Hopefully you're wearing gumboots!

@White

It's my opinion that our western culture deals very badly with death.

In the last fifteen years, a lot of people within my circle have died. That number includes all of my aunts and uncles and both parents . Also the parents of friends and several peers. .

I go to a funeral if I know and care about the family of the deceased. If not, not. Imo funerals are for the living. The dead are unaware by definition***. It's the living who need comfort and support.

People have asked me to view the corpse of the deceased. I have always declined. My reasons have stayed the same; I want to remember the person alive. I have no interest in the cadaver.

Me? I want to be scattered from a small plane flying low over government house in Canberra, while both houses are sitting. Don't want to be cremated though. Really? Of course not. I have a phobic fear of premature burial, so want to be burned to ash. Even though my funeral director sister in law once told me "If you aren't dead when we get you, you bloody well are when we're finished with you"

(((((((((((((((((((((9))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

*** The concept of 'the unconscious dead" has always been part of the Christian tradition. The teaching is that the dead will be resurrected to face judgement at the end of days. Until then they lie slowly disintegrating in the ground, or as ashes either buried or in an urn on the mantle.

Thus the dead person has not "passed away'. Nor is he or she in a better place, unless they were fucking miserable whilst alive.

My mother had a lovely funeral. That is because she left six pages of precise instructions and extra money for a wake.

Seems to me the Catholic habit of declaring a person a saint (IE In heaven with god) seems a smidge premature. Horse feathers in fact, after you get over the gobsmacking arrogance of presuming to know the whereabouts of an individual's soul. Especially when one considers some of the recent recipients of this honour. Such as that disgusting old hag Teresa of Calcutta and the arch revisionist , Karol Wojtyla. ( Pope john Paul 11 )

"Whilst the actions of those responsible to God will be remembered by Him (Mal. 3:16; Rev. 20:12; Heb. 6:10), there is nothing in the Bible to suggest that we have any consciousness during the death state. It is hard to argue with the following clear statements concerning this:

"(Man's) breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day (moment) his thoughts perish" (Ps. 146:4).

"The dead know not anything...their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished" (Ecc. 9:5,6). There is no "wisdom in the grave" (Ecc. 9:10) - no thinking and therefore no consciousness.

Job says that on death, he would be "as though he had not been" (Job 10:18); he saw death as the oblivion, unconscious-ness and total lack of existence which we had before we were born.

Man dies as the animals do (Ecc. 3:18); if man consciously survives death somewhere, so must they, yet both Scripture and science are silent about this.

God "remembereth that we are dust. As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth...it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more" (Ps. 103:14-16).

That death is truly unconsciousness, even for the righteous, is demonstrated by the repeated pleas of God's servants to allow their lives to be lengthened, because they knew that after death they would be unable to praise and glorify God, seeing that death was a state of unconsciousness. Hezekiah (Isa. 38:17-19) and David (Ps. 6:4,5; 30:9; 39:13; 115:17) are good examples of this. Death is repeatedly referred to as a sleep or rest, both for the righteous and the wicked (Job 3:11,13,17; Dan. 12:13)."

http://www.christadelphians.com/biblebasics/0404deathisunconsciousness.html