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Final wishes: Victoria Stable, centre, with friends Nikki Clemens, left, and Helena Appio |
Let your funeral worries rest in peace – plan a burial online
Friends launch whenimdeadandgone.com, the last word in websites
WHEN Victoria Stable dies she knows her friends will be ready to carry out her final wishes – by clicking online.
After entering their passwords onto her website, four chosen friends and relatives can carry out her secret funeral plans, down to the poems and music she has chosen.
The details have been stored on whenimdead
andgone.com, a free website created by film researcher Ms Stable, who lives in Napier Terrace, Barnsbury, and two friends, film editor Nikki Clemens and producer-director Helena Appio.
They hope the website will help ease the pain of bereaved relatives who may not know exactly what kind of funeral a loved one would like.
Ms Stable came up with the idea a couple of years ago after finding herself at a loss to remember what a close friend had said about the funeral she wanted.
She said: “I kicked myself for not having written down the ideas that we had had, as we’d discussed often what we wanted as a send-off, in happy times, over a bottle of wine.
“When the time came I was so upset I couldn’t remember a thing and felt unable to do justice to the occasion, and my friend.
“Once I started talking to my friends, I realised we were increasingly having to think about funerals and were all fairly clueless.”
She roped in her friends to help, working on Saturdays, until the website was ready to launch three weeks ago.
“We’re the baby-boomer generation,” Ms Stable. “We’ve got elderly parents and are confronting the funeral business for the first time and our generation is computer literate.
“Family structures have changed. Many of us are freelance, we don’t get compassionate leave any more.
“One would love to have the luxury to think slowly about what someone would want but to be realistic it’s not like that. I don’t have children. It might be my cousin’s children having to do it and I don’t want them having to go through my office looking for papers.”
She added: “There are a few websites out there but they’re not independent. They belong to funeral directors and you have to pay. Ours is free. We’ll fund it with careful adverts.
“I don’t want to make money out of people who are thinking about death. Someone could have been given two months to live.”
The website covers all aspects of funeral planning, from questions such as “What readings do you want?” to “Have you made a will?” It has advice on green funerals and grief counsellors.
Ms Clemens said: “A lot of my generation are control freaks and want to organise the final party to be remembered by.
“Our questionnaire prompts you to make creative choices, or surprise your friends and do something quite traditional.
“Without children, I’m keen that my friends aren’t left with a responsibility they might not want and I’m enjoying filling out my questionnaire. It can be a sociable thing, if you do it with friends.”
For more information, go to www.whenimdeadandgone.com |
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