@Benji - That’s a really good point, and I agree with you. But then again, I’m the sort of person who needs a “script” for most of my everyday stuff also, and the internet is just a fountain of wisdom for that… On a vaguely related note, have you read Stiff by Mary Roach?

Or at least, it’s fears like that that allow wedding and funeral peddlers to rake in the cash.

There was a bill in the state legislature a few weeks ago about establishing a line of succession for dealing with remains. It was a long bill, and apparently the rep that wrote it owns a funeral home, so a good deal of it is devoted to protecting coroners and directors of funeral homes from liability if the kids are squabbling over whether to inter or cremate mom’s remains (meanwhile, the coroner is trying to figure out how to preserve her body long enough to see the legal battle through to its end). It also concerned what to do when nobody steps forward to take responsibility for the body, and the bleak isolation it conveyed was all the more depressing (and funny) for the fact that it’s written in the dry, repetitive language of law.

We had this eco funeral shop down the street from us in Brighton: http://www.ecopod.co.uk. The coffins seem look like flimsy papier mache up close, but I guess that’s the point.

I’m going to mail you the wedding equivialent of Mitford’s funeral book, if I can find it in our piles of moving boxes. The Wedding Complex, I think it’s called…

Read “The American Way of Death” by Jessica Mitford. It will make you very angry, but from the Slate article, it looks like things will be changing once our generation gets old.

Just remember: a wedding should not be the happiest day of your life, or the specialest thing EVAR. People who believe may be party to this current divorce landslide.