“Britain, the only country in the world where at funerals the bereaved are congratulated on the degree to which they have so far supressed their emotions.”
“Last week, I attended the funeral of one of my uncles. His irresponsible lifestyle, which included eating meat, smoking, drinking alcohol and ignoring sell by dates, resulted in his life being cut short at the age of 94.”
“Now deep in my bed I lie
and the world turns on the other side”
John Hirst
“The burnt ashes are put into a cremulator that grinds them fine and grinds the bits. Some funeral homes prefer not to grind all the bits out, so that you can see it’s the remains. It’s a bit like peanut butter. Some prefer chunky. Some prefer smooth.”
From an online Q and A with an American funeral director here.
I’ve attended both a religious and a … civil? funeral recently, and the similarities – the sadness of the person’s departure, the commemoration of a life well spent, humour, grief and the gathering together of people who might not otherwise have seen each other in a long time – were far more obvious to me than the differences.
Guardian commenter Jehenna here.
For many years, my father was a hairbrush. He, that is the hairbrush, was improbably made of perspex. The real thing died before I got to know him, so I carried this perspex hairbrush around, and it became for me the real thing. I used to kid my disbelieving schoolchums that it was wrought out of the cockpit of a Spitfire, since I had read that these things were made of the same material, and Spitfires were honorific objects on the 50s schoolboy totem. Ever since then I have been interested in ancestries, in authenticity, and in reality. I’ve also had a longstanding sympathy for perspex, which I like as a word, as well as a plastic.
John Hartley here
“The older I get, the worse I’m going to look on my deathbed.”
‘At death, I want to be fed through a wood chipper, spread over a wheat field and a cake buy cialis through paypal baked from that crop for my friends to munch.’
Larry Hagman, quoted in today’s Daily Mail.
“The music-loving world, temperamentally, seems to divide neatly into two. There are those who spend their idle hours thinking about which songs they would like to have played at their wedding; and those who spend their idle hours thinking about which songs they would like at their funeral … Planning one’s funeral suits the auteur in me: as the sole honoree of that ceremony, I shall choose what music (and what readings) I jolly well like. I incline to the melancholy yet uplifting: music designed to induce a grave contemplation of my good taste, spiritual heroism and sensitivity. I’d like to pretend that I’m the sort of person who wants their funeral to be “a celebration of life”, but really I want people crying awfully hard.”
Sam Leith here.
“They said I couldn’t shoot him til he was inside the house, so I waited til he got in the door and then I shot him.”
Sarah McKinley, after killing Justin Martin, a burglar, with the permission of the emergency services.
Can’t give you a link to the story because it’s in the Times (paywalled). There’s a nice coda: Martin’s alleged accomplice, Dustin Stewart, 29, has been charged with murder because police say Martin’s death was caused by their attempt to carry out the burglary.
