Shannen Doherty was not afraid to talk openly about the possibility of death, and ahead of her passing she shared her desires for how she wanted her funeral and burial be carried out. In January, the actress spoke about dying on an episode of her podcast, Let's Be Clear with Shannen Doherty. She died on July 13, 2024, at the age of 53 after a long battle with cancer. Shannen was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015. In 2020 it returned as Stage 4 and soon metastasized to her bones and brain.
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Here's what her desires were.
"I want [my remains] to be mixed with my dog, and I want it to be mixed with my dad. I do not want to be buried and not cremated," she said during the episode. She added that her loved ones should distribute her ashes in "a healthy mixture" of ways, such as scattering her and her father's ashes in Malibu, California, where they spent "precious time" together, or another location that they both loved. He died in 2010. She mentioned she was also interested in using her remains to "grow them into a tree."
She wanted a small funeral.
"There's a lot of people that I think would show up that I don't want there," she said. "I don't want them there because their reasons for showing up aren't necessarily the best reasons, like, they don't really like me and, you know, they have their reasons and good for them, but they don't actually really like me enough to show up to my funeral."
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She wanted to have a 'love fest.'
"[They'll show up] because it's the politically correct thing to do, and they don't want to look bad, so I kinda want to take the pressure off them and I want my funeral to be like a love fest," the 90210 actress went on. "I don't want people to be crying or people to privately be like, 'Thank God that b—- is dead now.'"
Shannen was also downsizing.
On another episode of her podcast in April, she spoke about letting go of physical possessions that no longer brought her joy as a way to make the time after her death easier for her loved ones.
“It feels like you're giving up on something that was very special and important to you,” she said, referring to cleaning out a storage unit. “But you know that it's the right thing to do and that it's going to give you a sense of peace and a sense of calm. Because you're helping the people that you leave behind just have a cleaner, easier transition.”
She spent her final days making memories with her loved ones.
“I don't need this, it doesn’t really bring me any great joy, but what does bring me great joy is taking my mom to the places that she's always wanted to go to,” Shannen added then. “I get to build different memories — I get to build memories with the people I love. I'm not digging into the money that's in my estate that is going to make sure everybody in my life is taken care of.”
