Helping With Your Own Funeral

Planning a funeral or memorial service is a values-clarification exercise–“What was important to him?” It’s also a guessing game of sorts—“What would she want?” Being on the edge of the process these last few days, I think anyone over 18 should plan their own, or at least provide the raw material. Anyone, in a few minutes, can list examples of the music they’d like played, the Bible verses or poems they’d like read, maybe the people they would like to speak (a potential minefield, admittedly), and anything else they’d like included. It would encourage you to think about the meaning of your own life. You wouldn’t have to share it if you didn’t want. Put it in an envelope marked “Funeral/Memorial Service: Do Not Open Until Needed” and make it known that it exists and where it is.

I suppose there’s another point of view that would say a Christian funeral should be less an individualized celebration of a life and more a community’s celebration of the hope of resurrection. It matters less what anyone “wants” at their funeral and more the collective faith we have in God’s ultimate grace to us. I understand that too.

Perhaps the middle ground is a celebration of that collective hope in ways that reflect the shape of the individual life that now is experiencing the reality of that hope.