It's a Dead Man's Party: Bring Your Body In the Door

Occasionally, the unsavory idea of embalming can become quite appealing.

    (6/23/2014) Wow, could grief get any more decorative? The latest trend in good-times funerals is to get the corpse all gussied up and displayed in a realistic and relevant tableaux, as if he or she were right there having a blast, along with everyone else. The photos below are courtesy of the New York Times, from its article yesterday, "Rite of the Sitting Dead" (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/us/its-not-the-living-dead-just-a-funeral-with-flair.html?action=click&contentCollection=Media&module=MostEmailed&version=Full&region=Marginalia&src=me&pgtype=article).
    For more about the funeral-home industry's efforts to transform memorial services into multimedia bashes, with DJs, streamers and great food, read my earlier coverage (http://kronstantinople.blogspot.com/2011/05/for-memorial-day-its-dead-mans-party.html). This manipulative transformation of sadness and loss into rip-roaring festivity is chilling. It kills me!

A New Orleans woman's body is posed at her family's request, at a funeral in May 2014.

A young boxer who was shot to death is displayed at his Puerto Rico memorial service.