No matter how great a man is, the size of his funeral usually depends on the weather.
When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.
Grief is fantastical, and loves the dead, And the apparel of the grave.
I serve dinner in three phases: serve the food, clear the table, bury the dead.
Eerily, the coronation was kind of a reverse of Tatianaʹs funeral. What was the old saying? The queen is dead. Long live the queen
A good funeral gets the dead where they need to go and the living where they need to be.
Mr. Bernard died on a Monday, at the age of seventy-five, his body wasted. He lay in state for two days in the lobby of the Bernard Gursky Tower and, as he failed to rise on the third, he was duly buried.
We simply rob ourselves when we make presents to the dead.
I think it makes small difference to the dead, if they are buried in the tokens of luxury. All that is an empty glorification left for those who live.
A solemn funeral is inconceivable to the Chinese mind.
No Church-yard is so handsom, that a man would desire straight to bee buried there. [No churchyard is so handsome that a man would desire straight to be buried there.]
To waste! You are unknown and unwanted, save by me. This, because you are fairly adept at the various embalming arts and you occasionally compose a clever epitaph.
What we say of a thing that has just come in fashion And that which we do with the dead, Is the name of the honestest man in the nation: What more of a man can be said?
When you attend a funeral, It is sad to think that sooner o' Later those you love will do the same for you. And you may have thought it tragic, Not to mention other adjec- Tives, to think of all the weeping they will do. (But don't you worry.
Chilo advised, "not to speak evil of the dead."
Funerals are all abstract ceremony.
Death is the least civilized rite of passage.
Among Negroes it is a bad omen when someone knocks on the door of a house where a person has died.
Ritual disposal of the dead speaks clearly of an awareness of death, and thus an awareness of self.
There are about as many ways to be dead as there are to be alive. People linger in different ways, both publicly and privately.
A society that doesn't know any longer how to observe every death with proper rituals, that does not know that death is not the end, but only part of the journey, has lost its way, has had the very heart of its humanity torn out.
I've always been fascinated by dark subjects, especially people's reactions to them. Why are people so uncomfortable talking about death if everyone dies?
There must be some unwritten law that says about fifty people have to move into your house when somebody dies. If it weren't for the smell of death clinging to the walls, you might think it was your family's turn to host the month neighborhood potluck supper.
In order to know a community, one must observe the styles of its funerals and know what manner of men they bury with most ceremony.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
The grave is a crucible where memory is purified; we only remember a dead friend by those qualities which make him regretted.
