Hey, It's Your Funeral

Don't put the kit in a safe-deposit box; sometimes such a holding cannot be legally accessed until after burial. Instead, put it in a secure place at home. Slocum recommends the freezer, which is sometimes the only thing that survives a house fire. Plus, the association's kit comes with a magnet to put on the fridge that says, "Matters of life and death inside."

Draw up an ethical will. While a last will and testament details how assets are distributed, an ethical will covers everything intangible. It's an ancient practice dating back 3,000 years and mentioned in the Book of Genesis. The will may be an autobiography or self-composed obituary, or a letter from a parent to a child, an apology, or simply an essay or list explaining your thoughts on life and what you'd like to be remembered for. It's a blank slate on which you can compose anything not covered in a regular will or the end-of-life planning kit.

"It's about 'If I weren't here tomorrow, what would I want my loved ones to know?' " says Karen Russell, executive director of National Grief Support Services in California. "It's a very reflective process, too, because it allows people to really think about what is important."

Pick a trusted family member or friend to act as your agent. It will be this person's job to retrieve the end-of-life planning kit and ensure your directives are followed. If you are young and unmarried and die today, this duty automatically falls to your parents or guardian. Note that picking someone to carry out your wishes is different from naming an executor of an estate, who has a legal directive to deal with assets and money. Planning kits and ethical wills are not binding contracts but can serve as legitimate guidelines for families if there is no disagreement.

Know the legal issues. Understand what is and is not required at the time of death. Your postmortem options depend on where you live. In most states, embalming is not required, and your family need not go through a funeral home. Families can file the death certificate themselves, hold a funeral at home and transport your remains to an appropriate resting spot without intermediaries. This depends on your state's right-to-disposition laws, which govern who is able to deal with your body.

In the District, Maryland and Virginia, you have the right to designate an agent to make decisions about your body, and written directions for its disposition supersede any other party's wishes. For a rundown of laws by state, visit http://www.funerals.org and select "Personal Preference & Designated Agent Laws."

Explore your options, and don't feel limited. New send-off methods are starting to usurp the traditions of an open-casket wake and coffin burial. America is on the edge of redefining death care, according to Mark Harris, author of "Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial" (Scribner, 2007), which follows a dozen families as they carve out their own paths to a green funeral and burial.

"You've got baby boomers leading a do-it-yourself, environmentally friendly view toward life," Harris says. "They've been extremely self-reflective, they ushered in the natural child birth movement, they wrote their own wedding vows and are now bringing that same consciousness to end-of-life issues."

Harris has met people who have built their own caskets, chosen to be buried as part of coral reefs or in natural cemeteries, or had their families personally deliver their bodies to the crematory. For those who want to keep a funeral within the family, he recommends Lisa Carlson's "Caring for the Dead" (Upper Access, 1998), a book about making arrangements with or without a funeral director. Exploring these options is about maintaining a sense of control over the process.

"A natural burial speaks to old-fashioned American values of thrift and simplicity, of love and respect for family, a desire to do things yourself and a respect for traditions since this is the way we used to bury people," Harris says.

Long story short: If you want to be shrouded and thrown directly in the ground as Wagner plays on a boombox, make sure you put that in words as soon as possible. Today may be your last chance to compose your final communication with the living. Or if you're a gambler, you can just hope to come across "The Handbook for the Recently Deceased" in those first postmortem hours.