With the passage of 2016 PA 57, Michigan law now allows everyone to appoint their own “funeral representative” who will be authorized to make decisions about their funeral, the handling and disposition of their body, and burial. Previously, such decisions were left to one’s “next of kin.” The choice of next of kin sounds good in theory but becomes unworkable if the next of kin do not agree with each other, as happened with baseball hall of famers Ted Williams and Ernie Banks and boxer Tony Ayala, Jr.
The law also provides for
- the revocation of the designation,
- the appointment of a successor funeral representative,
- limitations on who can serve as a funeral representative, excluding people associated with the funeral establishment, and
- a reordering of the priority of who can make funeral and burial decisions to put the funeral representative at the top (except in cases in which the deceased is a service member whose remains were disposed of in accordance with federal statute).
While this law clears up who will be making funeral and burial arrangements, what remains unclear is whether the funeral representative must follow the decedent’s wishes. Doug Chalgian, in this post and this post, details the controversy. A funeral representative is defined as a fiduciary under EPIC, which would, on first thought, indicate a duty on his or her part to follow the decedent's wishes. But it is not clear that a fiduciary can have a duty to a person who has passed on. In addition, nowhere in the statute does it clearly state that the funeral representative must follow the decedent’s instructions.
So if you know someone who has strong feelings about how he or she is to be buried, maybe in a certain nontraditional casket, say, and there is a danger that the funeral representative may balk at these wishes, you might want to recommend that he or she leave a gift in the will for the representative if the wishes are carried out.