Finally, We're Talking About Death

No longer do funeral homes have a monopoly on selling caskets. Walmart now offers the highly decorated coffins in its stores. While you're browsing for books, bedding and beans you can cruise down a nearby aisle and pick out a casket which you or your loved one -- at some time in the future -- will lie in forever.

Being that Walmart is selling them (urns too) -- Costco also sells caskets on its website -- low prices mean you should have your choice of velour instead of velvet, polyester instead of silk, plastic instead of brass. Why shouldn't you be able to get a bargain in caskets and urns like you do in pills and pizza?

It may take awhile until people are totally comfortable talking about caskets, but it will happen. And none too soon. For far too long, like forever, people have shied away from discussing death, allowing directors of funeral homes to keep everything pretty much a secret. And they, in turn, have relied on grief to bring families around to paying exorbitant fees for everything from the plot to flowers to caskets. We can't choose anything about our birth, but we can choose a few things about our death. And seeing our final resting containers in familiar stores, at reasonable prices, should help make the talk of death less scary.