Word: coffining
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...catafalque, bore it haltingly, laboriously down the 36 Capitol steps past the black-clothed ranks of John Kennedy's family. The drums began a muffled thunder. There was a gnashing of metal as the military men loaded it aboard the glistening black caisson, the same that carried the coffin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt 18 years...
...that had paid as much as $300 each for the pleasure of seeing him hang heard him cry, Glory, glory, glory," as the door was sprung from beneath his feet. Czolgosz was electrocuted only 46 days after McKinley died, and a carboy of sulphuric acid was poured into his coffin afterward, by way of post-mortem punishment. Sergeant Boston Corbett, the soldier who claimed he had killed Booth, in defiance of orders that he be taken alive, explained that he had acted on God's authority. "Providence directed me," he said...
...from inside the warehouse where the killer had knelt; the camera played on a litter of chicken bones. Each moment of the unfolding story flashed before millions of eyes: Jacqueline Kennedy, her suit and stockings still bloodstained, getting into a Dallas hearse with her husband's body; the coffin arriving at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington; Lyndon Johnson speaking haltingly through his first public words as President...
Probably the reason for such astonishing behavior rests with the way Americans die, and our attitudes toward death. Not only have Americans had little experience in buying a coffin and a service, they have had little experience with death at all. In our modern, urbanized society, death, like birth, usually takes place in a hospital. It has become an unnatural, isolated occurrence. Friends and relatives visit the dying person during visiting hours; they are informed of the final event after it has happened. Their contact with death, their actual experience with it, is minimal...
...Europe the anti-tobacco campaign is far less circumspect. The British Ministry of Health has put up more than a million posters. One says: "Why be another sheep? Before you smoke, THINK. Cigarettes cause lung cancer." Another shows a half-open coffin, with the legend: "The big Flip-Top Box for the Smoker." In Italy, all tobacco advertising was made illegal...