The baby boomer generation reinvented youth culture; now they are reinventing death culture by reclaiming funerals from the undertakers and ministers and re-casting rituals for their dead.”

I hope the traditional one-size-fits-all funeral is finished, for it is a poor way to say goodbye to a loved one, or to be remembered by.

Instead we should recognise the virtues of the new funerals for a secular age.  As Charles points out the ‘new’ funerals should have some or all of these five features:

• celebratory – preferring gratitude to gloom, laughter to lamentation;
• personalised – a funeral as unique as the life lived;
• participative – the involvement of family and friends in caring for the body and creating their farewell ceremony;
• secular or spiritual – rejecting orthodox religious rituals; and
• iconoclastic – quirky music choices, outrageous dress codes.

Charles rightly argues that people attach little or no value to a traditional funeral because they get so little out of it and “resent paying what it would cost them to buy a decent second hand car.

“Only when they experience the transformative powers of a more relevant and personal funeral will they embrace a more positive attitude to death and how a person’s life is commemorated.”

Traditional religious funerals are less likely to achieve this if chosen by the family of the departed loved one because it seems the ‘right thing to do’, or it is the assumed default of the funeral director.  A decreasing proportion of our society have religious beliefs so it makes little sense to assume that a religious funeral is an appropriate ceremony around which family and friends mourn and remember a loved one.

As I argue in Honesty At The End, it is dishonest to organise a religious funeral for a dead loved one who had no religious beliefs to appease other members of the family.

The best way to avoid this is to plan your own funeral and ensure your family and executors know your wishes.

Which  is what the Vault section of My Last Song is for…safe storage of the details that the family will need once you have died, and for much longer if you want future generations to have an insight to the sort of person you were and the life you led.

Charles agrees: “Planning ahead is a responsibility we shouldn’t duck. To ignore death means we won’t have the ending we deserve, and our loved ones will be left to sort out the mess at a time when they are shocked and grieving.

“But if the funeral is a positive, unique and memorable event, the family will feel they are getting financial, emotional and spiritual value.”

Tags: baby boomers, executor, Funeral, funeral planning, Religion, Vault

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 17th, 2010 at 12:18 pm and is filed under Funeral, Planning for the end, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.