大象传媒

Joy, and her sisters Jill and Pug, devote much of their time to planning where they'll be buried, and, more importantly, what to wear at their own funerals ...

As a Health visitor, and a trained nurse, Joy is no stranger to death. However, picking out a burial plot and finding the perfect outfit in which to be buried, may seem strange a preoccupation to some. Joy explains how it started, "My father thought a good day out with his children was a trip to Winston Churchill's grave to eat our sandwiches ...." Death became a reality when the husband of Joy's sister, Jill, died when he was very young. When the bill arrived from the undertakers, the three sisters noticed a charge for the shroud. Joy recalls, "We discussed this, and thought he probably would have liked to have been buried in his suit - that's when we decided that we ought to be sorting out what we want to be buried in..."

Joy has even had a dress rehearsal, "I want to look a little bit bizarre - so as a leaving present my work colleagues bought my burial outfit - from Oxfam! It's awful! A crushed velvet black skirt which comes to the knee, then yards of black netting with a huge rose in the middle, and a black and white cardigan with a silver strip going through it. I've tried it on, and laid on the office floor - I look quite stunning!" To Joy's disappointment, her sisters have chosen less splendid outfits, "Jill is planning to wear her dog-walking jumper with her wellingtons, and Pug wants to be buried in a Moses basket with her feet in warm socks..."

On a more serious level, Joy acknowledges that talking about their own burial plots and burial clothes helps take away the natural fear of death. "We spend a lot of time in graveyards, we eat fish and chips there. If you look at the grave stones, all these people had problems and heartaches. It puts everything into perspective for us... "

How do you deal with thoughts which make you scared or nervous?
Are you able to talk about your fears to your family and friends?
How do they react?

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