Baby boomers have always rewritten the rules. Now they are reinventing funerals

This story is part of the November 22 edition of Good Weekend.See all 14 stories.

Debbie Scott is hard at work decluttering one room at a time of the large family house on Sydney’s north shore she’s lived in for the past 24 years. It’s a tough job, piling up those no longer wanted items, sticking notes on the surplus furniture and working out what should be passed on to any of her four children, an auction house or a local charity. But she’s determined to see it through. The memory of her mum’s death two years ago, and of then having to clear out her home – stuffed to the gills with furniture, linen, crockery, paintings, recipe books, clothing, ornaments and assorted bric-a-brac – is still painfully raw.

“After Mum’s passing, there was just so much to go through and work out what to keep and what not to keep,” says Scott, 59, who does the accounts for her family business. “It was all good stuff but you really don’t need 10 of everything, or 20 vases, or pyjamas still in their packet in case you go to hospital. But even harder was sorting out things like the electricity, gas and phone accounts afterwards. It was all quite traumatic, and I don’t want to put my kids through that.”

And the result? With a smile, she brandishes a hefty navy-blue folder. Inside is a series of documents, with her daughter and three sons variously named on her accounts to give them access, certified copies of signed Power of Attorney and Guardianship Orders, details on how to access her digital footprint and last, but not least, detailed instructions for her cremation service and arrangements for her ashes.

Debbie Scott wants her urn to spend consecutive years in each of her four children’s houses.Credit: Wolter Peeters

“I want to be put in an urn – I haven’t decided which one yet – and then I want the urn to be placed in their houses so one has me for Christmas, then the next one for the next Christmas and so on,” she says. “I want a year in each, and then we can go round again. The grandchildren can say, ‘There’s Nanny on the mantelpiece!’ ”

Scott, who is preparing to downsize with her husband Michael, 64, from their house to a new off-the-plan apartment, is far from alone in streamlining her life in preparation for her death. Data gathered this year by market researcher McCrindle for Funerals Australia found that seven in 10 Australians intend to plan their own funerals, with 9 per cent having already fully done so and 61 per cent having partially planned it or aiming to do so. Most people – 71 per cent – also feel the funeral should be more a celebration of life and therefore personalised as a fitting tribute to the character of the deceased.

“We’re seeing that more and more now, with funerals held in alternative venues and with unique touches,” says Funerals Australia president Asha Dooley. “For instance, a funeral for an avid golfer was held in his golf clubhouse, or someone might have loved scones in life, so scones can be served at the simple service. I think a lot of people don’t realise that there are no rules and you can hold a funeral anywhere that accepts a coffin and a hearse, and we like to keep wriggle room for people to add their personal touches. Some people come with detailed notes on how they want their funeral to be, while we had one daughter whose parents passed away over the age of 100 who had never discussed death.”

But often those planning their funerals want them to be far more memorable than a few buttered scones. There has been a rash of people aged in their 50s, 60s or 70s planning funerals with coffins coated in comic strips or painted in the colours of a favourite football team, and ashes moulded into gnomes for the garden, added to tattoo ink for a loved one or put on the stage in an urn – for a fee – with an adored band, and even more colourful choreographies.

Mum of five Lorna Boyle, for instance, loved the 2019 movie Poms, starring Diane Keaton, where a woman wants to send her ashes up in fireworks. When the 74-year-old discovered she was dying, she told her children she didn’t want a regular funeral with everyone standing around crying; she wanted to go up in smoke and bright lights.

“I said, ‘Have you taken your medication?’” recalls her daughter Nicole England, 55, from Sydney’s west. “I told her you can’t do that, it’s not possible. But then I looked on Google and found the company Ashes to Ashes, which actually does that for people. So then Mum was determined that was what she wanted. She didn’t want to be put in the ground and make people feel guilty if they didn’t visit. She died in November 2022 and then we held a memorial in May 2023, had a bit of Amazing Grace then Another One Bites the Dust to the bangs of the fireworks holding her ashes. It suited her perfectly.”

‘We realise that dying is a part of life, and we no longer have to be bound by tradition.’

Cheryl Forbes, funeral director and celebrant

Others have yet to fulfil their visions of their final banging farewell, but they’re no less enthusiastic. Keen shooter Michael “Skip” Field, 74, who defines himself as a cowboy tragic, broke down and cried when he visited his family’s overgrown burial plot. It made the Queenslander from Gunalda, north of Gympie, realise he wanted something completely different. As a result, he’s arranged to be cremated, then for some of his ashes to be loaded into shotgun shells to be shot out of a cannon – along with maroon wax pencil shavings to give off coloured smoke – with the rest loaded into guns. Then there’ll be a “cowboy’s salute”, with a line of shooters firing their guns in turn, then their second barrels back down the line in the other direction.

