There are those who cannot make ends meet and there are those who have so much money that they spend it on yachts, private planes, three Michelin star meals, prostitution, drugs… And there are also those who spend a small fortune on sleeping 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 shield of their favorite football team inscribed on their tombstone.
The truth is that the Victorian cemetery of Highgate, in northwest London, promotes new tombs (and niches for urns with ashes) as if they were luxury flats, with the hook of being door-to-door neighbors of Marx for the centuries of centuries, and having, as it were, on the same staircase (that is, within the same cemetery) the composer Oleg Prokofiev, the singer George Michael, the poetess George Eliot (stage name of Mary Ann Evans), and the woman and in-laws of Charles Dickens, who preferred Westminster Abbey. Although on second thought, no one gave him a candle at that funeral…
The graves next to Marx sell for thirty thousand euros, and the niches for six thousand, which is five times more than what they cost in other London cemeteries such as Kensal Green, Merton or East Finchley, and ten or twelve times more than in a town (especially knowing the priest) or an inland city. But overall, the buyer will not be able to enjoy the money left at his last destination. And there he, if he is excited to spend eternity with his idol, and in the process, with a little luck, helps him fall asleep by reading passages from Das Kapital, and if possible, the fragments in which he analyzes the role of capitalist speculation in land value. It must be like your favorite player giving you a signed jersey.
The problem is that resting next to Karl Marx is as relative as resting in the apartments in Barcelona that overlook Enric Granados, the Barri Gòtic or other places with clubs and bars open until very late. And not because of a question of noise or light pollution, but because at this point the German philosopher has as many or more detractors than fans, and some like to deface his grave with graffiti (it must be cleaned periodically), and generally inscriptions little friendly The ones that have just been deleted said nice things like “architect of the genocide” or “creator of the ideology of dying of hunger.”
If one’s survival consists of how many people remember him, one could actually speculate that friend Karl is alive and well one hundred and forty-one years after his death. But since not everyone can boast of leaving (for better or worse) a mark like theirs, more and more British people are celebrating their funerals while they are alive, and thus ensure that they hear things live and direct. good things that friends, family and co-workers say about them.
These types of ceremonies, which began in Japan under the name seizenso to take pressure off the relatives of the deceased when death occurs (thus the funeral is already done), are carried out by event organization companies such as A beautiful goodbye (“a nice goodbye”, not to be confused with The Long Goodbye, the detective novel by Raymond Chandler), which charge as if it were a wedding or a baptism, depending on the number of guests, the food served and the peripheral activities of the meeting, apart from the central act of flattering the person, telling anecdotes and saying how wonderful he is and how much he will be missed when the time comes. Some celebrate their funeral in life by having a picnic or at an amusement park, riding the roller coaster and going down the slides. Others ask to be put in a coffin and left there for a few minutes or hours, to get the idea. And then, a jacuzzi.
Because that’s another one. Generally the protagonists are people with terminal illnesses who want to celebrate their existence, since they will not even know what happens next, and funeral homes look like an assembly line, one leaves and another enters. But there have been funerals in the lifetime of people who have been cured, or who do it as a bachelor party or a second wedding fifty years after the first, by having a party. Not everyone is a true communist or socialist, and the experience is also cheaper than buying a tomb or a niche next to Marx.