living funeral

There have been examples of this in Australia for the last four or five years but it seems to be a practice that is growing in popularity.  We go to funerals and the thought arises — if only the deceased person could have heard what was being said about them, if only they could have been here to chat with all the people who turned up.  They would have really enjoyed it.

So the living funeral, the funeral ceremony held by someone who is about to die, resolves this problem.  The nomenclature hasn’t quite settled so rival names are living wake or pre-funeral.  A living funeral usually follows the pattern of a normal funeral. There is a celebrant who runs the ceremony, there are people who speak from family or work experience, there are reminiscences from people in the crowd, there are moments of humour.  The style is entirely the choice of the person about to die. It can have some solemnity, it can be one big party.  But the person about to die is part of it all and has the opportunity to say goodbye.

The practice started in Japan in the 1980s where an ageing generation wished to take some of the burden of an expensive funeral away from their children.  They would deal with the ceremonial occasion leaving their children with much simpler arrangements after their death. It then became popular in South Korea in 2012 for young people to participate in mass living funerals where they put on shrouds and lay in a closed coffin for ten minutes, as a way of increasing their appreciation of life.