29 April 2010 – The Good Funeral Guide

Blessed are the wicked

We all acknowledge the link between sex and death – but what is it that links crime with death? A really good gangster funeral is a sight to see. These guys do not go incognito into that good night. Having shunned any sort of limelight all their lives, this is when they step out from the shadows.

Power talks. As does popularity. Most societies cherish their Krays and Capones.

Here’s a corker from Taiwan:

Gangster Lee Chao-hsiung died last month of liver cancer at the age of 73. He was accorded a 108-car procession and 2,000 chanting Buddhist monks and nuns. Twenty thousand spectators lined the route for a mile. A leading light of the Bamboo Union, Taiwan’s largest gang, brought 500 mobsters with him. The leader of the Heavenly Way mob brought another 500. The head of the Four Seas brought 300, and there were delegations from Japan’s yakuza and the Hong Kong and Macau triads.

The funeral was organised by the Speaker of Taiwan’s legislature.

Full account here.

Any thoughts?

Tidying up our dead

Very nice piece in the Washington Post by Tracy Grant:

Closets are odd creatures … In starter homes, newlywed husbands tease their brides that all their clothes will never fit in that closet. When the homebuyers are upscale, the closets can boast more square footage than some Manhattan apartments.

But talk to any adult child who has packed up a parent’s closet after a move to an assisted living facility or a death, and you know why these small, painfully intimate spaces are the stuff of metaphor. Closets, like our lives, can be messy.

For almost exactly three years after my husband died, I left our closet untouched. There were a host of easy rationalizations. I didn’t need the space. His clothes weren’t bothering me; why should they bother anyone else? There were also loftier justifications. The week after he died, a dear friend offered to come over and help me go through the closet. It seemed as ludicrous to me as when the funeral director suggested that he take Bill’s glasses and donate them to the Lion’s Club. “But he needs his things,” I wanted to scream.

I would come to refer to this as my Joan Didion moment. As she recounts in her memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking,” she refused to give husband John Gregory Dunne’s loafers away because if he came back, he would need his shoes.

Read the rest of it here.

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