Out at dinner with my girlfriends last night, we spent an unusually large amount of time talking about death and funeral customs, burials, cremation, mourning, insurance policies.  It started with M, talking about her recent trip to Houston for her grandmother’s funeral. 

The phrase, “There wasn’t an open casket,” led us in.  J, who’s from China, said she’d never been to a funeral with an open casket because they always did cremation back home.  This led us to the book I’m reading now, Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, in which I have just read a scene that takes place at a crematorium.  It seems China and England have similar customs where they go and watch the loved ones enter the flames, while in the USA, we don’t really do that.  We send the body away, and it comes back as ashes in a box or a jar, all mysterious-like, where you wonder if they didn’t just empty a bunch of ash trays into a box and pass it off as your cousin Larry.

M threatened her mother with a bright pink coffin since she’s always hated the color.  Then D admitted that since she liked all things pink, she might like to have a Hello Kitty coffin as her final resting place.  And if the food hadn’t come, I might have talked about the touring exhibit of African coffins I saw many years ago at the Dallas Museum of Art, where they’d make a wooden sculpture that represented the dead man’s life and bury him in it.  An airplane for a pilot, a huge carrot for a farmer, you get the picture.  I’m just not sure why these things weren’t buried, unless they were still awaiting their owners’ demise.

See, this is a conversation I can appreciate.  One day, I’d like to visit the funeral service museum in the north side of Houston, which I read about in some Texas magazine the year after I saw the coffins on tour.  It seems they had the pleasure of hosting the same exhibit.  Call it a morbid fascination, call it research.

Anyway, as I lay down to bed last night, I opened my book and saw this phrase on the page — “the big D.”  Of course, Hornby’s not talking about Dallas, Texas. After all, he’s in London.  What he is talking about, is Death.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 7:12 pm and is filed under UK and Ireland, meanderings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.