Before my friend Alex Wong wasted away from AIDS in 1994 he specified that all the flowers at his funeral must be white, so my partner and I made sure we had 34 long stemmed white roses delivered to the funeral home. They looked lovely, and were given pride of place at the head of his ghoulish open casket. When I visited him at Casey House a couple of weeks before he died, he opened a bedside drawer and showed me the scripts for both of the eulogies that were to be read at his funeral - and the wording of neither was changed on the day. He decreed the menu choices we were to select from at the fancy Chinese restaurant we went to after the funeral. My partner Ambrose was suitably dismissive of most of our fellow mourners as we drove off in convoy to the cemetery - "They're dressed for a fashion show, not for a funeral ..." - but as a pallbearer I was so upset by the whole thing I almost lost my footing and fell into the grave as we manoeuvred the casket across uneven ground in the chilly April air. "Dress like a man, cry like a lady ..." was Ambrose's later description of my behaviour. I must admit I made a lovely mourner - dark clip-ons over my prescription glasses, a sober dark suit, pale as death warmed over myself, and barely able to control my grief.
Should I feel the end is drawing near, l'll post the elaborate mourning requirements - dress code etc. - on my little Neighbourhood Watch ghetto thread.
