Audrey Appleton from Stockport, Cheshire has already told Mark what she wants. That includes making sure she looks like Whitney Houston at the end, and a finale with steel drums and lots of loud music playing. She’s hoping her last words will be from one of the songs she loves to sing.

One of Witney’s last wishes was that her funeral should take place at the church where she first sang as a child. Her family made sure that happened. Audrey’s family will make sure her last wishes are followed to the letter.

She says: “I have discussed my funeral plans with my husband, my daughter and my sister, there will be no difficult decisions for them to make when the time comes”.

Following the high number of unexpected deaths due to the pandemic, Mark found family members were suddenly being faced with organising funerals without really knowing what their loved ones wanted.

Betty Marsland from Heaton Chapel has made sure that isn’t the case for her relatives.

The sprightly 89-year-old, has even picked out her own final resting place at Adlington Memorial Park.

Her daughter Louise knows Betty wants to arrive in a horse drawn hearse for a non-religious service at the graveside.

She will be dressed in bio-degradable materials, placed in a casket of all-natural materials next to a Living Garden floral memorial so everyone gets a plant to take away and any left behind will be planted beside her. New Orleans jazz music will play out as she is carried up the hill.

Mark adds: “Sharing last wishes doesn’t have to be difficult, it’s just about communicating the message to your loved ones.

“In a modern world where social media is often the meeting room of choice, it may be easier to at least start the conversation there. So many more people have learned to connect through social media during the pandemic that it makes sense to consider it an alternative communication channel.”

Some famous people who made their last wishes known, albeit before social media, include:

• Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry whose ashes were taken to the final frontier on board the space shuttle Columbia
• Singer/song writer Janis Joplin who left $2,500 for her friends to rock out to The Grateful Dead at her wake
• French statesman Napoleon Bonaparte’s final wish was that after his death his head was to be shaved and the hair divided between his friends
• Author Charles Dickens asked that mourners attending his funeral should not wear scarves, cloaks, black bows, long hatbands or other “revolting absurdities”
• Alexander The Great had more extravagant demands. The king wanted his physicians alone to carry his coffin, the path leading to his grave to be strewn with gold, silver and precious stones and for both his hands to be left dangling out of his coffin. When asked the reason for his strange request he said he wanted the world to know three things; no doctor can really cure anybody, despite a lifetime accumulating riches not even a grain of gold goes with you and leaving his hands out of the coffin would prove he came empty handed into the world and left the same way!

And some famous last words:

• Footballer George Best: “Don’t die like I did”. A handwritten card left by his hospital deathbed
• Singer Elvis Presley: “I hope I haven’t bored you”. His last words in public, to the audience at his final concert before his death
• Former Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill: “I’m bored with it all”. Spoken before he slipped into a coma.
• Comedian Spike Milligan: “I told you I was ill”. The epitaph he requested for his gravestone
• Tenor Luciano Pavarotti: “I believe that a life lived for music is an existence spent wonderfully, and this is what I have dedicated my life to.” A prepared statement given to his manager just before he died.