Death wishes – and the right to choose your final departure

There is a huge gap between how people would like to die and how their death is managed. Andy Martin on the growing number of options available for the ultimate farewell

Burial in a cemetery could soon be a thing of the past (Getty/iStock)

Ride this, you fat bastard!” They were Fred’s last words to his best friend, Bob, leaving him his bike. But not all “death wishes” are so affectionate. In a parting shot from beyond the grave, Rita wrote: “Here’s £1,000 to buy a box of chocolates for everyone in the office – apart from Carol in HR.” On a very practical note, one dying man left his Dyson V6 vacuum cleaner to his mother. “Hi Mum, you said you wanted it. So here you are... Don't register it with Dyson though... As it's off the back of a lorry. HEHEHE.”

The authors of the Babylonian epic, Gilgamesh, the Bible, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Plato, Shakespeare, and now Fred, Rita and Dyson guy too, all have this in common: a consciousness of “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns” – and a posthumous message to those who remain behind. Faced with the inevitability of death, we have several options: we can try to postpone it for as long as possible (reasonable, but ultimately doomed); we can stick our heads in the sand and ignore (delusional stoicism); or we can see it coming from way off, like a surfer spotting a wave on the horizon, and paddle into position to get the best possible ride. It’s not taking back control, it’s more going with the flow.

All those recent valedictory statements, the fond farewells, came to me courtesy of Dan Garrett, who has been dubbed in tabloidese “the Merchant of Death” and runs Farewill, the online host of many a last will and testament. Garrett is a brazen picture of health, youth and cheerfulness who grew up in Golders Green in a house that backed on to the crematorium. “We used to go on family walks around the crematorium grounds,” he says. “It’s beautiful. Marc Bolan is there. Among others.”