Have you left explicit instructions for someone to follow in the event of your death?

We have a living will and a durable power of attorney. We have had conversations with all our family as to what is important to us, though nothing bubbling up to the level of having to write it all down. Once I die, I really don’t have the concern anymore.

No. I just said I want to be cremated, and what they do after that is up to them.

Told my wife to cremate my body don’t keep but keep any of my ashes or give any of my ashes to anyone else. No funeral cerimony. Just deposit my ashes along Hale O Lono Beach (The start location of the Molokai Hoe outrigger canoe races) on Molokai, Hawaii.

I just trust that my wife will comply with my wishes and believe that she will.

My will bequeaths all my worldly possessions to my wife.

My cousin who just turned 18 yrs old is our prime beneficiary as well as executor. So yes, we’re finalizing everything shortly.

I have one friend of more than 20 years that I have an agreement with. If she dies first, I go and get her computer and destroy it, if I go first, she comes get mine.
My best friend from high school and I attended another high school friend’s funeral last night. She had fought a long hard battle with lung cancer. Most of the pictures of her around the funeral home were bad pictures of her in her worst days of her cancer.
My friend and I promised each other that if anybody put up those types of pictures at our funeral, we would tear them down.

Sorry if I was unable to pose my question clearly. It was not about whether you have a will and what’s in it, or how your remains should be disposed of, although that’s interesting too. The details were meant to clarify my intention.

So please tell me: How should I have asked this question in order to get answers like this?

• I’ve asked my best friend to confiscate my computer and delete the hard drive. (Yes, I see that @chyna posted an answer like this one.)

• I’ve left a letter to be mailed to my ex-wife telling her what really happened.

• My nephew in Florida is supposed to open a safe deposit box I stored there.

And then this part: If so, how did you choose the person to instruct, and how can you be sure they will carry out your request?

I understood your Q, @Jeruba, and now I am wishing that a group of friends and I had set up that tontine in the 70s, with the bottle of fancy Laphroaig somebody’s dad left them. I am the last survivor of that group, but the bottle didn’t last past the first baby.

Now I will spend the rest of the day wondering if I should set up some sort of posthumous scavenger hunt for my daughter

I have no plans to have my computer killed. I leave stuff on it for my kids to come across after I die. Stories, pictures….

My sisters know I want my dog to go live with one of them, unless he can stay with my husband.

I’m the recipient of a request like that, too: My grandma wants me to burn her diaries when she dies. I’m determined to get my hands on them before anyone else does, and I feel confident I can burn them without looking inside. I’ll have to ask her why she chose me.

Food for thought. GQ.

Yes, destroy my computers. That would be better for everyone. :)

Only as far as me being cremated, where my ashes will be interred, what my headstone will look like, and what it might say, as an epitaph.

There is a possibility my home could end up in a sinkhole.
Apparently a section of my city was built on top of abandoned mine locations.
I told my daughter if the house drops with me in it to contact the landlord and join with him in a lawsuit against the city for not posting the locations or investigating possible damage areas.

If this house ends up my gravesite, she should get the inheritance I can not otherwise provide.

Also, my daughter is displeased that I want to donate whatever parts of me which can be used.
I told her if she finds that too impersonal, she should cremate whatever is left, and then she could put a small fragment in a vial she could wear around her neck. She would then always have mommy near her heart.

Not much. Just never to stop life support unless I’m in pain. Organs not to be donated. Brain can be studied and tasted to compare with other brains to see if intelligence tastes different between people. After my brain is to be reunited with my body.
Also would like company before and after death. Not left alone in a morge. Some one to talk to me and warm cotton sheets to keep me comfortable.
I am to be given every opportunity to recover. Not to be creamated.

I am somewhat isolated. I commented to my sister that if I croak it might be weeks before anybody discovers the body. She suggested that I call her every day and the day I don’t call she would investigate why. So I told her that I have donated my body to science and there is a paper on my desk saying where to send the remains. I was surprised that she suggested such a thing. Nobody else cares.