It’s rather ironic that we can’t go to the one function that we’d kill for: our own funeral.
But what’s really interesting are the answers you receive when bringing up the subject – yes, Your Honour, I did that recently – guilty as charged.
And the first response was from one of the wits sitting nearby: how do you know you can’t attend your own funeral?
Which I must admit knocked me over at first, but when you think about it, it’s possible we could be capable of attending our own funeral but we just can’t confirm it; not while we’re alive anyway.
It would be rather disappointing to find out that when we’re gone we’re just gone and forget about attending your own funeral or anyone else’s for that matter.
I mean look at our very famous ghost, Fred Fisher, who legends has it was very dead but managed to pick himself up and to park his backside on a wooden fence long enough for a local drunk to spot him and report the whole incident.
It doesn’t prove anything one way or another, but that such an out of body experience is capable of occurring is something for those who believe in these things.
Personally I am more fascinated by the numerous euphemisms we employ for death.
It’s as if using a euphemism will lessen the pain of loss and grief.
Here are our Top 5 euphemisms for you know what:
Number 1. Kick the bucket. I would love to meet whoever came up with that one. And its first cousin, the “bucket list’’.
Number 2. Passed away is apparently the most popular euphemism.
Number 3. Departed. Not so popular, and no wonder; departed from which airport, etc.
Number 4: The Big Sleep, immortalized in the hard boiled crime thriller of that name by Raymond Chandler.
Number 5. My personal favourite: shuffle off the mortal coil, from Hamlet’s To be or not to be speech:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
