Lifestyle editor Irene Seiberling with The Regina Leader Post, based in Regina, Saskatchewan (way up north in Canada), just posted this in her online column, Anything and Everything:
Book Helps People Plan Their Own End-of-Life Event
Just as talking about sex won’t make you pregnant, talking about funerals won’t make you dead, says Gail Rubin, author of A Good Goodbye: Funeral Planning for Those Who Don’t Plan to Die (Light Tree Press). Rubin uses gentle humour to convey vital information about funeral arrangements that most people don’t learn until faced with a death in the family.
With chapters named Over My Dead Body, I Got It At Costco, and It’s My Party and I’ll Die If I Want To, Rubin has overcome society’s last taboo with a book that’s a great resource minus the morbidity. Rubin’s book provides the information, inspiration and tools to plan and implement creative, meaningful and memorable end-of-life rituals for people and pets while taking the fear out of the subject of death.
Given the fact that only 24% of us pre-plan a funeral and less than 46% tell our family our final wishes – it’s evident we plan our finances, families and retirement, but rarely plan our funerals. Without end-of-life planning, all of life’s other plans can come undone. For this reason an annual event, Create a Great Funeral Day (that occurs every October), was started 12 years ago to remind people of the many benefits of planning their own end-of-life event.
Rubin’s new book, A Good Goodbye: Funeral Planning for Those Who Don’t Plan to Die, recently named Best of Show in the 2011 New Mexico Book Awards and winner in the Family Issues category, goes one step further with resources to help reduce family conflict, avoid stress at a time of grief, prepare directives, obituaries, eulogies, ethical wills, cards and thank-you notes, and save readers thousands of dollars in the process. She also presents background on many religious traditions and creative non-religious rituals – especially helpful for interfaith families.
Once a year, like the characters in Harold and Maude, Rubin attends funerals of strangers. During her second annual “30 Funerals in 30 Days Challenge,” she covered each one with a video and wrote about them on The Family Plot Blog. Rubin shares the creative ways people celebrate the lives of those they love and emphasizes that funerals are a life cycle event much like a wedding (and better if planned more than a few days ahead). Rubin sees this as a healthier way of dealing with death – “we know it’s going to happen to all of us some day so let’s make it more comfortable to talk about and plan for.”
For more information, visit: www.agoodgoodbye.com.