Theme
3:34am
August 19, 2014
➸ Anonymous funeral director explains the big con behind the industry, coffins, and embalming
“…See my co-workers standing around looking somber and respectful? They’re not there to just have a presence of authority, they are studying you. They are watching the family dynamic and will report back to me with any potential angles I can play to manipulate your emotions, which family members are taking it the hardest and will therefore be the easiest prey, and their estimation of your financial well-being. If, by the way, you appear to be less affluent, I’ll tell you to take your business elsewhere. This is not a hospital and I don’t provide a service – this is a business. If you aren’t paying me (in full and up front, generally), all you’re getting is my sympathy.”
(Full disclosure: I found out about this stuff years ago and instantly became intent on never allowing my body to become part of this kind of grief theater. My body is going to medical science [there are never enough cadavers for medical students to work on]. Putative funeral money will instead be spent on a wake with good catering.)
224 notes
6:06am
July 6, 2014
A trick a friend taught me for evaluating how serious your suicidal feelings are.
Obvious content warning for suicide.
She told me that when you’re at your most suicidal, you can’t generally imagine very far in the future.
So when we talked about my suicidal thoughts, she would always ask me, “Can you picture the funeral?”
If I couldn’t picture the funeral at all, we knew things were much more serious than usual, and we would plan around that. Mostly, I had a small group of friends willing to keep me on suicide watch. I was unable to use the psych system for very good reasons, and I was lucky to have an amazing, if small, support system outside the system. That support system also helped me come out the other side and not be depressed anymore, which was some of the hardest work I’ve ever done, and was not a bootstraps kind of thing, it more resembled cognitive-behavioral therapy but without a formal system or a therapist.
Anyway, you might want to try this as a rule of thumb when you struggle with suicidal thoughts. I guess first you’d want to make sure that at your least suicidal, you can at least vaguely picture the funeral. That way you know that if you can’t, it probably is the suicidal thoughts keeping you from doing so. Or rather, the time fog that accompanies suicidal thoughts. Because suicidal thoughts often come with being unable to see the future, unable to see a way out. And not being able to imagine your own funeral becomes a big warning sign that your suicidal thoughts may be out of hand.
Of course, some people are going to be stuck in that mode for a really long time, so that it’s normal for them not to be able to picture the funeral. For other people, not being able to picture the funeral will be a temporary state. Either way, it’s a warning sign. How you act on that warning is so individual I’m not going to give any advice on how you manage it. Any advice I give could be dramatically horrible if the wrong person took it. So all I’m going to say is that the less you can picture the future, the worse things probably are.
6:33am
May 13, 2014
“Strange tradition from the forgotten rural years.” Bees attend keeper’s funeral, 1956.
always reblog bees
important bee news