Kathy Benjamin - Its Your Funeral! Plan the Celebration of a Lifetime - Before Its Too Late

According to the National Funeral Directors Association, the average funeral today costs over $10,000. Thats such a ridiculous amount of money that if you werent already dead, the shock of it might kill you. Its enough to make you understand if your relatives chose to just dump your body in a field under cover of darkness. Yet, despite the expense, few people plan their funerals ahead of time. This is a disaster waiting to happen.

What other event of such magnitude do people drop Benjamins galore on with no arrangements in place? Weddings, vacations, births of children, car purchases: most of us prepare for months, if not years, for such milestones. But none of those are sure to be a one-off. You could have any number of marriages. Dozens of vacations. Dozens of cars. Dozens ofchildren, God help you. With a funeral, you pretty much get one shot to nail it.

But this defining moment of your existence (or nonexistence, as it were), the one chance for your friends and family to come together and remember who you were, what they loved about you, and how you left your mark on the world, is an afterthought. No, worseits an anti-thought, something many people avoid thinking about completely. This isnt healthy. You are going to be worm food one day, and its time to deal with it.

Which brings us to Nicolas Cage. Everyone loves Nicolas Cage. His films have made five billion dollars. Hes got an Oscar. He named his son after Superman. Yes, he blew his fortune acquiring such esoteric items as a dinosaur skull, a pet octopus, and not one but two castles, but whats important is that in the middle of his spending spree, he realized he could not take any of it with him.

One of Cages many purchases was a nine-foot-tall pyramid tomb in a famous New Orleans cemetery. Its gleaming white and engraved with the Latin phrase OMNIA AB UNO (Everything from One). Still only in his mid-forties, hed decided to take charge of his own afterlife in the most Nicolas Cage manner possible. No way was he letting his busload of ex-wives bury him under a simple tombstone. He looked death in the face and said, I was Ghost Rider. Did you see that movie? It was absolutely murdered by the critics. Which I think was unfair becauseanyway, my point is, you do not scare me.

You need to be at least as rational as Nicolas Cage when it comes to planning your funeral. That is a very low bar. If the star of the direct-to-DVD film Vengeance: A Love Story has put his affairs in order, its time to get serious.

But not too serious. Because planning the biggest event of your afterlife should be a blast. A fun-eral, if you will. Within the pages of this book, you have the chance to make sure your send-off is exactly what you want it to be, whether thats a drunken bacchanalia or a sober, somber reflection on just how great you were. The decisions to make are many, as are the pitfalls to avoid. Every stage of the legacy-planning process will be considered, from selecting a burial outfit and accessories to choosing a funeral theme. Guided-journal elements and worksheets will not only help you think outside the coffin, but ensure that your wishes are recordedwhich will be a massive help to your loved ones.

Just imagine: your mourners screw up your send-off because they have to throw together a five-figure event in a couple of days while sobbing uncontrollably. Having a plan will both ensure that you get the funeral of your dreams and take the burden of major decisions off them.

If all of this sounds too sad or scary to contemplate, its okay. Youre not alone. Take comfort in knowing that the best way to conquer your fears and anxiety about death is to face it head-on. Although you cant choose the time or manner of your demise, at least you can make sure you have a say in what happens after. By working out the details in advance, you wont have to cross your fingers that your spirit will find a way to communicate your funeral wishes through a psychic. And doesnt that make you feel just a little bit better?

Planning your own funeral is an act of love, an important aspect of positive mental health, andthanks to this bookits going to be a heck of a lot of fun.

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Humans have been dying pretty much from the minute they started living. Thats kind of how it works. Every Homo sapiens who ever lived has had to deal with being buried or burying other people (and often both). This means that funerals are as old as the human race itself. For at least one hundred thousand years, humans have been reinventing the funeral again and again. Sure, the main idea has been the same: get rid of the decomposing body (although, as you will learn, even how we accomplish that has changed with the times). Its generally accepted that every funeral is made up of three major ingredients: the burial, a ceremony or ritual that accompanies the burial, and a memorial or marker for the dead. But within those confines, funerals are unimaginably diverse, with every culture and era putting its own stamp on this event.

Its hard to pinpoint the earliest known funerals. After all, the only thing that makes a funeral different from just dumping a corpse in a hole is the ritual surrounding it. The majority of ancient funerary traditions havent been preserved in the archaeological record, and so are lost to time. But we do know some things about the earliest funerals. As of 2020, the oldest known ritual burialsdating back 92,000 yearscan be found in the Qafzeh cave in Israel. The twenty-seven individuals whose remains are in the cave include some of the earliest examples of anatomically modern human beings outside Africa. Some of the bodies were buried with deer antlers in their hands. Traces of ocher were also found on the bones. A childs arms had been carefully folded before his burial. Just like today, it seems that our earliest