Preparing to appear at the grandest celebration of his life.

Your 15 minutes have arrived. Roll out the red carpet. A living funeral is the grandest celebration of your life with a twist—you, the honoree, are living and present to hear the eulogies, praises and farewells given before death. This gathering of family, friends, neighbors and colleagues is a ceremony or party to celebrate a person with a life-limiting illness. If you know your time is short why wait?

Mark Twain, the astute observer of human behavior and one of the greatest authors in American history, portrayed his fascination of eavesdropping on his own funeral in the novel “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” published in 1902. The protagonist Tom Sawyer said in the midst of the fanfare, “It was the proudest moment of his whole life.”

In researching my book Parting Ways, I’ve come to realize that these pre-death rituals that seem rare are on the rise from the east to west coasts. People are toasting and roasting family members and friends with limited time left. Some look like a cross between a wedding and funeral. These formal or informal get-togethers take place at a home, community center, house of worship, hotel banquet hall, a favorite restaurant, a theater, or any place that would honor the person. I’ve seen the honoree dressed in everything from a hospital gown to a tuxedo. Others are more somber with collective prayers, Psalms or Holy book readings, anointing and last rites given by clergy.

As I mention in my column about a living tribute in the OC Register, “The gathering becomes a stage for people to share memories, sometimes songs, poems and lifetime achievement awards that express: thank you, I love you, I’ll remember you. And goodbye.

Some families suggest that attendees bring mementos, such as a picture or an item from a treasured family vacation, to help focus the reminiscing party. These celebrations help families prepare for the inevitable, and bond while focusing on life when they often feel helpless in the face of death.”

The funeral in living funeral tends to put people off because they feel like they’re digging the grave too early, but quite the contrary gathering to eulogize and celebrate one’s life before he or she dies is the antithesis. These pre-death ceremonial farewells have been coined living wake, celebration of life, friendship service, living tribute, reminiscing party and sendoff. No matter what these personalized rituals are called the most important element is that a special time is carved out for intimates to express love, gratitude and those things we should’ve, would’ve, or could’ve, said if we found the right time.

The first time, I read about a living funeral was in the book Tuesdays With Morrie: An Old Man, A Young Man, Life’s Greatest Lessons by Mitch Albom. Five million copies of this book were sold and it was

on the New York Times Best Seller List. Morrie Schwartz, dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease, goes to a funeral and realizes that his late friend didn’t get to hear all of the wonderful speeches so he decides to have a funeral before his death. He invited his family and friends to come to his home and say the things they would’ve said at his funeral. At Morrie’s living funeral in the Emmy winning made for TV movie produced by Oprah Winfrey, gospel singers perform giving the home ceremony a reverence that it so deserves.

As I trace the history of living funerals in my book, Parting Ways, I discovered Morrie awakened a ritual from our past because the act of gathering around the dying person to uplift them actually dates back centuries when dying was a social affair attended by the family and community. The dying person would give long-winded speeches about his or her wisdom gained in life and family members would gather to listen and express love and gratitude, but the ritual died in the twentieth-century when death moved out of the home and community and into the hospital. Now, with the prevalence of hospice, we’re seeing an awakening of this communal, familial ritual

because more people are taking their end of life journeys in the comforts of home, family and community rather than estranged in a sterile institution.

Sometimes, people don’t learn the most interesting attributes and experiences about a person until the funeral. So, the living funeral offers a time to really learn about the “whole life” of a person. Today, people lead such splintered lives spread far apart in many cases from their birthplace and their families. It takes a death to unite people from distant locals in one place. A living funeral maybe the last time a person joins with all those he or she loved and experienced life with and vice versa.

When I interviewed John Hogan, former president of the National Funeral Directors Association, for my book, Parting Ways, he recalled a man dying of cancer, who asked to have a living wake in the viewing room of his New York City funeral home. Friends and family came to the funeral home viewing room to collectively reminisce and the dying man sat on a throne like a king relishing every last moment shared with his beloved court, instead of laying dead in a casket.

So when might a person chose to indulge in such a ritual? Today, most people know when their time is short and the body is in irreparable decline. Many people deny it to themselves and those around them for self-preservation and protection of the family. The living funeral, also known as a celebration of life or living wake, is so instrumental in stimulating the family and friends to begin to talk about the possibility of the end. It’s not talking about death but rather life. I’ve come to the conclusion that a living funeral or living wake honors a person in a way that no milestone or birthday celebration is able to over the course of a life. In those culminating hours, family, friends and colleagues mark the sum of all those milestones and birthdays, a total life mission accomplished.

