Attend Your Own Funeral?
I watched a movie the other night with one of my favorite actors, Robert Duvall, as the lead character who plans and attends his own funeral. The name of the movie is Get Low. I don’t think that he is the only one who has thought about doing this.
He arranged the music and the food and took care of the invitations to the people in the town. He was not on a friendly basis with a lot of the townsfolk, so this was also his chance to make amends before he died.
He actually went to his own funeral. That is different from what we usually imagine. We think that we might be there, but we are visiting, listening, and looking down from the spirit world.
The fact is that most of us do not make plans for our own funeral. Less than 70% of us have last will and testament forms made up.
It is about the same amount of people over 50 who have not made any funeral plans. I have often wondered why people put this off. Are we waiting until we get sick to make plans or to “get your things in order” after the doctor tells us the diagnosis is terminal? This is not the time to start thinking about buying a life insurance policy.
Steve Jobs had the luxury of knowing that he was going to die ahead of time. I call it a luxury because it is not a death by accident or a sudden heart attack.
We all know that we are going to die, but we are just waiting for someone to confirm it. One of his quotes from the speech that he was giving to the Stanford graduates helped explain it. “No one wants to die. Not even those who believe that they are going to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.”
If you are thinking about planning ahead, visit preparingtodie.com for some thoughts and ideas.