Regarding ‘assumptions’ and make up. This resounded! My father died suddenly and had been taken away for a postmortem by the time I arrived to be with my mum. I was asked if I wanted to see him, and as I hadn’t seen him for a while I said yes, so we went off to the funeral home. He was in an open coffin – this was my first dead body – and when I looked at him he had been ‘made up’. I was profoundly shocked by how he now looked and, whereas my mother thought he looked beautiful, I thought he looked like a grotesque caricature of how I recalled him, and I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. This resulted in my not wanting to see my mother’s body when she died. It would have been good to know that make up is a norm, which one generally can opt out of.