A terminal illness strips a person of his or her autonomy, individuality and social identity. Experts often call this a social death because a person maybe bound to a wheelchair or a bed. This consequence makes a person feel like a half-human. This is the hour when a person feeling quite vulnerable could find renewal in hearing about his or her life shared through the cherished lens of others rather than after he or she takes the last breath. The ritual binds the honoree, family and friends in reciprocity. Everyone is uplifted in a way they thought impossible at this stage of life, because attendees are given the microphone to say those words of remembrance and know the honoree is receiving it. That is so gratifying especially at an hour when we as humans feel completely out of control. They call the end of life awful. When people gather for collective reminiscence everyone is awe-inspired.  A good ritual shatters isolation and leads the way to transformation. In the end, it’s a remarkable gift to give as a parting gift to the honoree and an extraordinary memory to leave in the minds of survivors.

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Life Review is a universal mental process of reflecting on the events that shaped one’s life set in motion by the realization that the end of life is near. For some it’s more gradual as one ages, but for others on a fast-forwarded journey to the end brought on by a terminal illness the life review can take on a vivid inward journey. A person may revisit pivotal life moments and points of conflict that may require some work in making a mends with people and smooth out the torn edges of broken relationships before one finds the peace to pass on. The reflections are very real, sensory rich. It’s like one is truly reliving that moment of the past in the present. As family members, if we’re smart then we can tap into this inward journey and record in writing, audio or video it in order to preserve precious vivid details of family and personal history.

Dr. Robert Butler, renowned gerontologist and Pulitzer Prize wining author of the book Why Survive? Being Old in America, discovered life review when interviewing a healthy community of seniors for the National Institutes of Health in the 1960s. He said at the time, they didn’t even know what a healthy blood sugar level was of healthy seniors, because all studies of the aged were of the sick ones. But he recognized these fascinating inward journeys of their lives as they talked about events that directed the course of their lives for the best, the worse, while giving voice to regrets and lessons learned. He described this life review as a movie of your life playing on a viagra buy film screen in the back of your mind.

Life Review Video

Robert Ostmann, hospice volunteer and teacher at Los Alamitos High School, and his video production student, John Maxwell, preparing to go in and film a life review video.

Lights, camera, action. The video camera instantly shifts the mood and atmosphere around the deathbed from a quiet murmur to a quicken pulse of vibrant life. A star for the day, the family helps get the interviewee prepped in a handsome shirt or a pretty outfit with make-up and powder. Often this might be the last time, she rolls on her favorite lipstick, or he buttons up his favorite shirt. Once he or she is camera ready, the family then gathers around their patriarch or matriarch to listen and participate in a life review interview video recorded to preserve precious personal and family history.

In preparation for the life review, Donna Miller, Director of Volunteer Services at Hospice Care of West, requests the family on the eve of the interview go through old family photo albums to pull out pictures that will tell his or her life story in pictures. When Donna arrives at the home, she sets up the camera. She then suggests that the family all give the interviewee a hug and kiss while the camera is rolling. That usually breaks the ice and instantly warms the atmosphere.

A life review video taps into that inward journey through an interview guided by a willing listener, a hospice volunteer or a younger generation family member. The video camera provides a unique stage and setting to gather the family together to listen to their father, mother, spouse or sibling, share his or her life stories. Donna has a list of interview questions that guide the person on tour on his or her past experiences starting with birth that branch into reflections about his origins such as his parents, grandparents and birthplace. The interview then progresses into childhood memories, sibling reflections and school days. Just as you might envision a life, the interview then delves into adolescence, sports and friends. Young adulthood reviews falling in love, going to college, or off to war, getting married and starting a career. Parenthood explores creating a home, giving birth and raising children while balancing home life and an advancing career. Some people talk about their hobbies and how world events shaped their lives. Others talk about how religion and spirituality played a role in their life path.

The questions about these life stages provoke reflections of challenges, mistakes, successes and the comparisons between now and then. The conversation turns to family holidays, vacations and traditions. This dovetails into a discussion about how morals, values and life goals served as a compass in life and the family life. As the conversation turns to growing old, or becoming sick, the interviewer brings up regrets and then the interviewee shares hopes for his children, grandchildren and future generations.

