Fiscal verses Physical Responsibility

A MyGoodbye.com Legacy Plan allows you to cover your bases without alot of drama

A 29 year old internet executive recently commented he had bought his first serious life insurance.  “Why” I asked, “Are you planning on kicking the bucket soon?”  Surprised, he quickly retorted “Of course not, but if something should happen, I want to make sure my wife and daughter are taken care of.” 

Our society puts a high premium on financial planning in the event that the unexpected happens.  In fact, individuals spent 4.067 trillion dollars in 2009 a year to pay for life insurance coverage that they hope with all their hearts is not needed.  That’s nearly 9% of the total goods and services produced in industrialized nations to buy something you really are not planning, or even desiring to put to use. 

While we commend the purchasing of life insurance as fiscal responsibility, the pre-planning of what, how and where our remains are dealt with in the event that the unexpected happens is considered morbid and presumptuous. 

Most of us have a better end of life plan for our bank accounts than our own bodies. 

Certainly a wife is spared grief if her husband has covered the bases on their finances, but she can suffer tremendous anguish trying to determine decisions regarding burial/cremation/cemetery when such topics have never been discussed.

Does she choose the family plot in another state or purchase one nearby?  Who would he have preferred to be pall bearers?  Did he have strong feelings for or against cremation?  Are there childhood friends or business associates who should be notified?  Would he want her to spend the $15,000 the funeral director insists is appropriate to properly acknowledge his place in society? 

What if there were a convenient resource and planning tool which could insure that should the unexpected happen, the bases were covered for all your end of life needs?  A website that could guide you through what decisions and plans are needed, and allowed you to store that information in a way that it could be accessed 24-7 from any place in the world?  What if it allowed you to store the words you would want to say if it were your last goodbye?

For the small investment of a few hours, the return is exponential.  You are protecting your loved ones from facing the unexpected unprepared, insuring peace of mind and a plan in the midst of heartache. But most importantly, you are insuring that saying your final goodbye will be with the same care and forethought as you said “I do.”

For a fraction of the cost of a month’s insurance premium, MyGoodbye.com provides you with  lifetime protection that your end of life needs are addressed as you would want them to be, extending comfort and provision for those you love beyond your last breath

How do you provide a guide for your grieving family?  Bravo, MyGoodbye.  There to carry them through when you can’t be.  

Shirley Walker is the President of www.MyGoodbye.com, offering a fresh, living way to deal with dying.

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.