Subject: No pontificating at the pearly gates

Cut price funeral’s are all the rage these days, in what has become an inhospitable cost conscious end to life. There was a time when only the more ostentatious the funeral was the more society felt you cared, the culmination being the, horse drawn carriage decked in flowers and tributes the sombre men padding around, the one in front measuring the journey with his staff. Today a phone call will do to engage a collection of the body, its transport to the crematorium and the deposit back of a simple box of ashes. What could be simpler, no interplay with the deceased than necessary, no mawkish hymns and obituaries, no long faces, no tears. Here today gone  tomorrow and only one moderate invoice to pay.
Will we seen as cheap skate towards we buried, will we not have invested enough glory in their memory, a poor return for all theirs if we were married to them. How will it look to others if we only assemble for tea and cake. As human beings  we trade on our appearance, we often run our lives on what others think of us and dread a poor report.
And yet we also know that once the coffin has been despatched so has the memory and current affairs resume as normal.
The cut price funeral. The green site burial. The civic non denominational burial. A burial at sea are all the smorgasbord options available today including a burial in the back garden which could nock a few bob off the house price.
Of course if I am nothing more than a Buddhist transient, a concept in the making waiting to be transformed into something very different from the form I now have will their be an audience in the next life to reflect on my parsimony.