This amazing, new end of life ritual that Donna has created simply by bringing in a list of questions and video camera to the bedside is an incredibly therapeutic and socially beneficial experience for the family to often find the courage, words, voice and most importantly the stage, a bridge, to say the heartfelt things, we often wish we could say at the deathbed but never feel the time is right, because when is it the right time to say good-bye, I love you and share the stories, or lessons learned from your parent or sibling that made you who you are today. The life review is not only for the interviewee to say the things he needs to say, but it also provides this gathering, this invitation for the whole family to participate in reminiscing. The video is then edited with pictures and music for the dying person to bequeath his legacy of memories to his family before his last breath.

The completion of a life review Dr. Butler suggested helps people reintegrate the meaning of their life and become able to openly accept their death while simultaneously increasing their ability to live and enjoy the present. He suggested that a life review isn’t just a one-off interview and collection of relived memories, it’s a psychological developmental process as one comes to terms with the life he or she lived.

Dignity Therapy

More recently, doctors have begun researching the benefits of recorded spoken legacies similar to the life review video that taps into the life review. Dr. Harvey Chochinov, Director of the Manitoba Palliative Care Research Unit, Winnipeg, Manitoba and a psychiatry professor at the University of Manitoba, said that leaving a spoken legacy is important to both patients and family members. Dr. Chochinov led an international clinical trial, supported by the National Institutes of Health of the United States, to explore the impact

of “dignity therapy” that engages patients in extended conversations about issues that matter most to them; dreams for their loved ones; last words they want to express before they die and particular achievements or qualities they would most want remembered. These meaningful discussions are tape-recorded, transcribed and edited, with a final version returned to the patient to bequeath to their kindred. Researchers call this transcript a generativity document to provide a permanent record that will live on when the person dies.

In August 2005, the results of a pilot trial were published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. Ninety-one percent reported being satisfied with the study and 76 percent reported that the dignity therapy heightened their sense of purpose and will to live. Eighty-one percent said their family members cherished the transcribed oral legacies. Post-intervention showed significant improvement in reducing symptoms of distress and depression and increased will to live.

The evidence reports that patients suffer deep angst from an assault on generativity, ie the idea that “nothing of who or what I am will last beyond this lifetime, that I will soon die and the my memory will fade.” These video recorded interviews that tap into the life review or audio-recorded spoken legacies transform the intangible life stories, values, wisdom, hopes and dreams for their children into something tangible that they can leave behind and will live on in the hearts and minds of their children.

Even Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Melon with terminal pancreatic cancer and author of the National Bestselling book, The Last Lecture, talked of how he wasn’t very interested in giving a last lecture that professors often give when retiring until he received the news that he only had months to live.  Suddenly, facing death at 47, he had a growing urge to piece together a lecture that may in fact pass on words of wisdom not only to his students but more importantly to his three young children that he was forced to prematurely say good-bye to.  Pausch knew the last lecture would be video recorded. He knew that it would be his last chance to speak directly to his children.

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Rabbi Jack Reimer, known as America’s rabbi, wisely advises parents that an ethical will, bequeathing your values, moral assets and life lessons, is just as valuable as a will that passes on your material possessions. He goes on to say in his book, Ethical Wills: A Jewish Modern Treasury, that if parents don’t take the time to share their life stories and the stories of those from whom they come then they will disappear and “our kids will be deprived”.

This custom of an ethical will dates back to Biblical times and existed until the nineteenth century, when people lived their last days in the familiar comforts of home and community. Believe it or not, end of life was a social affair. Philippe Aries, social historian and author of the Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present notes that this “will was a means for a person to express his deep thoughts; his religious faith; his attachment to his possessions, to the beings he loved, to God and the decisions he had made to assure the salvation of his soul and the repose of his body”. He goes on to point out that this will assured the dying person that his or her life’s wisdom would survive the physical death. The custom reached near extinction in the twentieth century when the place death moved from the come to the hospital, no longer a place that housed the social customs that once accompanied this final stage of life.

With more people edging toward the end of life at home again with the spread of hospice, this social custom is being unwittingly reawakened with the families recording life review videos and life stories that bring about a gathering around the dying person to share the intimate wisdom learned in his life, while expressing hopes and dreams for his children’s and grandchildren’s lives.

