The reason so many people turned up at his funeral is that they wanted to make sure he was dead.

All say, how hard it is that we have to die - a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live

Sensei says funerals are not really for the dead. They are for those left behind. "The dead are long gone by the time a funeral is held," he told us. "Who would wait when the doors of Heaven are open? Only the living would be foolish enough to still hang around on earth.

That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner

If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.

it is sad to fill a grave with a person full of potential yet completely emptied of anymore possibility to try it once again.