How should I share my funeral plan without upsetting someone?
I recently completed a funeral plan for myself and my husband. I want to share what we’d like for our funeral with my sister but I’m not sure how she will react to that coming out of the blue. I’d also like to know what she’d like for her funeral since she is single and I will likely be involved in the arrangements. Do you have any suggestions for how I might approach her?
Hello,
First – Congratulations on creating a funeral plan! While your loved ones may not appreciate it right now, they will certainly be glad it’s there if they need it.
As for your sister, you are right. It may be disconcerting to her if a conversation about end-of-life wishes comes out of the blue. Perhaps you could ease in to it. If you have used our Planner you can designate her as a Plan Guardian. Introducing her to that concept could be a great conversation starter. You could ask her if it would be ok to use her as a guardian and then invite her through the online planner. Once you’ve done that you can suggest that you take a look at the plan. While you are doing that you can mention to her that you’d like to talk about what she’d like. If you are using another planning tool, you could do the same thing. Mention to her that you have created a funeral plan and that you’d like to get together to share your ideas.
Some people like to use a personal story to get started. Perhaps you have a family member or friend who passed away and people were unsure how to handle his or her final arrangements. You could mention to your sister that you remember what happened when so and so died and that you don’t want that to be the case for you. You could even use the death of a celebrity such as Prince as a reference point since he died without making arrangements and his memorialization was left to people who didn’t seem to know him well.
It’s quite common to dread suggesting a conversation about end-of-life wishes. Once they’ve done it, though, they find that the other person is actually relieved because they wanted to talk about it but didn’t know how to get started either. The important thing is that you are being proactive about making your wishes clear. It’s hard to go wrong when doing that.
