Sublime

Service Corporation International, the largest American funeral home and cemetery corporation, based in Houston, Texas, has even managed to trademark dignity. Go to any of their “Dignity Memorial®” facilities, and that pesky ® shows up every time, subtly letting you know they’ve cornered the market on postmortem poise.

Birth, death and grief

Jusque dans les années 1970, la mort était un thème tabou, et les ouvrages sur la mort ne rencontraient qu’une vente très limitée. La mort a été expulsée des domiciles : il y a cinquante ans, 80 % des décès survenaient à domicile ; en 2007, 80 % des décès ont eu lieu à l’hôpital.

she was no doubt worried she would go to hell if she didn’t show her respect for the dead.

is a not-so-well-kept funeral industry secret that the processes used to make someone appear natural are often highly unnatural.

Quetelet’s legacy was to make the average, what started as unremarkable by definition, into a paradoxical ideal. When the average is laden with cultural worth, everything changes: what was common began to be seen as what was “natural,” and what was “natural” came to be seen as right.

When I saw her with all her makeup off, I felt a little better. On the platform, I felt like I wasn’t even seeing my own sister. What a relief. I’d thought she was a walking skeleton, but she wasn’t half as skinny as I’d thought. She’d worn the wrong foundation, and way too much of it. No wonder she looked pale. Maybe she hadn’t really changed that

A modern, professional cremation will reduce an adult male to about seven or eight litres of ashes and bone material, and slightly less for an adult female. The Viking-Age cremations rarely contain more than a litre of remains. Nobody knows what this means. Did the funeral involve a partition of the ashes—some to the family or onlookers and mourner