Just when you thought MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking sites had pretty much achieved world domination, along comes a site with even more infinite aspirations. Londoner Victoria Vanstone’s yourdeathwish.com wants to help you create the “perfect” funeral. Yes, in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee, you could be well on your way to arranging the funeral you’ve always dreamed of: choose the musical set list, the wake menu, the all-important venue, funerary fashions; write the eulogy yourself; upload pictures and videos of you at your liveliest; friend other funereally focused folks. What fun!
Although we applaud the forward-thinking sentiment behind it and admire Vanstone for targeting an industry that shows no signs of, um, dying, we’re sceptical about the melding of social networking and funeral planning tools. Tout the latter as “upbeat and fun” and you run the risk that it won’t be taken seriously. We’d hate for our family to be saddled with the request that Blue Oyster Cult’s ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’ be played at our graveside simply because, in a moment of snark, we created a DeathWish profile to amuse our mates and kill work time. And frankly, we already get friended by too many stiffs.
But for the record, we’d like Def Leppard’s Pour Some Sugar on Me played at the funeral’s outset. For inexplicable reasons, we were in life pathologically unable to refrain from dancing when hearing this song – this will ensure that we are, in fact, dead. In place of a eulogy, a performance of Monty Python’s dead parrot skit. And please bury us in the black knee-high boots we bought at Selfridges this season – we paid far too much not to get more use out of them.
Tacky, you say? The Final Judgement isn’t yours to make, friends.
Image of Banksy’s not-so-grim reaper courtesy of Compound Eye’s Flickr photostream
