Filed under: Film and Video Reviews | Tags: estate planning, funeral planning
By Gail Rubin
The Six Wives of Henry Lefay (2009) is a comedic cautionary tale for those who don’t make funeral plans, or for those who make plans but get married way too many times. One of the tag lines is: He loves women – Lots of women.
Tim Allen plays Henry Lefay, a guy who really loves women
As a funny funeral film, it’s a great tool to start funeral planning conversations. It’s also a great way for estate planning attorneys to help their clients get serious about their wills, trusts and other estate planning issues.
Audio-video salesman Henry Lefay (Tim Allen) disappears while para-sailing in Mexico and is presumed dead. His daughter Barbie (Elisha Cuthbert) returns to her Upstate New York hometown for the funeral. Tensions mount into comedic explosions when Henry’s current wife, his five exes, and a mistress wage a fierce power struggle over the final arrangements.
Wife #1 is Kate (Andie MacDowell), Barbie’s mother. Ophelia (Jenna Elfman), Wife #2 and #4 (he married her twice), is an intensely passionate and often drunk woman who Henry continues to “date” on a regular basis. Wife #3, Veronica (Paz Vega), owns and operates half of Henry’s successful business. Wife #5, Autumn (Lindsay Sloane), who’s Barbie’s age, thinks she’s in charge and will inherit everything since she’s the current wife.
L to R - Daughter Barbie (Elisha Cuthbert), Wife #5 (Lindsay Sloane), Wife #1 (Angie MacDowell), Grandma (Barbara Barrie), and Wife #3 (Paz Vega)
None of them knows there was yet another wife before Kate, and the mistress Henry was with in Mexico expects to become wife #7. Things really get crazy at the funeral home visitations after the body is returned to the U.S.
The disagreements fly: Should the casket be open or closed? What cemetery is he supposed to be buried in? And what about cremation?
Wives #2 through #5 each have handwritten letters from Henry with different funeral arrangements. Veronica has side-by-side plots for her and Henry in Pleasant Meadows cemetery. Autumn has side-by-side plots for her and Henry in Shady Glen cemetery. And Ophelia has a letter saying he wants to be cremated and his ashes scattered in the ocean off a catamaran near the Bahamas.
Ophelia, Wife #2 and #4 (Jenna Elfman) mourns over Henry's casket
This being a comedy, there are several surprise twists and a happy ending. It’s not a deep film by any means. No spoiler alerts, you’ll just have to see the movie.
Most folks probably don’t have a complicated love life like Henry Lefay’s. Still, the film raises important questions that all families need to answer before someone dies.
The Six Wives of Henry Lefay provides a light-hearted lesson in the serious business of funeral planning, wills, trusts and estate planning. It can open the door to discussions of funeral plans, inheritance, business succession, trusts, and pre-nup agreements.
A few points to ponder (and act upon):
- When changing spouses, update the details of any funeral plans or advance directives in place.
- Review and update all wills, advance directives, trusts, and other important papers whenever there’s a change in marital status and any additions to (or subtractions from) the family.
- A personal letter of instruction that lays out your wishes is very helpful for your loved ones – just don’t make different ones for different spouses like Henry Lefay did.
The Six Wives of Henry Lefay can be rented on DVD through Netflix and purchased (as available) from Amazon.com. It is rated PG-13 for sexual content, nudity and some language.
Gail Rubin is the author of the award-winning book, A Good Goodbye: Funeral Planning for Those Who Don’t Plan to Die (http://AGoodGoodbye.com), and The Family Plot Blog, http://TheFamilyPlot.wordpress.com. She’s “knocking them dead” with her Funny Films to Start Serious Conversations talks.
Today’s Non Sequitur is another Pearly Gates Death Cartoon. St. Peter is saying, “This would go a lot faster if you’d stop saying ‘alleged’…” There’s a box on the other side that says “Why it takes longer for lawyers to get in.” I’m amazed he even got this far!
Check out this “fun” listing of ten bodily functions that continue after death, first posted at the website, i09.com.
10 Bodily Functions That Continue After Death
Death doesn’t need to stop you from doing all the things you enjoy, as long as the things you enjoy are pretty basic. Certain bodily functions continue for minutes, hours, days, and even weeks after death. You will not believe the kind of things a dead body will do with its now-copious amount of time.
