Ledger Laid to Rest

Heath Ledger’s emotional day of memorial services ended Saturday with a spontaneous swim at the Oscar-nominated actor’s favorite seaside hangout. Michelle Williams, Ledger’s ex-partner and mother of their two-year old daughter Matilda, and some 50 other mourners dove fully clothed into the surf on Cottesloe Beach, in Ledger’s hometown of Perth. Earlier in the day approximately 500 family members and friends gathered at a local chapel to hear actress Cate Blanchett, who recently starred alongside Ledger in the Bob Dylan biopic,"I’m Not There," give a eulogy. Dylan’s song “The Times They Are A-Changin” was also featured in the ceremony. Ledger was later cremated in a smaller service at the nearby Fremantle Cemetery. Mourners then gathered for a wake on the beach at Ledger’s beloved Indiana Tea House. “It’s what Heath would have wanted,” one attendee told Sydney’s Daily Telegraph.

Ledger, 28, died in his New York apartment January 22. A medical examiner ruled his death an accidental overdose of six prescription drugs identified by their generic names: oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, commonly known as Valium (RHHBY.PK), temazepam, alprazolam, commonly known as Xanax (PFE), and doxylamine. “Heath’s accidental death serves as a caution to the hidden dangers of combining prescription medication,” his father, Kim, said in a statement. On February 2, Hollywood friends of Ledger including Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes, Sienna Miller and Ellen DeGeneres gathered at the Sony Lot for a private memorial service. 

An unexpected tragedy is difficult to recover from emotionally, but some advance planning can make it easier to pay for financially. “Most funerals are unplanned and take place within a week or shortly after death,” says Sarah Orr funeral director of Adams Funeral Home in Ozark, Missouri, who says funerals can run as high as $13,000 or more.

One of the best ways to financially prepare for your funeral is to start a fund for a pre-arranged funeral. The pre-arrangement is set up at the funeral home, says Orr, and locks the price of the service, casket, and vault to the current market prices, thereby avoiding inflation. Clients can put the money into a trust or make monthly payments through an insurance company. Orr says that pre-arranging your funeral takes about 15 minutes to fill out the paperwork and affords you the time to make decisions on your own rather then leaving them to your family to guess after the fact. Using a National Funeral Directors Association-approved funeral director is advised because they must follow the code of ethics and consumer bill of rights for funeral pre-planning.

Georgia has some of the best funeral funding laws in the nation, says Broc Fischer, a partner at the Atlanta-based Fischer Funeral Care. If you prepay for a funeral, 100% goes into an escrow trust and draws interest. The interest from the growth is what off sets the inflation of the funeral’s price. “Funeral costs are based on the interest rates,” says Fischer. “It is nothing spectacular it is just 2-3% but it does depend on the market. It indexes every year.” The longer you live after starting the fund, the more you save as funeral costs rise consistently each year. Says Orr: “We did a funeral the other day [where] the person had paid the pre-arrangement in the 1980s. They paid $1,500 for that funeral. That would have been a $7,000 funeral according to today’s prices.”