Being dead is a huge inconvenience for everyone but the dead.
Family, both miles-away-people and close-ups under the roof,
experience a variety of griefs and unsettled grievances.
Verbs decay from active to passive,
tenses shift from present to past,
pronouns from you to he or she.
For the deceased, death is a luxury.
He or she is waited on hand and foot,
Which in this instance is not a metaphor for lavish care.
If hands and feet are to move,
someone else will have to move them.
Agency is over, absolute dependency begins.
Nothing is automatic in the carriage of a corpse.
Effort is no longer required or expected.
The obituary sums up life in just so many words.
We talk ‘about’ rather than ‘to’.
The euphemism ‘rest’ comes into play.
But in this case the rest is not eternal,
in this case, as they say, , the rest is history.