‘Requiescat in Pace’, more commonly recognised as R.I.P. worries me.
Rest in Peace. I struggle with that. How can decaying bones do anything but? I can’t imagine them jumping out of the ground for an all night rave (though the makers of horror genre films might disagree), nor can I imagine an urn full of ashes struggling with its tax returns, dreading the impending visit of the in-laws, or rushing down to Ladbrokes to place a bet on the X Factor.
Of course they are going to rest in bloody peace and they’ve probably earned it.
From my experience of impending death very few look as though they are looking forward to it, unless they are drugged to their faltering eyeballs.
“She looked so peaceful”. So would you if your cancer ravaged body had been infused with a king’s ransom’s worth of morphine.
Prior to the legal drug overdose they had been clinging onto life with the tenacity of a furious fishing boat barnacle suddenly faced with a typhoon.
Of course if you really are a believer in the after life and all things God like (I confess I am not) I apologise and you might take heart from the following, shamelessly lifted from Wikipedia:
“The phrase, rest in peace (R.I.P.) in English was not found on tombstones before the eighth century. (It hit the hebrew tombs in the 1st century) It became common on the tombs of Catholics in the 18th century, for whom it was a prayerful request that their soulshould find peace in the afterlife When the phrase became conventional, the absence of a reference to the soul led people to suppose that it was the physical body that was enjoined to lie peacefully in the grave. This is associated with the Catholic doctrine of the particular judgement; that is, that the soul is parted from the body upon death, but that the soul and body will be reunited on Judgement Day.”
Enlightened now?
In fairness I also struggle with ‘passed on’, ‘passing’ and ‘passing over’. Who thought those ones up?
They didn’t exactly pass the ball, overtake you on the M25 or cross the street to avoid putting their hands in their pockets for the charity tin.
They’re dead. They died. They are deceased; as dead as the Monty Python parrot. Celebrate their lives, grieve for your loss, remember them and all the good things they gave you but don’t expect them to thank you for asking them to R.I.P. – they don’t have a choice in that.