Whatever it is, I Don't Like it by Howard Jacobson

bestowed – and I take this to be the logic of the epitaph – you became ‘A Man Greatly Beloved’. Not honoured, lettered, knighted, prize-laden, best-selling and all the rest of it, just greatly beloved. We don’t even need to be told by whom. By humanity, naturally.
    Best gig in Edinburgh – Archibald McGlashan, Dean Cemetery, any time you’re free, dead in the earth.

All at Sea
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    Today I buried my father-in-law at sea. Buried is probably not the word for it. There was no body. What we did was cast his ashes to the four winds.
    I’ve never seen a person’s ashes before. I suppose I’d unthinkingly assumed that ‘ashes’ was only a way of speaking, that what we burn down to is some sort of odoriferous powder, finer and sweeter perfumed than talcum, and somehow still animated by soul. But we don’t. We make the same sort of ash as a bonfire makes. Grey and grainy and unspiritual. Plenty of it, too. A whole plastic flaskful, which can take a fair bit of shaking out. Especially if your hands aren’t steady.
    I don’t fancy being burned myself. I’m too worried about the possibility of a mistake. Imagine lying inside that highly flammable wooden lozenge and listening to it crackle while you’re still alive, still able to hear the congregation singing ‘Jerusalem’. Imagine the condition of your mind. Illogical, I know, given that you can be buried alive just as easily. But then I’ve never fancied the soil option either. Earth, water, air, fire – let those who are happy to live in the elements, die in the elements. I’m not. I keep hoping I can hold out long enough for someone to discover some new and more suitable medium for my expiry. Something less natural. Evaporation through abstruse sentence, say. Interment in metaphor.
    Scatter me in words, O my beloved.
    My father-in-law was lucky in that the elements spoke directly to him. He was a gardener, a garlic grower, a pisser on to the roots of lemon trees, a maker of barbecues and fires, and a waterman – that’s to say he swam, fished, sailed, and therefore understood and loved the capriciousness of the wind. What a bore he could be on each and all of those subjects! When he expatiated on boats to me, I thought I was dead already. He showed me nautical charts. He talked knots to me. Tides. Reefs. Rips. Sandbars. Fathoms. Channels. Fish. Masts. Sails. The lives of Dutch navigators, for Christ’s sake! He clogged my brain with seaweed. He picked my bones clean with maritime minutiae.
    But at least he knew how he wanted to be disposed of. Burned to soulless ash and scattered on to the waters of the Indian Ocean off Rottnest, the paradisal people’s isle a half nautical hour from the port of Fremantle. And let the winds and tides and fish and fathoms do as they wished with him.
    So that was where we repaired to do his bidding – his widow, his daughter, his old fishing and camping friend Eric the ferryman, Eric’s wife Dot, and me. There is always farce associated with the disposal of ashes: so of course we left him on the boat and had to run back for him, and of course we weren’t able to open the plastic canister that contained him until his daughter found a way of breaking into it with a car key, and of course the wind blew half of him back into our faces. Life is three-quarters farce; it is only fitting that death should be the same.
    â€˜There is a willow grows aslant a brook . . .’ Nothing to do with Rottnest but it’s a great line when you’re thinking about watery graves. There is, though, a wooden jetty which gives out into Thomson Bay and we sat on the end of that like urchins looking for jellyfish and watched the water discolour with our husband and friend and father. We threw flowers after him – camellias from Dot’s garden, and wild flowers, white and green and yellow everlastings, which his