I’d like an optimistic but secular funeral most of all. I’d prefer there not to be any mention of an afterlife, or any other kind of magical thinking to avoid the reality that I’m gone. The religious can believe I’m in a better place if they need to, but I’m not encouraging it.
I’d prefer the people to go home from my funeral with the idea that it’s okay, because my life was totally worth it. And the fact that it had to end eventually was what made it all worth living in the first place.
I’ve heard of this paragraph being cited in a eulogy. It’s a great start.
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”
– Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow
As for the specifics: I know how freaking expensive headstones are these days, so, over my dead body. I would turn over in my ridiculously overpriced grave if my relatives wasted their money on that sort of emotional blackmail.
And I’d like my remains to return into the ecosystem they came from. My body is made up of all sorts of nutritional resources I’ll have been hogging for long enough.