Maybe I’m being petty, but I really, really don’t want them to come.

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Hi Hera,

Maybe this is a petty question, but can I specifically disinvite someone from my funeral? I’m not planning to die any time soon, but when I do, there’s someone I really want to make sure won’t be there.

Thanks, 

Hater till the very end

Dear Hater,

Thank you for this fascinating and petty question. 

I want nothing more than for you to have the funeral of your dreams with a chartreuse silk-lined casket and “one more angel in heaven 👼👼” commemorative gift bags. But beyond hiring a bouncer with a velvet rope to stand outside the venue and keep out the riff-raff, once you’re dead, the entire thing is out of your hands.

That doesn’t mean you can’t attempt to stick your oar in from beyond the grave. 

If you feel very strongly about any part of your funeral service, you can always leave written instructions with a warning you’ll come back and haunt anyone who doesn’t comply. You could also have a conversation with the executor of your estate and make your intentions crystal clear. 

People usually want to be respectful of death preferences, so if there’s something that’s really important to you, it’s absolutely worth making that known while you’re still alive, so the people who love you can try their best to honour your wishes. But unless you take a proactive approach and hold your funeral while you’re alive, you can’t actually guarantee anything. 

Legally, can you exclude someone from attending your funeral? 

Well, you can certainly try! The easiest workaround is to hold a small, invitation-only, private service. If you want the legal justification for restricting entry, you need to make sure that the service is being held on private property. It also might make the executors’ lives easier not to announce the funeral beforehand, so if anyone wants to make a fuss, it’s hopefully already too late. 

If you want to hold a service in a church or a public cemetery, it gets a lot harder. Sure, there are ways you can try and discourage someone from attending, like posting a few burly cousins outside the door or having a brave relative call and specifically disinvite them. But depending on the vibe of the person being excluded, this might be difficult to enforce. 

Should you exclude someone from attending your funeral? 

It all depends on what they’ve done. Is the person you want struck off the guest list your brother’s attention-seeking ex-wife you always hated, who you just know will try and play the flute at your wake? Or is it your stalker of 10 years? 

There are plenty of good reasons not to want someone at your funeral. Perhaps they’ve inflicted some terrible psychic or physical harm on you, and the idea of them sitting in the front row, dabbing their eyes with a handkerchief, is untenable. Or perhaps you’re looking out for one of your living relatives. People always say funerals are for the living, but what if the living hate each other and can’t stand to be in the same room for more than five minutes? 

That’s another good justification for keeping things private. You could even plan a small funeral service for family and close friends, and have a wider “memorial” that’s open to all the losers and haters. 

Most of all, you have to think about your loved ones. Organising a funeral is a thankless and upsetting job, and the last thing you want to do is deputise your next of kin as reluctant bouncers. You want your sister concentrating on the eulogy she’s about to give about the special, beautiful, wonderful, unique, irreplaceable person you were, not hovering by the door trying to prevent your worst ex from sneaking in the back and claiming stolen valour. 

There’s nothing more annoying than going to a funeral and seeing someone you know for a fact the deceased person hated, sniffling mendaciously into a handkerchief. But ultimately the burden of enforcement falls squarely on the shoulders of your loved ones, so unless you have an especially good reason, you should try and make life easy for them. 

The most important thing to remember is that, during all of this, you will be dead, and therefore beyond the scope of mortal concerns such as who added the Eastern European techno to the funeral playlist, and why did your family choose that horrible photo of you posing with the Hulk at Universal Studios for the memorial wall? 

Hoping you rest in peace,

Hera.