By the way, this post is not for the weak of stomach.
10. Nail and hair growth (by technicality)
This is a technical function, not an actual function. The body doesn’t produce more hair and nail tissue, but both of these things do ‘grow,’ in the days after death. What actually happens is the skin loses moisture (although cosmetics companies are probably hard at work making a cream for that) and pulls back, exposing more hair and making nails seem longer. Since you do measure the length of hair and nails from the point where they meet the skin to the tip of the hair, the hair does ‘grow’.
9. Brain activity (with drugs)
One of the side effects of modern technology is a blurring of the time between life and death. The brain can be almost completely gone, but the heart can keep pumping. If the heart is stopped for a minute, there’s no breathing, and the person was dying anyway, most doctors just pronounce people dead while their brain is technically still alive for the next few minutes. The brain’s cells spend those minutes scrambling for the oxygen and nutrients they need to stay alive – to the point where they often damage themselves irreparably even if the heart starts up again. Those minutes before the damage is too extensive could be extended, with the right drugs and under the right circumstances, to days. Ideally, this would give doctors a chance to save you, but it’s not guaranteed. I know what most of you are thinking, “What fun! The biggest problem I had with dying is that it could be quick and painless, with no chance that my living brain is stuck inside a corpse for days on end.” Well, now you don’t have to worry about that.
8. Skin cell growth
This is another function of different parts of the body dying at different rates. While loss of blood circulation can kill the brain in minutes, other cells are not as in need of constant care. Skin cells, which are used to living on the outskirts of the body and grabbing what they can through osmosis, can stay alive for days. Its a good thing they don’t have brains, or I’d feel sorry for them, the poor doomed things.
7. Peeing
Peeing, we think, is a voluntary function. And we’re mostly right, except if something’s really funny. Not-peeing, though, is not a voluntary function. We never have to think about it, because a certain part of the brain is always in charge of it. This is the same part that’s involved in regulating a person’s breathing and heartbeat, which is one of the reasons people tend to pee involuntarily if they’re drunk. The part of the brain that keeps the urinary sphincter closed is inhibited. (More alcohol will shut down the part that regulate breathing and heart function, which is one of the reasons too much alcohol is dangerous.) Although rigor mortis stiffens the muscles, it doesn’t set in until hours after death. Just after death, muscles relax, causing people to urinate after death.
6. Pooing
We all know that in times of stress the body eliminates waste, often in front of people or on camera. The body relaxes certain muscles and things just . . . progress. In the case of dead bodies, the whole thing is helped along by the gas that’s produced inside the body. This can happen hours after death. Hours. Considering fetuses can also poop in the womb (it’s true!), this may be both the first and last thing we do in life. Puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?
5. Digestion
It turns out that when you die, bot only are you expelling stuff, you’re actively making more. Or, at least, something is making more. We forget that we share our bodies with tons of other creatures, many of them beneficial. The bacteria inside your gut don’t die just because you do. While plenty of them are parasitic, some of them are great aids to digestion, and do part of the work for us. They keep right on chugging, even when we’re good and dead. Others eat into the lining of our intestines, making more of that gas that repulsed us all in section six, which pushes things along.
4. Erections and Ejaculation
When the heart stops forcing the blood around the body, it pools in whatever area is lowest. Sometimes people die standing up and sometimes people die lying face down. I think everyone here has enough spatial reasoning to understand what kind of blood pooling that would encourage. Meanwhile, for all that talk of relaxing muscles after death, it doesn’t last forever. Certain types of muscle cells are activated by calcium ions. After activation, the cells expend energy putting the calcium ions back outside the cell. After death, the membranes become more permeable to calcium and the cells don’t expend as much energy to push the ions out, so the muscles contract. This does lead to rigor mortis and can lead to ejaculation. It’s real. It happens. Now let’s never think of it again.
3. Muscle movement
Although the brain may die, other areas of the nervous system may still be active. Nurses report seeing reflex action, which involves nerves sending signals to the spinal cord and not the brain, leading to muscle twitches and spasms after death. Some even say they’ve seen shallow chest movements after death. (Although maybe the doctor fell down on the job for that one.)
