Let's be brutally honest here: most of us are going to die. The only questionable one is the neighbor down the street, who is for sure an alien (and who knows what happens to them).

Shocking, I know. Yet somehow, the majority of us are walking around assuming our family has telepathic powers when it comes to knowing exactly how we want to be planted, scattered, or displayed when we shuffle off this mortal coil.

Newsflash: They don't.

Your kids aren't mind readers, and your spouse isn't a fortune teller. That beautiful vision you have of being scattered over the Pacific while "My Way" plays in the background? Yeah, your daughter thinks you wanted to be buried next to Grandma Rose in that cemetery she can't even remember the name of. Your son is convinced you'd prefer a Viking funeral because you once said something about going out in a blaze of glory after too many beers at a barbecue.

The result? Chaos. Arguments. And quite possibly your ashes sitting in someone's closet for the next decade because nobody can agree on what you actually wanted.

Margaret had always been the organized one. Color-coded calendars, labeled storage bins, a place for everything, and everything in its place. So when she passed away suddenly at 68, her three adult children figured planning her funeral would be straightforward.

"Mom always said she wanted to be buried with Dad," insisted Emily, the eldest, while frantically googling funeral homes.

"No way," argued Michael, scrolling through cremation costs on his phone. "She specifically told me cremation was more practical. Less expensive, better for the environment."

Sister Lisa chimed in from across the funeral home's "comfort room" (because calling it an office would be too morbid): "You're both wrong. She wanted to donate her body to science. Remember that documentary about body farms she made us watch?"

Three weeks and $15,000 later, they'd settled on a traditional burial at Restful Meadows Cemetery. Beautiful service, touching eulogies, everyone agreed Margaret would have approved.

Then came the mail.

Six months after the funeral, a bill arrived for Margaret's pre-paid cemetery plot at Eternal Rest Gardens – the cemetery in her hometown, three states away. The plot she'd purchased fifteen years earlier. Next to the space reserved for her beloved husband Walter, who'd been cremated and was sitting in an urn on her nightstand because she "wasn't ready" to bury him yet.

The kicker? She'd left detailed instructions in a sealed envelope tucked inside her jewelry box. The envelope Karen found while cleaning out the house. The envelope marked "IMPORTANT – FUNERAL WISHES" in Margaret's unmistakable block letters.

Emily still has therapy bills from that discovery.

Baby Boomers: You've planned everything else in your lives with military precision – retirement portfolios, Medicare supplements, early bird dinner schedules. Yet somehow you think death plans are optional? You're the generation that invented living wills, for crying out loud! Stop assuming your kids have inherited your psychic abilities along with your good looks and questionable taste in lawn ornaments.

GenX: You're caught in the perfect storm of denial. You're too busy managing your own kids' college funds and your parents' medical appointments to think about your mortality.

Meanwhile, you're desperately trying to get Mom and Dad to put their wishes in writing while secretly hoping you've got another twenty years before you need to think about your final arrangements. Spoiler alert: you don't.

The truth is, both generations are masters of avoidance, just in different ways. Boomers avoid it because they've earned the right not to think about unpleasant things. Gen X avoids it because they're too exhausted from everything else on their plates.

The Johnson family Thanksgiving always followed the same script: too much turkey, Uncle Bob's political rants, and someone inevitably bringing up Aunt Sally's questionable Jello salad choices. This year, however, 72-year-old patriarch Bill decided to shake things up.

"Pass the stuffing, and while you're at it, I need to tell you all something important," he announced, causing his three kids to exchange the universal look of "Oh God, what now?"

"Your mother and I have been talking about our funeral arrangements."

The table went silent. Even Uncle Bob stopped mid-rant about the government.

"We've decided we want to be cremated and have our ashes mixed together, then scattered at that little beach in Maine where we honeymooned," continued Bill, cutting his turkey with surgical precision.

His daughter Jennifer nearly choked on her wine. "But Dad, you always said you wanted to be buried in the family plot next to Grandpa Joe!"

"And Mom," added son Robert, "didn't you say you wanted a traditional Catholic service with the full nine yards?"

Martha, their 70-year-old mother, smiled sweetly while passing the cranberry sauce. "Honey, that was twenty years ago. People change. We've become more... what's the word... bohemian in our old age."

"Bohemian?" Robert sputtered. "You wear matching Christmas sweaters and still use coupons!"

Bill chuckled. "Son, just because we clip coupons doesn't mean we can't be scattered to the wind like free spirits. Besides, do you really want to visit our graves every year, pretending to enjoy small talk with our headstones?"

By dessert, the family had moved from shock to acceptance to appreciating their parents' refreshing honesty. Jennifer even admitted she'd been dreading the thought of maintaining grave sites in perpetuity.

The moral of the story? Sometimes the best gift you can give your family is the gift of actually telling them what you want – even if it ruins the traditional Thanksgiving atmosphere.

