It’s your funeral
Arthur Black, Seaway NewsI could never bear to be buried with people to whom I had not been introduced.
Unfortunately, most of us don’t get to choose all of our next-door neighbours in the Great Hereafter, but we do have some say in how we present ourselves to them. Which is why I found myself window shopping for wicker baskets last week. Found a beauty in the House Furnishings section down at Home Hardware. Nice and deep, about three feet long and 30 inches wide, made of hand-woven willow. It’s on sale ’til the end of the month for only $19.95. I figured I could buy a pair of them, glue them together end to end, knock out the middle partitions and have myself a nifty little getaway pod (aka coffin), all for less than 50 bucks.
A little morbid, you think? Hardly. Forward thinking, I call it. There’s a cemetery not far from where I live and (currently) breathe that has already set aside a half acre of its premises to exclusively accommodate 284 ‘eco-graves’—plots in which the environmentally sensitive newly expired can pre-arrange to have themselves planted in ‘biodegradable caskets.’
Makes sense to me. I have never understood the peculiar penchant of my tribe for interring our departed in outrageous circus floats handcrafted of exotic woods, brushed silk and burnished brass, the sole function of which is to transport said remains from the funeral parlour to a hole in the ground, never to be seen again.
It is, perhaps, the ultimate in human folly. One last pathetic stab at immortality. Shakespeare recognized—and nailed the futility of it—more than four centuries ago:
Golden lads and girls all must
As chimneysweepers, turn to dust
As I say, the wickerware casket makes perfect sense to me. What makes less sense is the fact that (a) Canadian law prohibits me from whipping up my own casket, DIY-style, down in my basement; and (b) once I turn the project over to the professionals, I’m going to pay considerably more than the aforementioned half a C-note.
If, for instance, I engage the services of the Evergreen Casket Corporation, one of the world leaders in the biodegradable coffin game, I can expect to fork over a base price of $2,000 for a casket made of wicker (which, on their website at least, does not look a helluva lot more upscale than my fantasy Home Hardware jobbie).
Two thousand bucks? For a one-use-only takeout tote box made of dried grass? Such naked avarice would bring a blush of embarrassment to the cheeks of an oil company executive.
I could probably get myself a better deal if I lived in Europe. They ran out of cheap and vacant space for expired citizens centuries ago. Consequently, Europeans are much more open to cheap and efficient disposal options. Over there you can choose from a whole line of inexpensive caskets made of honeycombed recycled cardboard—even biodegradable urns. Hey, if I was lucky enough to kick off in India, I could have myself barbecued and pecked into the next world by vultures along the banks of the Ganges….
Yeah, well. Some options are just a little too cheap.
We’re still getting used to the idea of economical, environmentally friendly burials on this side of the water. “Eco-burial,” as its known, is a fledgling industry in Canada—and our next-door neighbours are just as behind the times. Population of the USA: 300 million. Number of natural burial grounds: 10.
There’s an old saying that the only things certain in life are death and taxes, but I’m not so sure about the first one. Even in death, you can’t always get what you want. I’m reminded of the story of poor old Ben Jonson, a dramatist contemporary of Shakespeare. Ben, who thought he had the ear of King Charles I, asked for “just a square foot” in Westminster Abbey for his burial plot. King Charles either didn’t like Ben much or else he had a wicked sense of humour. Visit Westminster Abbey and you can see Ben Jonson’s grave. His gravestone is exactly one foot square and the remains of Ben are indeed beneath it. The King had him buried standing up.