Sublime

eternity box: a coffin. furniture: a collective noun for coffins. Coffins were once made by craftsmen who worked in wood and also made other items of furniture. meat wagon: an ambulance or a hearse.

For the biggest savings on funeral expenses, consider “direct cremation” (i.e., cremation without embalming or a casket, and with no formal viewing or ceremony with the body present—a memorial service can always be held later, with the ashes present).

Today things look very different, and the undertaker can draw on a lexicon as softly focused as any estate agent’s. As one wryly told me: ‘We deodorize death to within an inch of its life.’ No longer does someone die and be laid out in a coffin, or taken to a cemetery and cremated: instead they pass away or depart, are placed in a burial container,

Each cremated body results in 400 kilograms of CO2 emissions – about the same as burning two tanks of diesel in an SUV. Toxic mercury vapour from tooth fillings also escapes into the atmosphere from the chimneys of crematoria.