Alas, poor Yorick! How surprised he would be to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor and is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged and neatly dressed - transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture.

It is somehow reassuring to discover that the word travel is derived from travail, denoting the pains of childbirth.

Enemies are, to me, as important as friends in my life, and when they die I mourn their passing.

the prison system, inherently unjust and inhumane, is the ultimate expression of injustice and inhumanity in the society at large.

Now there is a society where the funeral industry got completely out of control.

Gracious dying is a huge, macabre and expensive joke on the American public.

Funeralese has had its ups and downs. The word 'morticians,' first used in Embalmers Monthly for February, 1895, was barred by the Chicago Tribune in 1932, 'not for lack of sympathy with the ambition of undertakers to be well regarded, but because of it. If they haven't the sense to save themselves from their own lexicographers, we shall not be guilty of abetting them in their folly.