2. Vocalization
Our bodies are basically sacks of gas and goo supported by bones (which are filled with yet more goo). Rotting happens when bacteria go to work and the proportion of the gas increases. Since we carry most bacteria inside our body, the gas builds up inside. We’ve seen several ways it takes out. One of those ways is through the windpipe. Since rigor mortis stiffens all the muscles, including the ones that work the vocal cords, the combination leads to some very eerie sounds coming from dead bodies. People hear moans, groans, and squeaks coming from the dead, although why they stay around to confirm that the bodies making them are truly dead instead of peeing on the floor and running for their lives is beyond me.
1. Giving birth
Oh. Holy. Hell. No Twilight scene could be worse than this. Back in the day when people dropped like flies, a number of women died while pregnant, and sometimes in times that were too cold to give them a burial. This gave rise to a charming little term called ‘coffin birth.’ The gases building up inside a body, combined with the softening flesh, were said to cause the body to expel the fetus. These events were rare, and caused a lot of rumors, but were documented in times before proper embalming and quick burial. It sounds like the kind of thing out of an Edgar Allen Poe book, but it did happen. And it’s yet another reason to be happy that we live in the modern world.
http://io9.com/5862418/10-bodily-functions-that-continue-after-death
Lifestyle editor Irene Seiberling with The Regina Leader Post, based in Regina, Saskatchewan (way up north in Canada), just posted this in her online column, Anything and Everything:
Book Helps People Plan Their Own End-of-Life Event
Just as talking about sex won’t make you pregnant, talking about funerals won’t make you dead, says Gail Rubin, author of A Good Goodbye: Funeral Planning for Those Who Don’t Plan to Die (Light Tree Press). Rubin uses gentle humour to convey vital information about funeral arrangements that most people don’t learn until faced with a death in the family.
With chapters named Over My Dead Body, I Got It At Costco, and It’s My Party and I’ll Die If I Want To, Rubin has overcome society’s last taboo with a book that’s a great resource minus the morbidity. Rubin’s book provides the information, inspiration and tools to plan and implement creative, meaningful and memorable end-of-life rituals for people and pets while taking the fear out of the subject of death.
Given the fact that only 24% of us pre-plan a funeral and less than 46% tell our family our final wishes – it’s evident we plan our finances, families and retirement, but rarely plan our funerals. Without end-of-life planning, all of life’s other plans can come undone. For this reason an annual event, Create a Great Funeral Day (that occurs every October), was started 12 years ago to remind people of the many benefits of planning their own end-of-life event.
Rubin’s new book, A Good Goodbye: Funeral Planning for Those Who Don’t Plan to Die, recently named Best of Show in the 2011 New Mexico Book Awards and winner in the Family Issues category, goes one step further with resources to help reduce family conflict, avoid stress at a time of grief, prepare directives, obituaries, eulogies, ethical wills, cards and thank-you notes, and save readers thousands of dollars in the process. She also presents background on many religious traditions and creative non-religious rituals – especially helpful for interfaith families.
Once a year, like the characters in Harold and Maude, Rubin attends funerals of strangers. During her second annual “30 Funerals in 30 Days Challenge,” she covered each one with a video and wrote about them on The Family Plot Blog. Rubin shares the creative ways people celebrate the lives of those they love and emphasizes that funerals are a life cycle event much like a wedding (and better if planned more than a few days ahead). Rubin sees this as a healthier way of dealing with death – “we know it’s going to happen to all of us some day so let’s make it more comfortable to talk about and plan for.”
For more information, visit: www.agoodgoodbye.com.
Filed under: Film and Video Reviews | Tags: Funeral Films, funeral planning, funerals
I’m starting a series of periodic articles about movies, mostly comedies, that I call “funeral films.” Theses films have elements related to funerals that can be instructive and helpful for starting a conversation about funeral planning. This first film, The Loved One, is all about the funeral industry.
Funeral Films: The Loved One
By Gail Rubin
The Loved One satirizes the funeral business, including pet funerals, as well as the movie industry and the military-industrial complex. It debuted in 1965, two years after Jessica Mitford’s exposé book The American Way of Death rocked the funeral industry. Despite its black-and-white vintage, The Loved One does show funeral trends that have continued to this day.
