Requests for personal funeral rituals increase with growing secularization and the indi-vidualization of death. Based on interviews, this article discusses four women’s experi-ences of independently planning and conducting secular memorials and ash disposals. Idiscuss the role of improvisation in the processes surrounding these rituals. Imagination,invention, improvisation, independence and inspiration emerge as characteristic aspectsof their accounts. Due to the atheist beliefs of the deceased, the families have activelydistanced themselves from the Church’s funeral ritual, and undertakers were not con-sidered helpful. To amend this, the relatives assumed responsibility for planning thesecular funerals rather than leaving responsibility to the dominant authorities of death.Arranging memorials and burials without previous experience made the mourners feelinsecure, but they also took pleasure in the creativity of the process, through which theycreated meaningful and deeply personal memorials and ash disposals. The study showshow rituals were (re)created by combining personal details with already establishedfuneral ritual elements, as the mourners both mimicked and actively distanced them-selves from existing ritual forms.