Where to Bury Mary?

One hundred years ago the answer was very simple.  You placed her next to Winthrop, her husband of 49 years in the family plot of the congregational cemetery, facing east. And with one shift of the eye, you could trace her family line: grandparents, aunts, uncles, and untimely nephews all neatly lined awaiting Gabriel’s trumpet blast to call their resting remains upward.

Unfortunately, today’s Mary has been married twice, lived on both coasts and has two sets of parents and children from three relationships.  So deciding where her remains settle can be a daunting task for those who survive her. 

The shift in modern lifestyle has not negated the need for appropriate avenues to honor a life and express grief over the loss common to our predecessors. However, no longer can this service tradition be assumed.  Careful forethought and communication to address the inevitable is required.  The conversation needs to start NOW, to protect those who survive Mary, and her life-legacy from the hurt feelings and bruised relationships which are inevitable if the decisions are postponed until Mary has no voice.

What does Mary want?  What would be realistic for family to participate in?  If Mary has lived her entire adult life in Los Angeles, even though her family home is Coffeeville Kansas, should the family incur the expense to ship her back home to Kansas, or choose a plot in California? 

But how do you start the conversation?  What needs to be covered?  Do I need to go to a funeral home to do so? 

Mygoodbye.com provides a place to begin the dialogue. With an easy to follow format you can plan your final farewell and store your wishes in a secure, readily accessible account that will be there to answer questions when you are not.  

Where to bury Mary?  That’s easy.  She wanted to be cremated, with a simple memorial service for friends and family followed by a meal at her favorite restaurant.

Thank you, My Goodbye.

Shirley walker is the President of www.MyGoodbye.com  

Funerals

We’ve all been there.  In our too tight pumps and black suit, which smells a bit like the closet cleaner bag it has rested peacefully in since we last called it into action for Great Aunt Sally’s funeral, sitting stiffly in a funeral home “chapel” the scent of  slightly decaying lilies heavy in the air, listening to a complete stranger whose somber countenance and grave demeanor always, and as a Pastor’s wife I have been to my share of funerals, God forgive me but it’s true, always makes me think for just a moment this guy has to be part of a Saturday Night Live routine. No pun intended. 

It is heartbreaking to say a final goodbye to a friend or loved one, but the added awkwardness of surroundings which are totally foreign to everything that their life had represented adds a dull bummer to the whole deal. 

Funerals in funeral homes can feel as genuine as the silk flower arrangements lining their marble hallways.  I’m not lobbying for backyard bar B Q’s or destination cremations, (although if either of these ideas better reflects the life of the one who has died, than I’d readily participate rather than attend another morose, cookie cutter service in a funeral home where you’d better check the marquis because, save the eulogy, it could anybody’s service.) I just think it is time for life’s swan song to come in sync with the rest of the verses. 

A funeral or memorial service should be a time of rich celebration for the life that has been completed.  It should provide a platform for grief to be shared and expressed.  It should feel natural and not fake: which in essence, means it should have those who actually knew the deceased directing the decisions, and participating in the elements of its commemoration. 

However, most of us get the creeps talking about our, or another family member’s eventual death.  It goes against our social mores.  Consequently in our silence, we abdicate the framing of our final life expressions to “professionals” who know about the business, but nothing about the heart of the life being put to rest.

Break the silence. Start the conversation.  Mygoodbye.com provides a place to begin the dialogue. With an easy to follow format you can plan your final farewell and store your wishes in a secure, readily accessible account that will allow your life memorial to sound like you and not the generic deceased.

Shirley Walker is a pastor’s wife, author and creator of www.Mygoodbye.com, a fresh, living way of looking at dying.