Critics at the time skewered the movie, although others have come to regard it as a very funny comedy. Its tag line is “The motion picture with something to offend everyone.” It’s not terribly offensive by twenty-first century standards, however, the story gets rather confusing toward the end and most of the characters are unlikeable.
Robert Morse (R) as Dennis Barlow and Anjanette Comer as Aimee Thanatogenous
The exception is Sir Francis Hinsley (John Gielgud) who hangs himself because he’s summarily laid off after 31 years of working for a Hollywood studio. He becomes “The Loved One” for whom nephew Dennis Barlow (played by a young Robert Morse) sets out to arrange a funeral.
British ex-pat Sir Ambrose Ambercrombie (Robert Morley) directs Barlow to sell his uncle’s house to pay for a sufficiently impressive funeral.
At the Whispering Glades mortuary and cemetery, Barlow encounters discrimination against blacks and Jews, faces a huge array of choices to make in caskets, interment options and burial clothing (gleefully presented by Liberace), and gets a tour of the Whispering Glades cemetery grounds (Forest Lawn gets its close-up).
Barlow, an unemployed “poet” from England, is attracted to Aimee Thanatogenous (Anjanette Comer), a young lady who does the make-up on the corpses at Whispering Glades. Once Uncle Francis is dispatched with a high level of pomp, Barlow pursues Thanatogenous, who is also pursued by co-worker Mr. Joyboy (Rod Steiger), an embalmer. He brings Miss Thanatogenous home to have dinner with him and his obese mother in a bizarre food orgy.
Milton Berle and Margaret Leighton as a distraught pet parent
Things just get weirder as The Loved One progresses.
Barlow goes to work for a pet cemetery and cremation service. On his first call, he encounters a highly distraught dog owner (Margaret Leighton) and her husband (Milton Berle) who can’t wait to get rid of the carcass and go out to a dinner party.
(Spoiler Alert! Skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want to know the ending.)
Miss Thanatogenous commits suicide by self-embalming. Air Force officers have a wild party in the Whispering Glades casket room. A rocket launch is supposed to carry the remains of a war hero into space, and Barlow manages to switch bodies and launches Miss Thanatogenous instead.
Terry Southern, known for satirical outrageous fiction, wrote the screenplay based on the Evelyn Waugh novel. Southern’s other screenplay credits include Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Easy Rider, Barbarella, and The Magic Christian.
These elements in The Loved One endure and provide lessons for today’s funeral consumer:
- Weddings and funerals are similar. The Whispering Glades chapel and minister do double duty. There’s a quick-change scene where a newly married couple is hustled out and the black crepe drops from the ceiling for Uncle Francis’ funeral. Some funeral homes and cemeteries offer their facilities for both life cycle events. Whether the event is a wedding or a funeral, plan ahead if you want to reduce stress and save money.
- There is always a mind-boggling array of choices to make. While casket rooms are disappearing from funeral homes, the array of caskets from which to choose, and sources to get them, have only proliferated. Shop around before someone dies to make an informed decision without pressure.
- Funerals are expensive. Barlow has to resort to selling his uncle’s Hollywood home to pay for a traditional funeral. How will your household manage to pay for a funeral with costs that can range from $8,000 to $20,000?
- Pets are part of the family and their loss is keenly felt. People love their pets and often experience intense grief when they die. The pet cemetery and cremation operation in The Loved One showed less-than-respectful treatment of dead animals. As with people funerals, shop around before you need such services to ensure you work with an ethical provider.
The Loved One can be rented on DVD from Netflix and can be purchased (as available) on Amazon.com. This film is not rated.
Gail Rubin, “The Doyenne of Death,” is author of the award-winning book, A Good Goodbye: Funeral Planning for Those Who Don’t Plan to Die. She speaks to groups using clips from funny films to illustrate funeral planning issues and help start serious conversations. Her website is http://AGoodGoodbye.com.
Liberace as a gleeful casket salesman
Here are two Death Cartoons to brighten up your Thanksgiving celebration!
Close To Home a couple of days ago featured a man standing at the Pearly Gates with St. Peter checking his info on a computer screen. St. Peter says, “Well, good news for you. Our computers are down. You can go back home until Monday.”
Hmm… What would you do if you knew you had a couple of days on Earth before the end of this current existence?
