Now streaming on:
When I was an altar boy, assisting at Requiem High Mass and planning how to spend my 50-cent tip at the day-old pastry shop, funerals were sad affairs, with weeping and collapses and all that Latin. The only speaker was the priest, whose sermon reassured us that the Heavenly Father was reserving a space even now in the name of the Faithful Departed.
These days a lot of funerals have become vaudevillian, with readings, fond stories, laughter, favorite golden oldies and everybody smiling about dear old dad, or whoever. If they don't send us off gently into that good night, neither do they rage, rage against the dying of the light (copyright Dylan Thomas, who raged plenty).