What are your after-death wishes?

[AGBF]

My parents did not want funerals and my father made sure my mother had no service. We invited family, friends, and neighbors to come over one day a month or so after her death. We did not make a big deal about it and invite family we rarely saw. In fact, we we were asked by some family members if they should come, we said there would be no service. He put up a big piece of paper from a cremation society he joined so that his body would be collected and taken away to be cremated cheaply and no money would be wasted (as he felt it was on my my mother's cremation) years before he died. So after he passed away, Derrick and I spent some time alone with him. We didn't give his body the short shrift he had given my mother's body. He had been very dismissive of it, obviously feeling that my mother was not in what remained there. I kissed and held my father and Derrick tenderly washed him before we called the Hospice nurse to come and pronounce him. As kenny always says, people vary. Then a month later-or so-we held a memorial service in a restaurant. It had to be there, not in our home, because it got to be so huge. Many, many people wanted to be there to celebrate my father's life (including many residents from the halfway houses for the mentally ill at which he had worked). And all the distant relatives were told that they could come in. There were speeches, although no formal prayer and no clergyman. (My parents were Quakers, anyway, so there would have been no clergy involved even if there had been something religious.)

The thread on DNA made me go back and research some of the towns in Slovakia that my mother's family came from. That led to to my looking up church services. Eventually I found myself listening to the music from funerals. I am probably at complete odds with everyone else on Pricescope. I must just love a good funeral. (That's one of my dad's phrases.) I know we always took my daughter to all the funerals of elderly relatives (and they all seemed to be held in the Byzantine rite in Slovak). By the time she was two she was running around the funeral home in the town where my family lived, knowing where everything was. I love the Panachida (also called the Parastas), the funeral service which has a chanted "Lord Have Mercy" and "Memory Eternal" in it. The problem is that I am not Greek Catholic, so I am ineligible for one of those funerals I love so much! So I had better make other plans!

Deb/AGBF