"DYING A PLEASURE.”

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20283, 16 December 1927, Page 20

"DYING A PLEASURE.”

The avowed purpose of American under, takers, who are now holding a convention at Chicago, is to make funerals so bright that dying will be a pleasure, and from descriptions of the methods now in vogue it would seem that they have almost succeeded (says the New York correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph). The delegates style themselves “ progressive, funeral directors,” and always speak of coffins as ‘‘ caskets.” The old wedgeshaped black coffin, the symbol of grim death, has been completely abandoned, and the latest caskets on exhibition at the con. vontion are in pastel shades, or tinted with the hues of the rainbow. Tho shades in stylo at the moment are orchid, ashes of roses, violet, Egyptian green, deep-sea blue, and imperial purple. These new art caskets, it was explained, express modernday ideas concerning death, help to lighten the grief of the living, and rob the grave of its inevitable gruesomoness. It is not good form to parade grief by wearing mourning, it was said, and the blackplumed hearse and all the lugubrious trappings of woe have been discarded. “ Rainbow ” caskets, like tho rainbow in tho sky, arc symbols of hope.