Ethical Will Inspiration

The ethical wills have evolved over time the ancient wills encompassed settling of accounts, directives and burial instructions. My favorite passage from ethical will written by Judah Ibn Tibbon to his son, Samuel, in the twelfth-century, is famously quoted in numerous sermons and other inspirational materials. He writes, “Let books be your companions; let bookcases and shelves be your pleasure ground and gardens. Bask in their

paradise, gather their fruit, pluck their roses, enjoy their spices and their myrrh. If your soul be sated and weary, change from garden to garden, from furrow to furrow, from prospect to prospect.”

But, Rabbi Reimer also advises parents that literary excellence or elegant speeches aren’t important because “words that come from the heart enter the heart.” I think these words of wisdom are valuable to parents with terminal illnesses afraid to try their hand at a love letter or sit behind a video camera to speak. At the end of the book, So Your Values Live On: Ethical Wills and How to Prepare Them, Reimer provides a guide to preparing a modern ethical will to be written, audio or video recorded. Some of the topics suggested to inspire parents are:

• “Formative life events and experiences
• The era and world from which I came
• Important life lessons
• Influential people that shaped my life
• Some of my favorite possessions and the stories they contain
• Scriptural passages that guided and inspired me
• The mistakes I’ve made that I hope you don’t repeat
• A true definition of success
• How I feel as I look back over my life
• I ask for your forgiveness…
• How grateful I am to you for…
• And, finally I want you to know I love you.”

Dr. Barry Baines, author of the book Ethical Wills: Putting Your Values on Paper assembled a format that could help organize and inspire writing an ethical will. He suggested writing it in a letter to the family, to your children or your unborn child, or unborn grandchild. He suggested these topics with some excellent guidance on how to express your values with your own words beneath this headings in the will.

• The importance of family and relationships
• Religious/Spirituality
• The Importance of Education, Learning, Knowledge
• Respect For Life
• Learning From Mistakes
• Being Honest, Truthful, Sincere
• Giving and Receiving
• Importance of Humor
• Lessons
• Reflections
• Hopes for the Future
• Conclusions

Words of Poetic Wisdom from Morrie’s Ethical Will

Many Americans are familiar with the book Tuesdays With Morrie: A Young Man, An Old Man, and Life’s Greatest Lessons, but some don’t know the smaller book written by Morrie Schwartz titled Morrie: In His Own Words Life Wisdom From a Remarkable Man. Morrie was 78 years old when he recorded his aphorisms to live and die by in the final months of his life and Paul Solomon, a student of Morrie’s from Brandeis University, transcribed his words. The book is essentially Morrie’s ethical will.

“Let others’ affection, love, concern, interest, admiration, and respect be enough to keep you composed,” Morrie wrote in this book. I share this wisdom as a boost of confidence to those contemplating picking up a pen to write their ethical will or sitting in front of a video camera with family in the culminating hours of life. He goes on to say that on his deathbed visitors came with love and affection often saying “You look luminescent, angelic,” and he’d think to himself “Me, I’m a sick man.” Instead of casting

them away and disregarding how they perceived him, he reeled them in.  “You can’t avoid the bad things coming in physically because they’re inevitable, but you can chose to accept the good things whenever they come along. These loving moments help fortify you and keep you feeling more composed and at peace,” Morrie said. In other words, gather your family and friends, share the stories and exchange affection.

The Abbreviated Oral Ethical Will

I spoke to Dr. Diane Meier, Director of Hertzberg Palliative Care Institute, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, in an interview while researching my book Parting Ways: The New Rituals and Celebrations of Life’s Passing. She said when a person’s final weeks are apparent, she often sits by the bedside and asks some important questions such as “Are there things you feel you ought to accomplish but haven’t been able?” or “Are your affairs in order?” and “Are there people in your family or friends whom you haven’t seen for awhile and would like to see?” She often offers five expressions for patients to meditate on when thinking about important things to say to those they love. These passages are very much an abbreviation of the ethical will.

1. “Thank you for being my father or thank you for being my son.”

2. “Please forgive me for anything that I may have done that caused pain.”

3. “I forgive you for anything that you may have done that caused me pain.”

4. “I love you.”

5. “Good-bye.”

“It’s remarkable how many families take out a piece of paper and write that down when you tell it to them,” Dr. Meier said. “Pretty much every relationship has the components of these things, and it is very helpful for patients to focus on the things that are important while there is still time to address them. And not to have that regret of ‘I never said good-bye or I never told her that I loved her’.”

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