“If I live ’til I’m 80, I fully intend to reacquaint myself with the world of opiate drugs. I think it’s ideal for the elderly. It should be there for the asking. If you’re over 70, you should be able to go and say, ‘Just give me some diamorphine and I won’t mither you any more.'”
“Increasingly, I have to deal with bereavement. I could go to five funerals a week. But that many vol au vents isn’t good for you.”
Punk poet John Cooper Clarke
One interesting fact I encounter is what constitutes a ‘religious funeral’. I have on a number of occasions met and prayed with distressed familes who have had humanist funerals because they thought that ‘non-religious’ meant C of E!
Comment in the Guardian here.
Gianni Agnelli’s funeral
As scion of the Fiat family, Gianni Agnelli was both a multi-millionaire and one of Italy’s most influential figures, and among the men least likely to accept being relegated to the sidelines. His best friend was Stavros Niarchos, the shipping tycoon known as “the Golden Greek”.
When he died in 1996, his grieving widow rang Agnelli, who insisted on seeing the body before it was buried. She took it as a sign of the men’s great friendship, but was taken aback when the Fiat magnate, faced with the corpse, took the cold hand in his and proceeded to take its pulse; he repeated the gesture with the other hand. Agnelli went on to press his fingers on Niarchos’s temple: he couldn’t accept his loss, the widow concluded. She was taken aback when Agnelli, instead, burst out: “This is crazy! Men like us don’t die!”
“Am I dying or is this my birthday?”
Lady Nancy Astor, d. 1964
When she woke briefly during her last illness and found all her family around her bedside.
“The absorbing fact about being mortally sick is that you spend a good deal of time preparing yourself to die with some modicum of stoicism (and provision for loved ones), while being simultaneously and highly interested in the business of survival.”
Christopher Hitchens
“People come to you and say ‘Do you mind if I ask you how old you are?’ And you say ‘no’. It’s as if they want to say ‘Will you show me your arse?’ It’s some weird idea that it’s shameful to be old, something that is sick and smells bad instead of a source of pride — that one is a receptacle of years and years of being in the world. Why should I be ashamed of it and why should you be coy about it?”
Dudley Sutton, actor
“It is hard to have patience with people who say… ‘Death doesn’t matter.’ There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever where to buy generic cialis forum happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter.”
CS Lewis
“I chose the start of the overture from The Mikado as the music for my Dad’s funeral…..it was that, or his other favourite, Doris Day, but my Mum pointed out that everyone would think we were outing him, so G&S it was…” Source
“I think it is a great shame because the cross was etched into the glass when it was first built and what was special about it was that if you looked at it, it gave the effect of being on a hill in the distance.
“We have people of all different beliefs using the crem and no one has ever objected to the cross being there. We are a Christian society and if we went abroad we would expect to honour the beliefs of that country.”
Councillor Colin Barrett (Con) on the removal of the cross from Haycombe crematorium, Bath. [Source]
