Do I Need to Plan My Funeral Ahead of Time?

By: Shelley Essery, Certified Executor Advisor

What your family really needs to know.

Thinking about your funeral wishes and making sure someone knows what they are can make future decisions easier for the people you love.

Funeral planning doesn’t have to mean choosing every song, flower and reading.

It can be as simple as deciding what matters to you, writing those wishes down and telling someone where to find them.

Or, if you’d prefer to make more of the decisions yourself, you can take the next step and explore pre-need funeral planning.

What funeral decisions should I think about ahead of time?

Start with the bigger decisions.

Do you have a preference for burial or cremation?

Would you want a traditional funeral, celebration of life, small gathering or no service at all?

Are there religious, cultural or family traditions that are important to you?

Is there a particular place where you’d like a service or gathering to happen?

You don’t need to have an answer for everything. Start with the things you know matter to you.

What personal funeral wishes should I record?

This is where funeral planning becomes less about arrangements and more about the person being remembered.

Perhaps there’s a song you love, a reading that means something to you or a charity you’d like people to support.

Maybe there’s something from your life you’d love to see incorporated into the gathering.

There may also be things you definitely don’t want.

Write those down too.

These personal details can be difficult for families to guess later, particularly when several people remember different conversations.

Do I need to decide everything?

Absolutely not.

There may be decisions you’d rather leave to your family.

Perhaps you care about being cremated but don’t care what happens with your ashes. Maybe you’d like a celebration of life but don’t have an opinion about where it’s held.

You can be clear about both.

“This matters to me.”

And:

“This doesn’t. You decide.”

Funeral planning doesn’t have to mean controlling what happens after your death. It can simply mean giving some direction where you have a preference.

What is pre-need funeral planning?

If you’d like to go beyond recording your wishes, you can explore pre-need funeral planning with a funeral director.

This gives you an opportunity to talk through your preferences, learn about the choices available and consider which arrangements you’d like to make ahead of time.

Funeral planning is an important part of the work behind The Empowered Estate. Our combined experience brings together funeral service, death care and pre-need planning with estate administration and support for families after a death.

We see the value of the conversation from both directions.

Some people want to make detailed arrangements.

Some want to record a few wishes.

Some simply want to understand their choices before deciding what, if anything, they want to do next.

If you would like to explore making arrangements ahead of time, learn more about pre-need funeral planning with Karla here.

If I plan my funeral, who should I tell?

This is the piece that can easily be missed.

If you have written down funeral wishes or made arrangements with a funeral home, make sure someone knows.

They should know:

• that you’ve made plans or recorded wishes;
• where that information is kept; and
• who to contact if you’ve made arrangements with a funeral provider.

You don’t need to gather the whole family around the kitchen table and announce every detail.

But someone you trust should know that the information exists.

What happens if there are no funeral plans?

Of course, many families find themselves on the other side of this conversation.

Someone has died and nobody is quite sure what they wanted.

Did they want burial or cremation? Was anything arranged? Did they ever mention what kind of service they wanted?

That’s a different conversation, and one Shelley has covered on her Substack Someone Died Without Funeral Plans. What Does the Executor Do Now?

That article walks through what to do when the death has already happened and there are few or no funeral instructions to follow.

Here at The Empowered Estate, we have the opportunity to look at the question before our families are in that position.

Your funeral wishes don’t have to be complicated

You could begin today by answering just three questions:

What do I know I want?

What do I know I don’t want?

What am I completely comfortable leaving for my family to decide?

Those answers may be all you want to record right now.

That’s what we mean by preparing the people, not just the paperwork.

Sometimes preparation is a document.

Sometimes it’s a plan.

And sometimes it’s simply a conversation that means the people you love won’t have to wonder what you would have wanted.