Funeral planning

When I first started in ministry, I worked with a pastor who advised people not to plan their own funerals. He believed funerals were for the living, and the dead should leave the planning to the surviving family and friends. I recently came across a similar opinion written by Mary Roach in her book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers:

Here's the other thing I think about. It makes little sense to try to control what happens to your remains when you are no longer around to reap the joys or benefits of that control. People who make elaborate requests concerning disposition of their bodies are probably people who have trouble with the concept of not existing. Leaving a note requesting that your family and friends travel to the Ganges or ship your body to a plastination lab in Michigan is a way of exerting influence after you're gone—of still being there, in a sense. I imagine it is a symptom of the fear, the dread, of being gone, of the refusal to accept that you no longer control, or even participate in, anything that happens on earth. I spoke about this with funeral director Kevin McCabe, who believes that decisions concerning the disposition of a body should be made by the survivors, not the dead. "It's none of their business what happens to them when they die," he said to me.

What do you think?