Death in Life


caroljane

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It is hideously ironic that a high-profile Dutchman should symbolize the tragic dilemma of brain death and the ethics of euthanasia. Johan Friso, avalanched while skiing, deprived of oxygen for nearly half an hour, resuscitated for nearly an hour, lies now in hospital in London. His mother, Queen Beatrix, is at his side now but goes back to work on Monday, as must lesser folk to whom this happens. It has been said that he was her favourite son, her blue-eyed boy. Certainly he was the most intellectually able and independent of her children.

I suppose it was photos of Beatrix and Friso's wife together since the accident, that prompted me to write this. They slammed me back to my husband's funeral, where my mother held my hand so tightly throughout, so strongly that I could not fall. Our hearts had broken together when my father died, and she had shown me how to live beyond that central love, a knowledge I of course believed I would never need. To see Beatrix and Mabel, so privileged and supported yet so alone together, their hands entwined, touched me very strongly. And yet they will live with sombre hope and deep despair, where the son and husband has vanished and may never return in any form, for who knows how long?

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What a shame. When I die I want no service or funeral. I hate the custom. I don’t want anybody looking at me after I am dead. It drags a family through an ordeal too. Now a New Orleans’s style party would be OK. At a hotel with rooms rented so revelers can have a drink or two and not need to drive, all paid for by me. Or would that be over my dead body? Yeah. No sadness allowed.

Peter Taylor

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What a shame. When I die I want no service or funeral. I hate the custom. I don’t want anybody looking at me after I am dead. It drags a family through an ordeal too. Now a New Orleans’s style party would be OK. At a hotel with rooms rented so revelers can have a drink or two and not need to drive, all paid for by me. Or would that be over my dead body? Yeah. No sadness allowed.

Peter Taylor

What a shame. When I die I want no service or funeral. I hate the custom. I don’t want anybody looking at me after I am dead. It drags a family through an ordeal too. Now a New Orleans’s style party would be OK. At a hotel with rooms rented so revelers can have a drink or two and not need to drive, all paid for by me. Or would that be over my dead body? Yeah. No sadness allowed.

Peter Taylor

"Just stand me in the alley with my hat on" ?

-Lou Grant

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Hunter S Thompson

Given the way he lived his life it was only natural that the wild man of American journalism should have plotted a fiendishly weird funeral - this is, after all, a man who hung out with Richard Nixon while high on acid.

Hunter didn't disappoint: his loyal friend Johnny Depp followed his funeral wishes to the letter and constructed a 150ft high canon shaped like a two-thumbed fist clutching a peyote button. At the end of the ceremony Hunter's ashes were blasted out of the cannon while his close friends saluted his life with an arsenal of fireworks and Kentucky bourbon.

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Adam wrote:

At the end of the ceremony Hunter's ashes were blasted out of the cannon while his close friends saluted his life with an arsenal of fireworks and Kentucky bourbon

end quote

They ate the fireworks? Or they burned the Bourbon? That ain’t right, either way. Get-er-done. I never liked Hunter because I am leery of the Bikers he hung out with who wore German pith helmets. What criminal dummies. Cars are safer and you can drive in the rain without getting yourself or your dope soaked.

Peter

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