Ageing with Attitude: Thinking outside the box for your funeral

HER cousins in Carlow and Dublin asked her if she had “lost her marbles” when 80-year-old Joyce McCullough sent them pictures of her standing beside her coffin. It was weird enough that she had actually invested in the deathly box; the fact that she had also decorated it with pictures of leprechauns had them proclaiming: “You’re certifiable!”

But Dublin-born Joyce who emigrated to New Zealand as a young woman back in the ’60s, had never made a saner decision: to gleefully embrace in advance, her inevitable exit from life — whenever that might be — by decorating the funereal furniture that would be accompanying her underneath the soil.