And today’s Non Sequitur cartoon pokes fun at heartless rich folks with another cemetery headstone cartoon. A big over-sized headstone, surrounded by a wrought iron fence, announces, “Still in the top 1% and you’re not.” A couple observes the marker and the man remarks, “He was a grateful man… just not in a good way.”
Wishing everyone an attitude of gratitude this Thanksgiving holiday!
As the family gathers together this Thanksgiving weekend, it’s an ideal time to start a conversation on end-of-life wishes, don’t you think?
Actually, you probably haven’t thought about it. You just want to get through the turkey feast, the football games, the Black Friday shopping, and hanging out with your family without getting too deep. Having an in-depth conversation about how you or your loved ones want to be treated in a medical emergency when they can’t communicate what they would want done just isn’t on your radar.
Trust me, you want to have these conversations before you find yourself in a hospital floundering through a health care crisis with people you love. Today’s guest blog post from the fine folks at Engage With Grace provides some good insights.
Occupy With Grace
Once again, this Thanksgiving we are grateful to all the people who keep this mission alive day after day: to ensure that each and every one of us understands, communicates, and has honored their end of life wishes.
Seems almost more fitting than usual this year, the year of making change happen. 2011 gave us the Arab Spring, people on the ground using social media to organize a real political revolution. And now, love it or hate it – it’s the Occupy Wall Street movement that’s got people talking.
Smart people have made the point that unlike those political and economic movements, our mission isn’t an issue we need to raise our fists about – it’s an issue we have the luxury of being able to hold hands about.
It’s a mission that’s driven by all the personal stories we’ve heard of people who’ve seen their loved ones suffer unnecessarily at the end of their lives.
It’s driven by that ripping-off-the-band-aid feeling of relief you get when you’ve finally broached the subject of end of life wishes with your family, free from the burden of just not knowing what they’d want for themselves, and knowing you could advocate for these wishes if your loved one weren’t able to speak up for themselves.
And it’s driven by knowing that this is a conversation that needs to happen early, and often. One of the greatest gifts you can give the ones you love is making sure you’re all on the same page. In the words of the amazing Atul Gawande, you only die once! Die the way you want. Make sure your loved ones get that same gift. And there is a way to engage in this topic with grace!
Here are the five questions, read them, consider them, answer them (you can securely save your answers at the Engage with Grace site), share your answers with your loved ones. It doesn’t matter what your answers are, it just matters that you know them for yourself, and for your loved ones. And they for you.
We all know the power of a group that decides to assemble. In fact, we recently spent an amazing couple days with the members of the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care, or C-TAC, working together to channel so much of the extraordinary work that organizations are already doing to improve the quality of care for our country’s sickest and most vulnerable.
Noted journalist Eleanor Clift gave an amazing talk, finding a way to weave humor and joy into her telling of the story she shared in this Health Affairs article. She elegantly sums up (as only she can) the reason that we have this blog rally every year:
For too many physicians, that conversation is hard to have, and families, too, are reluctant to initiate a discussion about what Mom or Dad might want until they’re in a crisis, which isn’t the best time to make these kinds of decisions. Ideally, that conversation should begin at the kitchen table with family members, rather than in a doctor’s office.
It’s a conversation you need to have wherever and whenever you can, and the more people you can rope into it, the better! Make this conversation a part of your Thanksgiving weekend, there will be a right moment, you just might not realize how right it was until you begin the conversation.
This is a time to be inspired, informed – to tackle our challenges in real, substantive, and scalable ways. Participating in this blog rally is just one small, yet huge, way that we can each keep that fire burning in our bellies, long after the turkey dinner is gone.
Wishing you and yours a happy and healthy holiday season. Let’s Engage with Grace together.
To learn more please go to www.engagewithgrace.org.This post was developed by Alexandra Drane and the Engage With Grace team.
Did an interview on WJOB-AM on Party Line 219 with host Steven “The Preacher” Glover. Several years earlier, he had been through a near death experience, which we discussed but that isn’t in this YouTube video.
Here’s a great TED video with Jae Rhim Lee speaking about her Mushroom Burial Suit, an eco-friendly way to return to the earth with the help of spores that speed decomposition. Brilliant idea for those interested in green burial.
