18 August

I remember Saul Bellow, the great novelist, making a similar point to this undertaker. That 'celebration' has always felt a bit fake to me, like we don't want to face the reality of death. And actually, I think if we did, we'd be much less scared of it than we tend to be. "...the funeral has become instead a ‘celebration of life’. It has a guest list open to everyone except the actual corpse, which is often dismissed, disappeared without rubric or witness, buried or burned, out of sight, out of mind, by paid functionaries such as me — the undertaker."