Personalizing funerals helps answer this question: What would you want people to remember at your funeral?
Your career? Your sense of humor? Your favorite music? Your devotion to Star Trek?
A funeral can follow a familiar formula, or it can tell the story of the person who died. Episode Twelve of Mortality Movies explores how films and television portray personalizing funerals. Sometimes they’re touching, sometimes they’re outrageous, and occasionally they are both.
Host Gail Rubin, The Doyenne of Death®, is joined by Licensed Spiritual Counselor Kelly Saindon and Death Educator Jane Westbrook. They examine how meaningful details can transform a funeral from a generic ritual into a memorable reflection of a unique life.
Boldly Going Where Few Funerals Have Gone Before
The comedy Undertaking Betty (2002) features Christopher Walken as Frank Featherbed, an unconventional funeral director determined to shake up the funeral business.
When a widower describes his late wife Elsie, Featherbed picks up on one intriguing detail: she had a secret passion for Mr. Spock.
That’s all the inspiration he needs.
Featherbed creates an elaborate Star Trek-themed funeral, complete with science-fiction costumes and theatrical touches. Unfortunately, Elsie’s husband wasn’t expecting quite that much personalization.
The scene is played for laughs, but there’s a serious idea underneath the comedy. Funerals can incorporate the interests and passions that made someone distinctive.
Sports, hobbies, professions, favorite movies, music, foods, clothing and collections can all inspire elements of a funeral or memorial service.
The key, however, is knowing what the person actually wanted. Personalization works best when it reflects the deceased, rather than someone else’s enthusiastic guess about them.
Would You Attend Your Own Funeral?
Get Low (2009), starring Robert Duvall, Bill Murray and Sissy Spacek, takes personalizing funerals in an entirely different direction.
The movie was inspired by the remarkable true story of Felix “Bush” Breazeale, a Tennessee man who decided to hold his own funeral while he was still alive.
In 1938, thousands of people descended upon rural Tennessee for the occasion. The film takes liberties with the historical story, but its fictionalized first meeting between the reclusive Felix Bush and a funeral director raises a fascinating possibility.
Why should all the nice things people say about us at our funerals be saved until we aren’t there to hear them?
A living funeral gives someone an opportunity to gather with friends and family, hear stories, reconcile relationships, express gratitude, and participate in the celebration of their own life.
That’s personalizing funerals taken to its logical conclusion: the guest of honor actually gets to attend.
Another Take on the Living Funeral
The delightful Irish comedy Waking Ned Devine (1998) offers another variation on attending your own funeral.
Ned Devine wins the lottery. Unfortunately, the excitement kills him before he can collect his winnings.
His neighbors devise a scheme to convince a lottery official that Ned is still alive so the villagers can share the prize money. Michael O’Sullivan assumes Ned’s identity. There’s a problem when a representative from the lottery unexpectedly wanders into Ned’s funeral.
Jackie O’Shea is just about to talk about dead Ned. Thinking quickly, he delivers the eulogy as though the deceased were Michael instead. “The words spoken at a funeral are too late for the man who has died.”
The scene is touching, and the eulogy makes a lovely observation: people rarely get to hear the heartfelt words that will someday be spoken about them. Perhaps we shouldn’t wait.
Tell people what they mean to us while they’re still around to appreciate it.
When the Deceased Leaves Very Specific Instructions
Then there’s Eileen Newlander in The Kominsky Method.
Eileen didn’t leave her husband Norman to wonder what she would have wanted. While her health declined, she wrote a detailed letter of instruction specifying her funeral arrangements.
And she didn’t think small. Her requests included Patti LaBelle singing “Lady Marmalade,” Jay Leno serving as master of ceremonies, and Barbra Streisand singing “The Way We Were.”
Now that’s a letter of instruction.
The funeral is funny, extravagant and surprisingly touching. It also makes an important point about funeral planning: documenting your wishes can be an enormous gift to the people who love you.
Your instructions don’t need to involve internationally famous entertainers. You might specify favorite songs, readings, photographs, foods, flowers, clothing, speakers, a location, or simply the atmosphere you’d like people to create.
Personalizing funerals becomes much easier when the person being honored has left some clues.
Can a Funeral Be Happy?
The Chinese film Happy Funeral takes the idea of personalizing funerals into another culture.
After their lively 84-year-old landlady dies, the young people she rented to decide that a somber traditional ceremony simply doesn’t capture the woman they knew.
They create a “happy funeral” celebrating her personality and life.
A funeral director comes to observe what they’ve done and leaves encouraged by the possibilities for changing funeral traditions.
That doesn’t mean grief itself is happy. Rather, it demonstrates that sorrow and celebration can occupy the same room.
People can cry and laugh at the same funeral. They can mourn a death while being grateful for a life. In fact, some of the most memorable funerals provide permission to do both.
Personalizing Funerals Tells a Story
These films approach personalizing funerals from very different directions, but they share an important message.
A meaningful funeral doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s funeral.
Personalization can be elaborate, like Frank Featherbed’s Star Trek production or Eileen Newlander’s celebrity-filled send-off. It can involve participating in your own funeral, as in Get Low or Waking Ned Devine. Or it can simply mean incorporating stories, music, humor and traditions that genuinely reflect the person who died.
And planning ahead makes all of that easier.
A funeral isn’t merely about what happens to a body after someone dies. At its best, it’s an opportunity to tell the story of a life, acknowledge the reality of a death, bring people together, and help those left behind begin processing their grief.
So here’s a question worth considering before the need arises:
What would make your funeral unmistakably yours?
Want Mortality Movies Without YouTube?
Become a paid Substack subscriber to Mortality Movies with The Doyenne of Death® and get access to all of the 30-minute episodes, with the film clips included!
No need to jump back and forth from the TV show to clips on YouTube. Paid subscribers can watch the complete program, including clips that may be blocked on YouTube.
Just sit back, enjoy the movies, and discover what they can teach us about funerals, grief, end-of-life planning, and living life fully.
Subscribe at gailrubin.substack.com.
You can also discover a treasure trove of conversation-starting films and TV shows in Gail Rubin’s latest book, 98.6 Mortality Movies to See Before You Die.
