Today's post is rather short, but we felt compelled to repeat part of a conversation overheard on the train. The conversation was between two people who appeared to be acquainted, but did not know each other well. After the conversation, only a small fraction of which is repeated here, everyone in the train knew these two passengers quite as well as they wanted to.
Passenger 1: We've had several pets over the years. We just lost our dear beagle, Bella, the love of our life.
Passenger 2 (sympathetically): I know. We currently have four pets in the house. None of them are living.
Here, I imagine, surrounding passengers paused to consider this, as did I. But Passenger 1 did not miss a beat.
Passenger 1: You do wonder what to do with them after they pass, don't you? And what about when you pass? I mean, I could will Bella's ashes to my brother and sister-in-law, but what if they pass away before we do?
The obvious solution, which Passenger 2 declined to suggest, would be to keep the brother, sister-in-law, AND Bella all in the house after their respective deceasements.*
The conversation continued in various similar veins, including an in-depth discussion of burial practices on an island in the Mediterranean whose name I did not catch. Because of the makeup of the soil, Passenger 1 explained, about every 50 years a buried body has completely decomposed, and, due to limited space -- this is an island, after all -- the space is used to bury another body. No marker is retained from the first individual. Passenger 1 evidently had traveled to the island to view her great-grandparents' graves, only to find the graves inhabited by someone whose decease was much more recent. This would seem to only strengthen my earlier assertion that keeping the deceased in one's home might be the prudent option.
*This is one of those words that is not an actual word, but probably should be.
2 comments:
If incentivize can be a word, then deceasements can too.
I totally agree.
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