@beejaymay WOW. What a fabulous article. It’s going into my keeper file. As a parish pastor and former hospice chaplain, all I can say to that article is amen, amen, amen. I’ve had so many people tell me they didn’t want any kind of funeral or memorial service. Or, if they want one, they want it to called be a celebration of life and no one knows how to behave (…oughtn’t a celebration of life be a birthday party?). And over the years I have noticed that as North American (particularly U.S.) culture denies itself real communal rites and experiences around death and grieving, the more death imagery shows up in our pop culture: increasingly graphic Halloween “decorations,” skull images everywhere, cartoonish and glamorized violence in entertainment media.