Variants, please

There’s quite a good joke here — it must be an old one but I’ve not come across it before — in this week’s Spectator by Robin Oakley. It goes:

Asked why he had sent a wreath in the shape of a lifebelt, a friend at the funeral of the man who had drowned replied, “It’s what he would have wanted.”

There must be an infinite number of variants on this. What’s yours?