These High-Profile Funerals Can Help You Illustrate the Power of Preplanning
Everyone knows that preplanning a funeral is the best way to ensure your personal preferences are honored at your funeral, right? Wrong. Big time. During last month’s 2025 Funeral (Un)Conference, Jenn Parvin, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Batesville, revealed a stunning statistic from her company’s latest consumer research. Parvin revealed that “although 90% of people in the profession assume that families understand preneed, […] less than 30% of families actually know preneed is available.”
Filling this huge knowledge gap is the key to building loyalty and community engagement, not to mention revenue. One way to educate consumers is to show them real-life examples of the benefits of preplanning — and two recent high-profile and socially viral funerals can help you tell these stories.
Dikivia Steed: A funeral fit for a “real-life” Barbie
In November, Dikivia “Kivie” Steen, a Florida mother of four young sons, received the devastating diagnosis of breast cancer; just months later, the cancer spread to her brain. Kivie died in March 2025, just 10 days shy of her 40th birthday. Because she had shared her final wishes for her funeral in great detail, Kivie’s family was able to honor her life with an extravagant, stylish, and highly-personalized service.
“I want a black casket with pink flowers on top, and I want to wear pink,” Kivie told her family members and close friends — whom she called her “Glam Squad” — from her hospital bed. “I want you all to wear black with pink trimmings, bows, and gloves. Everyone should be glam.”
Kivie, who was often referred to as a “real-life Barbie” because of her love of fashion and the color pink, also said “they had the option of wearing dresses or trousers, as long as the theme was pink and black.”
Once entrusted with Kivie’s services, funeral director Shawn Johnson-Jones, the self-described “Funeral Lady” on Instagram worked with Kivie’s family and the squad to produce an over-the-top and incredibly fitting finale. Leaning into the Barbie theme, Johnson created a backdrop resembling the iconic doll’s packaging and upgraded Kivie’s requested black casket to a glass-topped version to “fulfill her dream of being a human Barbie doll.” Attendees adhered to Kivie’s detailed dress code, showing out in black, hot pink, gloves, and glitter. “She left no detail untouched,” shared Kivie’s sister DeeDee, who is now caring for Kivie’s children.
Although the service was definitely Instagram-worthy, it was the preplanning part of Kivie’s heartbreaking (and heartwarming) that actually went viral. TikTok videos like this one exclaimed that Kivie had actually planned her own funeral, as if preplanning was an incredibly unique thing to do — lending credence to Batesville’s research findings. “I have never seen anything like this ever,” says TikTokker @word_from_big_angie, “like somebody who just plans out their whole funeral.”
Tanner Martin: A “Rebel Against Cancer”
After being diagnosed with terminal colon cancer five years ago at age 25, Utah’s Tanner Martin did what might be expected of most millennials — he shared his story on social media. But Tanner didn’t just post to gather sympathy for himself and wife, Shay Wright; he documented his five-year cancer journey largely to help his friends and family prepare for his death, which occured on June 25 of this year.
Tanner’s TikTok profile, @tannerandshay, eventually gathered 719,000 followers as more and more of his posts sharing stories of his treatments, the couple’s struggle to get pregnant via IVF, and his detailed final wishes went viral with millions of likes. Tanner and Shay’s daughter, AmyLou, was born in May.
In April, Tanner documents his visit to Utah Valley Mortuary, where he playfully picked out his casket and selected his monument; he then visited the cemetery to designate his and Shay’s gravesites. The video also showed Tanner creating messages and documenting memories for his daughter.
Tanner’s funeral was held 10 days after his wife published this TikTok video, in which Tanner announced his own death with the words, “Hey it’s me, Tanner, and if you’re watching this, I’m dead.” The service reflected Tanner’s love of fantasy film series like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings; attendees were asked to wear “something Star Wars” and, at Tanner’s request, to place Star Wars stickers on his casket.
In one of Tanner’s last videos, entitled “Tanner’s Last Wish,” he asked his followers for both prayers and for donations to a GoFundMe account for his wife and daughter to replace his income, help with AmyLou’s schooling, and to pay for her wedding. The video garnered 12 million views and, surely, tons of tears. That account has amassed more than $750,000, prompting Shay to announce that she’d donate 25% of all proceeds over $500,000 to the nonprofit Rebels Against Cancer in Tanner’s memory.
Lessons learned
Although these stories showcase preplanning by young people with terminal diagnoses, they can truly serve as great examples of the power of preplanning. The families and friends of both Kivie Steed and Tanner Martin seemed to appreciate the detailed final wishes each of these individuals shared prior to their deaths; they bravely and practically provided blueprints for what would make they wanted, relieving much of the pressure and bewilderment usually experienced in at-need arrangements. Leveraging these stories on your own social media channels can definitely help you educate in a very visual way that huge portion (70%!) of folks who don’t even know that preplanning is an option.
