grave
May 13, 2008
Image via WikipediaNot that I’m thinking of popping off anywhere anytime soon, but it would be hard to pass up an offer currently running at Antwerp’s Schoonselhof necropolis, last resting place of such luminaries as writers Hendrik Conscience, Gaston Burssens and Marnix Gijsen, composers Peter Benoit and Armand Preud’Homme, and artists Pol Mara and Vic Gentils.
The deal is, for a mere €800 you get a burial place for two people, to be used within the next 50 years. The one draw-back is that you have to move in, as it were, beside what we shall refer to as a previous occupant. In fact, it’s not even as ghoulish as that, since when your time comes, and you are gathered to your Maker, they’ll open up the plot, take out the bloke who’s in there and who can hardly be said to care by this time, and make a space for you.
It is, as graveyard guide Jacques Beurmans pointed out, a more democratic system than the one operating at the turn of the 19th-20th century when the graveyard was opened. Then, the biggest and the fanciest stones, the statuary and the cellars (a kind of marble lining for the hole, which will incidentally push the price up to € 1,600) were the preserve of the rich alone. Now, the price is the same for everyone, and they’ll stick you under someone else’s stone. In return, while awaiting the day when you cash in your chips, you get to keep the place looking trim and tidy, which is actually the secret plan behind the whole scheme.
If you’re a bit strapped for eight C-notes, I did discover that you can adopt a gravestone for a mere €7.50, which brings the privilege of keeping the monument clean and maintained until you die, when you can go and be buried somewhere else, cheapskate. That could also be an option for those of us who don’t intend to die within the next 50 years. Though frankly the way medical science is going, we’ll all have life expectancies of 250 years just at the moment the asteroid strikes, so you have to wonder if it’s all worth it. But I digress.
So much for being buried. If you’re going to be cremated, meanwhile, try not to fill the air with too many dioxins. That’s what happened at the Antwerp crematorium a week or so ago, when the dioxin levels were pushed up to three time their legal limit. The director said a filter had accidentally fallen out, but my question is: what do we need dioxin filters at crematoria for anyway? Well, it turns out the evil-sounding emissions are produced in many forms of combustion, like volcanoes and forest fires. When I tell you another major source is meat being grilled on a barbecue, I trust I need explain no further.
When I die, I hope it’s in summer, so that the crowds who were unable to be accommodated in the church don’t get cold and wet standing outside. Some people, on the other hand, want to go out of the world as they came into it: as a pain in the butt who keeps everyone waiting. That’s why a Dutch funeral entrepreneur is now offering the possibility of being taken to your last resting place – whether that’s a fancy second-hand grave or a nice warm barbecue – in a caravan. So you’ll be able to die as you lived: creating long lines of traffic behind you. The caravan in question, funeral director Dick Mijnhart said, only has room for the coffin. So, considerably more spacious than most caravans, then.
Finally, the city of Nola near Naples in Italy (where Caesar Augustus died and Giordano Bruno was born) is giving a free funeral with casket and hearse (though not those ostentatious wreaths of flowers formed into words associated with Italian funerals in Francis Ford Coppola movies) to deceased persons who have been organ donors. Sign up to hand over your kidneys, heart or cornea (and whatever other offal the science whizz-kids are transplanting these days) and the city administration will pick up the tab for your transport into the World Beyond. And none of your cheap one-previous-occupant rubbish, either.
