Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
I just finished this book, and it was pretty good. So they had a service and it was good. When Lick died he had said he didn't want a service, but by then he was dead. The service is really for the survivors. Sorry for your loss. You should have a service! When my mother died, it took months for my step-father to face doing one, but it was still so much better than not having one would have been. |
I want a party. Open bar, good tunes, casual attire.
Nothing is a greater waste of time than a maudlin funeral. Somebody's already dead. Having the assembled act like they are too serves very little purpose.
Richard Dawkins has my proxy:
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
That has always struck me as a perfect refutation of the necessity of religion, and of dour ceremonies ushering the deceased into Charon's Boat. We're all damned fortunate to have been here at all. Get over yourselves.
It's also an excellent argument against the work-to-consume hamster wheel of American culture.