Here's what happens when you don't document your wishes: your grieving family gets to make expensive decisions under extreme emotional duress while trying to mind-read a dead person. It's like trying to solve a puzzle where half the pieces are missing and the other half are your own guilt and assumptions.

Funeral costs can range from $2,000 for basic cremation to $15,000+ for traditional burial with all the bells and whistles. Plot prices vary wildly by location – that prime real estate in Manhattan costs more dead than alive. Green burials, alkaline hydrolysis, body donation, memorial diamonds made from cremated remains – the options are endless, and each one comes with its own price tag and logistics.

Special Consideration for Veterans: If you served in the military, your family needs to know about your service benefits. The Department of Veterans Affairs provides burial flags, headstones or markers, and burial in national cemeteries at no cost to your family. Military funeral honors including flag folding and presentation, playing of Taps, and rifle volleys are available for eligible veterans. Don't make your family scramble to figure out what you're entitled to – contact the VA National Cemetery Scheduling Office (1-800-535-1117) or visit va.gov/burials-memorials/ to understand your benefits and document them with your other final wishes. Your DD-214 (discharge papers) will be crucial for your family to access these services.

The Money Talk Nobody Wants to Have: While we're discussing costs, let's address the elephant in the room – funeral insurance. Final expense or burial insurance policies specifically cover funeral and burial costs, typically ranging from $5,000 to $50,000 in coverage. Unlike life insurance, these policies are designed to pay out quickly to cover immediate expenses. Companies like Colonial Penn, Mutual of Omaha, and AARP offer these policies, often with no medical exam required for seniors. Yes, they're more expensive per dollar of coverage than term life insurance, but they serve a specific purpose: ensuring your family isn't stuck with a bill they can't afford during an already difficult time. Just don't use funeral insurance as an excuse to avoid the conversation – your family still needs to know what you want done with that money.

But the real cost isn't financial. It's the family drama, the second-guessing, the "what if" conversations that happen for years afterward. Its siblings stop speaking because they couldn't agree on whether to bury or cremate. It's spouses left making impossible decisions because they honestly don't know what their partner would have wanted.

Seventh-grader Emma Martinez thought her genealogy project would be easy. Her abuela was a walking Wikipedia of family history, and her mom had boxes of old photos just begging to be organized into a proper family tree.

What Emma discovered instead was a scavenger hunt for a deceased relative that would make Dan Brown jealous.

"So Great-Uncle Roberto is buried where exactly?" Emma asked, pencil poised over her poster board.

"Well, mija, he's in that beautiful cemetery in San Antonio," Abuela replied, not looking up from her telenovela.

"And Great-Aunt Carmen?"

"Oh, she was cremated. Her ashes are... somewhere. Maybe with your Tía Rosa? Or was it your cousin Miguel who took them?"

Emma's mom, overhearing from the kitchen, called out: "I thought Carmen was buried in that cemetery in Phoenix!"

"No, no, that's my sister Elena. Carmen was the one who wanted to be scattered in the ocean, but then Uncle Frank said it was too expensive to rent a boat, so they just... kept her."

Three hours later, Emma had mapped out what could only be described as a "Diaspora of the Departed." Great-grandparents in Mexico, grandparents scattered across Texas, California, and Arizona, some buried, some cremated, some apparently in eternal limbo in various relatives' closets.

The real revelation came when Emma innocently asked where Abuela wanted to be buried someday.

"Ay, mija, I haven't thought about it. Maybe next to your abuelo in that nice cemetery near the mall? Or wait, isn't your cousin planning to buy plots near her house in Nevada?"

Emma's mom stopped stirring the beans and turned around slowly. "Mom, you mean you don't have a plan?"

"Plan? Who needs a plan? You kids will figure it out when the time comes."

And there it was. The cycle, perpetuating itself into yet another generation of guesswork and family meetings that would inevitably start with, "Well, I think she would have wanted..."

Emma got an A on her project, but more importantly, she started a family conversation that was thirty years overdue.

Yes, selfish. You're being selfish by not having this conversation. You think you're sparing your family from dealing with morbid topics, but actually, you're setting them up for a nightmare scenario where they have to guess what would make you happy when you're literally past caring.

The fix is simple: document your wishes, communicate them clearly, and update them when they change. Have the conversation more than once. Make it specific. "I want a simple service" means nothing. Simple to whom? What's your definition of simple versus your daughter's definition?

Here's what needs to be addressed:

You're going to be dead. You won't care if Great-Aunt Martha's feelings are hurt because you didn't choose the same funeral home she used. You won't be worried about the cost or the logistics, or whether the flowers match the season.

Your family will care about all of these things. They'll care while they're grieving, while they're stressed, while they're trying to honor your memory in a way that feels right.

The greatest gift you can give them isn't a perfect funeral plan – it's removing the guesswork from one of the most difficult times in their lives.

So stop being mysterious about your final wishes. Death is inevitable; family drama over your funeral doesn't have to be.

Download Your FREE End-of-Life Planning Checklist and AI Prompt at [website] – Because your family deserves better than playing twenty questions with your ghost.