"Gregory Morrow" >
wrote in
ink.net:

> Funerals and the whole culture around them are extremely
> morbid. I will NEVER attend another funeral (and that
> includes a parental unit)...
>
> Everyone should be cremated, no idiotic preacher service,
> no laying out the deceased like a piece of meat on a slab,
> no wakes, no visitation, no awfulness of burying someone to
> rot in the ground, no crappy and insensitive "dead
> spread". This stuff is not only disrespectful to the
> memory of the deceased, it's disprespectful to put the
> survivors through all this crappy contrived drama.

you know, i was getting all set to disagree, but... i don't.
i think the funeral director society has far too much clout in
deciding how these things will be run & how much they're going
to make off the bereaved.
however, the wake & dead spread and any subsequent party is
all the bereaved family's thing. it's not disrespectful of the
dead. it's celebrating the deceased's life & is the thing that
brings togeather the living. i've never been to a wake that
was 'full of contrived drama', even the wakes for kids that
died.
>
> If someone wants to hold some kind of remembrance service
> or party, that's fine with me, but NONE of this funeral
> "business"...

ok, but a wake, a real wake, isn't visiting hours at the dead
parlor...
>
> In fact several folks I know who've recently passed on
> didn't even want any kind of party or service or whatever,
> they just wanted their loved ones to remember them as they
> had been in life. That's fine with me...

that is as it should be (unless they were real prunes in
life...)

> If you really want to be put off by the whole funeral
> schtick read _Wisconsin Death Trip_, if you are wavering on
> the subject this will absolutely convince you of the utter
> ghoulishness of the standard American death rites.

i dunno about ghoulishness. we aren't as bad as the
Victorians when it comes to that! they had so odd ideas!
lee



--
Question with boldness even the existence of god; because if
there be
one, he must more approve the homage of reason than that of
blindfolded
fear. - Thomas Jefferson