There are those who do not make ends meet and there are those who have so much money that they spend it on yachts, private planes, three-star Michelin restaurants, prostitution, drugs… And there are also those who spend a small fortune on sleep the eternal sleep next to Karl Marx, supposedly because they are his fans, although there is no sociological study on the matter. There are people for everything, even those who have the crest of their favorite football team inscribed on their tombstone.
The truth is that the Victorian Highgate Cemetery in north-west London is promoting new graves (and niches for urns with ashes) as if they were luxury flats, with the hook of being next-door neighbors to Marx for centuries upon centuries, and to have as one says on the same scale (that is, within the same cemetery) the composer Oleg Prokofiev, the singer George Michael, the poet George Eliot (stage name of Mary Ann Evans), and the woman and in-laws of Charles Dickens, who preferred Westminster Abbey. Although, come to think of it, no one lit a candle for him at that funeral…
The graves next to Marx are sold for thirty thousand euros, and the niches, for six thousand, which is five times more than they cost in other London cemeteries such as Kensal Green, Merton or East Finchley, and ten or twelve times more that in a town (especially knowing the priest) or a city in the interior of the country. But total, the buyer cannot enjoy the pasta that is left at his last destination. And it’s up to him, if he’s excited to spend eternity next to his idol, and that incidentally, with a little luck, help him fall asleep by reading passages from Das Kapital, and if possible the fragments in which he analyzes the role of capitalist speculation in the value of land. It must be like your favorite player giving you a signed shirt.
The problem is that resting next to Karl Marx is as relative as resting in the flats in Barcelona overlooking Enric Granados, in the Gothic Quarter or other places with discos and bars open until very late. And not because of noise or light pollution, but because the German philosopher now has as many or more detractors than fans, and he takes some of them to plaster his grave with graffiti (it needs to be cleaned periodically), and with generally unfriendly inscriptions. The ones that have just been deleted read platitudes such as “architect of genocide” or “creator of the ideology of dying of hunger”.
If one’s survival consists in the number of people who remember him, one might actually speculate that friend Karl is as fresh as a rose one hundred and forty-one years after his death. But since not everyone can boast (for better or worse) of leaving a mark like theirs, more and more street Brits are celebrating their funerals while they’re still alive, making sure to listen live and live to good things friends, family and co-workers say about them.
These kinds of ceremonies, which began in Japan under the name seizenso to take pressure off the relatives of the deceased when the death takes place (thus the funeral is already done), are carried out by event organization companies such as A beautiful goodbye (“a beautiful goodbye”, not to be confused with The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler’s detective novel), which charge as if it were a wedding or a baptism, depending on the number of guests , the food that is served and the peripheral activities of the meeting, apart from the central act of flattering the living, telling anecdotes and saying how wonderful he is and how he will be missed when the time comes. Some do their funeral in life by having a picnic or at an amusement park, riding the roller coaster and throwing themselves down the slides. Others ask to be put in a coffin and left there for a few minutes or a few hours, to get used to the idea. And then a jacuzzi.
Because this is the other one. In general, the protagonists are people with terminal illnesses who wish to celebrate their existence, since they will not even realize what happens next, and funeral homes are like an assembly line, one goes out and another comes in. But there have been funerals in the lives of people who have been healed, or who do it as a bachelor party or a second wedding fifty years after the first, to have a party. Not everyone is a real communist or socialist, and besides, the experience is cheaper than buying a tomb or a niche next to Marx.
