I’ve been getting constant calls from some company offering a great bargain on funerals and they’ve worn me down to the point where I’m tempted to hire a hit man to take me out so I can get one of their really great deals–and end the phone calls once and for all. However, seeing this opens whole new vistas for me as I would love to be floated out into the Sound in a huge glass tube and become a navigation hazard to a millionaire’s yacht. I bet I would be a fun toy for orca pods too. And if they manage to break the glass, I would be a tasty treat!
Now to convince my wife to join me in this madcap scheme! Summer 2026 is gonna be LIT!
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Thanks for the chuckle – and yet, also, the challenging reality of both the sales calls (minor annoyance) and the end of life decision making (more existential, pun intended). We buried my dear father-in-law over the winter and the truly eye-popping cost of a burial plot in a Catholic cemetery alongside the lavish casket (burnished wood, brass fittings, etc.) drive me to rant (again!) about the funerary industrial complex that extracts so much from bereaved families. One of our corporal works of mercy is to bury the dead – how did that have to become profit driven? And how did we decide that the best way to honor our loved ones is to prevent (or greatly delay) the reincorporation of their physical remains into the great God-created chain of being? I’ve often thought that it is one great test of our faith: if we truly believe in the resurrection of the body as we claim in the Creed, then is our God so small that God cannot reassemble us from scattered elements? Must God have my whole moldering frame to work with? The God I’ve come to know and love will have no problem twinkling me back together at some far future moment after my carbon and nitrogen have recycled a few hundred times through trees, fungi, earthworms, houseflies and maybe a bird or fish. The jaw-dropping sum spent on what is essentially a piece of fine furniture that we just bury in soil! Where are the spaces in the Church to have the conversations about how best to honor our loved ones that align with “an authentic anthropology” (Archbishop Coakley’s phrase discussing Magnifica Humanitas), that honors the dignity of the body but does not fetishize it or hermetically seal it off from the rest of creation (which strikes me as undignified)? I’ve already told my kids that an empty refrigerator box from behind the appliance store is just fine for me; the sooner the soil community can get to work on me, the better. I’ve taken a lot of carbon from the planet – I should return it promptly and with gratitude.
“Join past attendees”? Aren’t “past attendees” presumed to be, you know?