Speaking ill of the dead...

“Death creates a prejudice in favour of the deceased ... I should like to find someone who knew Elizabeth Barnard and who does not know that she is dead! Then, perhaps, I should hear what is useful to me - the truth.”

Hercule Poirot - The ABC Murders

They say that you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. I don’t know why. If you were a shit whilst you were alive then just being dead isn’t going to change that. Or do the dead have a special pass, a kind of ‘Get out of truth’ free card?

Of course this speaking ill of the dead thing isn’t about respect at all. It’s superstition. A hangover from times when people believed the deceased would come back to get you if you said a bad thing about them. Well, I haven’t seen Jimmy Saville’s ghost to date, or Mr. Hitler’s (whoops, there I go mentioning him again). What was said at Dr. Shipman’s funeral I wonder? Maybe they said that he was "a committed doctor, one of the very few who still made house calls."

It seems that regardless of how disliked or embarrassing somebody has been in life, no matter what outrages they caused, or what crimes they committed, the minute they shuffle off, popping their clogs on their way to the great beyond, a rosy-tinted nostalgia filter falls into place causing the deceased to be remembered as being better than they really were. For a lot of people, the reason for this is that the dead person isn’t there to defend themselves. Others might feel that it’s best to let the past be past and remember only good things - “Um... Yes, he really liked digging.”

Of course, if you stand to get a lot of money when Uncle Harley passes it’s probably a good idea to mumble nice things about the dearly departed at the funeral. Besides, there might be some anti-negative comment clause written into the will. Well… Uncle Harley was like that – nasty, abusive, mistrusting, penny-pinching, vindictive, cheat of a liar that he was.

Why say that a person had strong convictions when you really mean that they were an argumentative, arrogant, bigot? Should you really describe somebody as having interesting ideas when they were actually as crazy as a loon? Does death wipe away all your personality flaws, covering them with an artificial gloss like an undertaker painting a corpse’s face to hide the decay? Of course most people have many good things to be said about them, so many that it would hardly be worth mentioning that they poisoned cats when they came into their garden.

I hope at my funeral that there’s somebody there who tells the truth about me, and doesn’t wrap me up in a few sugary-coated observations. I say hope, because I don’t think that there will be many there who really know me. In fact I don’t think that there will be many there at all. Perhaps I’ll record my own eulogy and have it played through the sound system.