I’m putting it on record from the jump that I’m not a fan of viewings. I think they’re weird and unnatural, everyone hanging around a dead body in the middle of a musty old room. That said, I don’t know if I’m willing to go the route of this grieving husband who hung out with his dead wife’s body for six days.
Leasing agent Russell Davison’s wife, Wendy, died at their home in Derby, England, after a 10-year battle with cervical cancer.
He said he was determined to keep her at home with their four children and not hand her over to a funeral director.
Davison and I are on the same page here but then his story kind of takes a turn…
Russell said he washed and dressed Wendy’s body and placed it in a coffin — which he called a “cocoon” — in the couple’s bedroom.
And Russell insists it should be “the way we treat our dead,” saying it allowed him and the boys to come to terms with their devastating loss.
Whoa! Just…whoa. I don’t know if a young kid needs to be involved in all this madness. That’s enough to put him in therapy, or a bar, for the rest of his life.
He said keeping Wendy at home was like “an emotional decompression chamber,” which helped the family come to terms with her death while she was still there.
Russell said: “The idea of her being taken away in a plastic body bag hours after death is so alien to us all now we really don’t think we could have taken it.”
Dead body being taken away for proper burial — alien.
Dead body hanging out with the family for 6 days — not alien.
[via The Sun]