Cowboy tragic Michael “Skip” Field wants his ashes to be shot out of a cannon with a salute – and go out with a bang.Credit:

“I wanted to go out with a bunch of bangs,” says Field, who’s had a heart attack and a stent fitted, and thinks he might not have too long left. “My parents gave me a burial plot for my 21st birthday, which I thought was awful. Cemeteries can be depressing places, but this will be a day which is fun, and people will laugh and tell jokes, which would be so much better than looking at tombstones and dead flowers. My kids think this is typical of me. It’ll be a great day.”

People’s ideas for their last hurrah never cease to surprise Cheryl Forbes, funeral director and celebrant of East Coast-based Picaluna Funerals. “Today, almost anything goes,” she says. “People know how they want their lives to be remembered and they’re increasingly planning their own funerals. They might not want a service in a dark chapel; they might want to be outside in the sun or overlooking water and want to be celebrated rather than mourned. It could be that the Baby Boomer generation likes to have control and has the kind of money previous generations didn’t, and we’re all talking a lot more about it now, too. We realise that dying is a part of life, and that we no longer have to be bound by tradition.”

Australian Seniors’ 2023 Cost of Death 2.0 Report found, further, that about half of those surveyed would prefer a focus on celebrating life and good humour at their funerals rather than mourning and being serious. Engineer Ted Bain, for instance, was known by his friends and family for his dry sense of humour, but even they were astounded when he told them what he wanted for his funeral. He was 78, he had cancer, the chemo wasn’t working, and the end was much nearer than anyone had anticipated.

“So he told us that, when they loaded the coffin into the hearse, the last thing he wanted everyone to see were the letters ‘WTF’ painted onto the wood,” says his daughter Rachel Bain, 50, from Sydney’s Hills district. “We thought he was joking at first, but he repeated it a number of times. As it was his dying wish, we had to do it. We had to explain what it meant to a number of older relatives, but it was a poignant moment and made us smile and it was very much his personality.”

Ted Bain told his daughter Rachel that the last thing he wanted people to see when his coffin was loaded onto the hearse was the above message.Credit:

It may be that death is also becoming demystified. Popular TV shows like After Life, Six Feet Under, Pushing Daisies and The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning have made it a more matter-of-fact topic of conversation as older people make up an increasing share of the population.

“People now realise that talking about death isn’t going to kill them,” says Sam McConkey, co-founder of national funeral company Bare. “They’re much more willing to reflect on life and death. I think a lot of people have gone to funerals and felt they didn’t want something like that for themselves, so need to make sure they’ll have something different. Also, a lot of people don’t want to put the financial burden on their kids or family of paying for the funeral, so they want to work it out first and pay for it upfront. And they don’t want to leave an emotional burden, either. We see a lot of turmoil around families trying to figure out what their mum or dad would have wanted and that’s hard when they’re also dealing with grief.”

Some people choose to go with minimal fuss, with perhaps just a simple cremation and no funeral service, at a cost of perhaps $1200. Generally, however, the average burial for the over-50s, according to Australian Seniors, costs an estimated $11,039, and the average cremation $8045. But for some, even the sky isn’t the limit for an elaborate send-off. There’s still the option of shooting ashes into space via a SpaceX rocket, which releases its payload into the stratosphere, leaving loved ones gazing up at the – literal – heavens.

“If people do plan their funerals in advance, it makes it so much easier for everyone else,” says Kim Lunt, manager at Compassionate Funerals, which covers the Australian east coast. “I think since COVID, more and more people are saying they don’t even want funerals. They saw how everyone coped not being able to have full funerals and did their own thing and realised it could work with just a memorial or a party later. A lot are also purchasing funeral bonds, which are becoming more popular now than pre-paying. Someone might pay and not die for five years, and funeral costs will have risen in the interim.”

The living wake – holding a ceremony while the subject is still alive so they can enjoy it, too – is, however, one trend that hasn’t taken off here. “Family and friends can find it confronting,” says Kate Morgan, of Tomorrow Funerals in Melbourne. “It can be a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. It’s not as simple as it sounds.”

But for those who plan their service ahead of time, there’s often a great deal of thought that goes into it, especially with the song list. Among the most popular are Over the Rainbow, What a Wonderful World, Frank Sinatra’s My Way and Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You. Others opt for a more rock ‘n’ roll funeral with Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven.

“It’s very empowering for a person to plan their own funeral, and gives them a real sense of agency,” says Jacqueline Coan of Picaluna. “But I think some people don’t realise what all the possibilities are. There are some rules – like about where you can bury bodies – but not as many as people think.”

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