Death Customs

From a 1963 article by Jessica Mitford on how funeral homes rip you off: 

Foreigners are astonished to learn that almost all Americans are embalmed and publicly displayed after death. The practice is unheard of outside the United States and Canada. As Alfred Fellows, an English jurist, wrote in The Law of Burial, "A public exhibition of an embalmed body, as that of Lenin in Moscow, would pre sumably be dealt with as a revolting spectacle and therefore a public nuisance."

Just part of the Dish's recent death obsession: couch coffins, dead Victorian children, suicidal madams, the Clinton campaign, etc. No apologies here: blogs are like conversations. Free association rules.