Videos of the author's father were shown throughout his service, like this one from the author’s wedding reception in 2004.

“If people aren’t laughing during my memorial, you’ve done it wrong,” my father told us for years, long before his death. “Funerals are inherently sad; for mine, cut the treacle a bit with humour.”

He thought a lot about funerals. Growing up, death was a dinner table conversation at our house almost every night, because my dad was an estate planning attorney. He always protected his clients’ privacy, but would bring the lessons home: Never fight with your siblings over money. Never stop talking to your brother and sister – work it out with words, go to a family therapist if you have to. Your mother and I would be so disappointed if you didn’t get along after we were gone.

My dad spent his days divvying up assets among sometimes testy or distant family members. He helped his clients write their wills and he attended enough funerals to develop strong beliefs about them. He often advised his clients to take a beat after a family member’s death and delay having the service in order to gather their thoughts and think about what their loved one would want.

He believed every close family member should write a eulogy. Whether they actually delivered the speech at the funeral mattered less than the process of organising one’s feelings and acknowledging their relationship with the loved one who had died. It’s a therapeutic rite of passage and aids in the grieving process. He believed it put the relationship into perspective.

Dad kept a folder at home in his den with handwritten notes about his wishes for his own memorial. In the folder, he included favourite hymns, songs, poems and notes.

He died in early February 2022, after a long battle with Parkinson’s Disease and dementia which slowly rendered him unable to communicate using speech or writing.

After his death, my mother turned to the folder and had a final conversation with her husband of more than 50 years. We then did the things my dad had outlined for us to do.

We paused

We planned his requested “celebration of life” to take place a few months after his passing, which gave us time for our grief to shift from raw disbelief to more reflective and open-hearted.

We waited until May, close to his birthday, and held it in the Milwaukee Art Museum, a place he loved. My father was affiliated with the museum – either as legal counsel or on their board – for 35 years.

The building, designed by Santiago Calatrava, is a work of art in its own right, and in the main hall,........

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