This week, the peculiar request of French actor Alain Delon that his dog should be put down and buried with him on his death has hit the headlines. 

Thankfully for animal welfare concerns, Delon’s family have refused to comply with such a request and for concerned pet owners there is plenty of advice available online about how to make provision for your pets if you die.

Mr Delon’s request raises an interesting question – can your will provide that your property should be destroyed when you die? For example, let’s say you wanted to provide that your favourite painting should be cremated with you – is that possible? There is much less advice to be found online about this, so below are some thoughts.

If your logic is that you do not want the painting to pass to someone under your will, then the standard advice online is to instead provide for it to be donated to charity. But what if your reasoning is not that you don’t want someone else to have it, but rather that you want to ‘take it with you’?

The simple answer is that it is not clear that you can have a legally binding obligation in your will that one of your items has to be cremated, and so in effect destroyed when you die. 

The way that we would deal with such a request would be to include a provision in your will to say that when arranging your funeral your executors should have regard to any letter that you leave with your will, and then include in that letter what you want to be cremated with. The letter is not legally binding but you would hope that your executors would follow your wishes if they are able to do so.

On that point, it may also be worth making specific provisions in your will about who you leave those specific items to, so that you leave them to people who you can trust will not make an issue about it being cremated or buried with you. The last thing you would want is to have your painting accidentally go to someone who then refuses to hand it over for the cremation!

This may all seem like a theoretical thought experiment but, as Mr Delon’s example shows, people can have unusual requests about what they want in their will – and we have to find ways of dealing with that.

However, to offer some more practical advice, for those preparing funeral wishes about cremation it is worth consulting with your local crematorium in advance as certain items cannot be cremated. For example, some watch batteries cannot be cremated so you may not be able to be cremated wearing a particular watch.

For advice about preparing your will, please feel free to contact our estate planning and wills team.