I recently came across an old newspaper clipping from the front page of The Sun dated August 17, 1977. On the front right is a large black and white photo of Elvis, his shoulders wrapped in an elaborate, collard outfit with multiple gold chains hanging from his neck. In the photo, it’s hard to determine if his eyes are fully closed or if he’s looking down, presumably from a stage onto the crowd. The title reads in block capitals ‘KING ELVIS DEAD’ and floating in slightly smaller type above ‘HE WAS 42 AND ALONE’. Within the context of the headings, it seems plausible that the photo could be of Elvis lying dead, dressed up and casket bound, ready for people’s tears to slide off his embalmed body. It’s a fascinating archive of news. Obviously, I’m not a reader of The Sun but they do know how to shock the public through the page. As people, we live our lives in blissful dismissal of the fact that one day we will die. If we ever do imagine our own deaths, we tend to picture ourselves lying in a warm bed, surrounded by our loved ones as we gently fade into the background and slip out the back door. In reality, hospitals have remained the most common place for people to die over the last decade with hospice’s following in second place. What people definitely don’t want is to die young and isolated; I imagine ‘42 AND ALONE’ sent shivers down the spines of readers.

My dad is a stonemason. This never seemed atypical to me until I went to uni where people’s parents were lawyers or doctors and responded “Oh, that’s cool. Very different” when I told them what he did. As children, my sister and I spent a lot of time at the cemetery. My dad would drive us there on weekends holding a scrap of paper with a plot number for a grave he needed to look at. He’d tell us the number and then we’d spread out in search of it. He would always find it first because my sister and I would get distracted reading the graves and looking for the oldest one. There were a lot of graves, many of which had a headstone at the top and a rectangular stone border jutting out from the bottom which was filled in with grass, outlining where the body lay beneath. My sister and I would jump along the row from the grassy center of one to another shouting “I’m standing on a dead body” with smiles plastered to our faces. I’m deeply apologetic to any mourners who were there expecting a peaceful remembrance of their loved one; they certainly didn’t get it that day. 

Our weekend cemetery trips were so frequent that my sister and I had our favourite cemeteries. Mine was Brompton and her’s Putney Vale. When you drive in a cemetery you have to drive slowly. You can’t pull in off an A road and continue to drive at 40 miles per hour. I remember once we were in the car creeping up the aisles between sections and there was an old woman trying to cross the path. From the back of the car my sister and I repeated “Accelerate, accelerate, more business more business” stopping our chant only to giggle. Now that I’m older I wonder if being around the knowledge of death from a young age was good or bad for us. I wonder if we really understood it, I don’t think we did. I remember one weekend my dad and I were at a grave and he was crouching down running his thumb over the engraved lettering while I stood at the foot. “When I die, will you do my grave?” I said earnestly, and my Dad replied, “Hopefully by the time you die, I’ll be long dead,” and I just thought ‘oh yeah!’ and went on with my day. My Dad’s business was dead and so we talked about it a lot although not in any philosophical terms, just practical ones. We still joke that his business can never go under because people can’t stop themselves from dying. Sometimes when it’s a slow period I’ll tell him I’ll go out and slaughter a couple hundred people to keep the money coming in. 

And yet even with all this background of the death industry, I was jarred by the Elvis newspaper article. Everything about it made me want to look away while also captivating my attention. No one wants to die alone and it’s shocking that a man as universally loved as Elvis, ‘King Elvis’, would have that be his end. My Dad once told me that when you die, if you get buried in a wooden coffin over time the dirt on top gets waterlogged and becomes heavier and heavier until one day the wooden top of the casket can’t carry the weight anymore and it breaks, concaving, covering your decomposed remains with dirt. That’s why sometimes graves look slightly sunken from above. That image has stayed with me, and because of it, I knew from the young age of seven that I would like to be cremated when I die. I don’t think many people know the ins and outs of the process after you die and no one looks into it because they can’t bear the thought of dying let alone knowing about the various stages of decomposition you’ll go through, or what temperature the flames will be when they burn you into ash (it’s 1800 degrees Fahrenheit btw). God knows, I know more than I want to and I don’t even know that much. When a celebrity like Elvis dies and it’s splashed across the news you are confronted with thinking about death even just for a moment. I know papers only publish these things as their printed click-bait but they have found a national pitfall; despite people dying for millions of years, no one in the UK thinks, talks, or confronts it and therefore you can use trigger words and scaremongering to sell more copies. I don’t imagine this will change. If you are interested and want to look up the article you can go to Google and type in ‘The Sun cover Elvis dead’ or an assortment of those kinds of words and you’re sure to find it. I’d be interested to hear about what impression it leaves on you.

This week, I made an orange and chocolate orange bundt cake! I’ve had this bundt tin for over a year and have never used it out of fear that I wouldn’t be able to turn it out properly. I decided I should bake with it whether the cake fails or not. After all, I’ll be dead one day and with my breath and beating heart there too will go my chance to bake with my bundt tin. I’m so happy with how it came out! Didn’t stick to the sides at all and the cake is spongey and delicious. Next time I will use more orange.

Goodbye for now.