Mourning glory
24 June 2002. No comments yet. Inspired by .
"Heaven and Earth has really put the fun in funerals"
Click on MORE... for a look at some unusual resting places
The only funeral parlour also to stock board games, this unusual Bristol-based emporium even sells coffins that double as bookcases until required. But where do you put the books afterwards? Maybe you bury them with you. And pity the poor gravediggers who have to deal with H+H's bespoke service.
Still, why not make use of the wood while you can? After all, the (bonkers) actress Sarah Bernhardt used to sleep in her coffin. For the photographers, anyway.
As the Egyptians knew all too well, your funeral can say a lot about you. You can be the imaginary Emperor of the USA (he "fired" Abraham Lincoln, you know) and then receive San Francisco's biggest ever funeral crowd, or have a quiet, pauper's service, no matter how famous you were.
Though it's probably good to be prepared for the inevitable (the Natural Death Centre offers a natty line in Last Aid manuals for those morbid boy scouts among you), in reality you have to just hope that your wishes are carried out.
"Not only is cremation good from the point of view of hygiene, but it also saves farmland," said 'Uncle' Ho Chi Minh, outlining the three hilltops that his ashes should be scattered upon. But the cadres disagreed, removing the section on cremation from his last wishes and sending him to Moscow to be embalmed, Lenin-style. Still open for the public, Uncle Ho looks very pale and very small up close, though local gossip says that imperfect embalming means that his nose keeps falling off. Now, of course, he's Vietnam's biggest tourist attraction. That is, when he's not in Moscow for 'cleaning', which happens for two months a year. Rather sad, really.
On a lighter note, sometimes relatives, like Gene Roddenberry's widow, get the style of the send off spot on.
Whatever the manner of your last farewell, you know that someone has lived a great life when, on the day of their funeral, a wreath arrives from a tiny bar the other side of the globe - because the recently deceased once taught them how to mix the perfect martini.
Lessons for us all, there. So what books would you want to be buried with?
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