Planning Your Funeral Wishes
Planning your own funeral doesn’t mean paying for anything or deciding everything today. It means thinking through what you’d want and writing it down, so the people who love you aren’t left guessing.
Start with four big decisions: burial or cremation, the kind of service, whether there’s a viewing, and where you’d rest. Add personal details as they come to you. Write it all down, and tell someone where to find it.
Your wishes, organized
- Burial, cremation, or another option
- Service
- Viewing or goodbye
- Final resting place
- Personal, faith, and cultural wishes
- People to tell
Start with the big decisions
- Burial, cremation, or another option
- This shapes most of the other choices. See burial vs. cremation and other options available in Utah.
- A service, and what kind
- A funeral, a memorial later, a graveside service, a private family gathering, a religious service, or none. See funeral, memorial, and graveside services.
- A viewing
- Whether you’d want family to see you, publicly or privately. See viewing and saying goodbye.
- A final resting place
- A cemetery, a niche, scattering where it’s allowed, or keeping cremated remains at home. See cemetery planning ahead.
The personal details
These are often what families most want to get right. Note any that matter to you:
- Music, hymns, or songs
- Readings, scriptures, or poems
- Who might speak or officiate
- Clothing, or items to be buried or cremated with you
- Flowers, or a charity for donations
- What you’d want in an obituary
- Faith or cultural traditions to follow
- People to be told, and who should tell them
For faith traditions, see faith and cultural considerations.
You don’t have to decide everything today
Funeral planning can happen in stages. You might decide burial or cremation now and leave the music for later. You can change your mind, too. If you update your wishes, date the new version and tell the people who have the old one.
Planning your wishes is separate from paying for them. If you want to look at prepaying, see how prepaid funeral plans work.
Write it down
A written record helps your family more than a conversation they have to remember. Keep it somewhere your family knows about. The FTC advises against putting funeral wishes only in a will, because a will often isn’t found or read until after the funeral.
A list of wishes is guidance for your family, not a contract. One thing does carry legal weight in Utah: the law lets you name, in a signed written document, the person you want to make decisions about your remains. Without that, the right passes in an order set by law, starting with a spouse (Utah Code 58-9-602). An attorney can tell you how to put that in writing properly.
For where to keep it with your other papers, see important papers to organize.
Tell the right people
Wishes only help if someone knows them. Share them with the person most likely to make the arrangements. See talking with family about your wishes.
“If something happened to me, what would I want my family to know about my wishes?”
A simple funeral planning checklist
- Burial, cremation, or another option
- Type of service, if any
- Viewing: yes, no, or family only
- Final resting place
- Personal details: music, readings, clothing, obituary
- Faith or cultural traditions
- The person you want to make decisions, named in writing
- Where the written wishes are kept, and who knows
For a printable version that also covers providers and payment, use the pre-planning worksheet.
Ready to see how these choices apply to your situation?
Your Wayfinder Plan can help organize the options you’re considering and give you a clearer picture of what to ask and compare.
Build My Wayfinder Plan- Wills, telling family, and planning ahead: FTC, Planning Your Own Funeral.
- Right to control disposition, including a person named in a written document: Utah Code 58-9-602.
This page is general information, not legal advice.