No one who’s healthy and happy really wants to die, but sometimes it’s fun to think about weird stuff you’d want to have happen at your funeral. It is, after all, your last big party on earth…even if you won’t be there in physical form to celebrate and enjoy it. We once had a friend tell us he wanted his corpse to be strung up like a marionette so that someone could pull the strings and make him move around. Yeah, we know – we need new friends.
Anyway, some dude in Ireland named Anto Wickham had similar weird thoughts about his own funeral…and then he made them a reality. Wickham lost eight of his Army friends during the Iraq war and all of their funerals were so sad; he decided that he wanted to plan his funeral far ahead of his own death so that he could make sure it was a celebration and not depressing.
First order of business? Wickham ordered a custom-made coffin in the shape of a bottle of his favorite liquor, Jack Daniels. The 10-foot casket created by specialty coffin company Crazy Coffins, cost about $5,000 and it took several months to make (luckily, Wickham wasn’t in any kind of rush). He says his friends see the funny side of it, but his parents and grandparents weren’t too impressed.
In addition to the Jack Daniels coffin, Wickham already has a few others plans. He says he wants to have a solar-paneled iPad on his headstone and he plans to leave a video message with pictures of the coffin from start to finish. He’s also going to talk to Guinness to see if they will cart his coffin to the funeral service in one of their delivery vans; the music as his casket enters will be Sid Vicious from the Sex Pistols singing “My Way.” This dude is a badass.
After reading about how awesome Anto’s funeral will be (hopefully many years into the future), we can’t help but be a little jealous. Does anyone have any good drinking-related ideas for our funeral? We’re thinking maybe a complimentary signature cocktail to sip during the service, BYOB and leave a bottle of your favorite beer in the coffin…hmm, think if we got cremated a craft brewery could take our ashes and use them in a new beer recipe? No? Okay, never mind.