Sounds like somebody you could share a beer with.
Perhaps that's where the tradition of toasting the departed began: one last chance to hoist a pint with a friend.
It's a tradition that surely dates to the earliest civilizations, as archaeologists uncover evidence of lavish funeral feasts held inside the very tombs of the freshly deceased. By the 14th century, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales irreverently rhymed the mourners' priorities: "Now let us sit and drink and make us merry. And afterward we will his body bury."
Today, old war buddies commonly raise a glass to the missing, saving a final bottle for the last man standing. And who among us hasn't tossed a few back at an Irish wake?
Sometimes, though, beer drinkers take things a step further.
Before Fred Clark, of Virginia, died in 2006, he wrote his own obituary, instructing that "in lieu of flowers . . . make a sizable purchase at your local ABC store or Virginia winery (please, nothing French) and get rip-roaring drunk at home with someone you love or hope to make love to."
It's a sentiment that was so widely appreciated, his online guest book at Legacy.com has attracted 1,500 personal tributes and still counting, five years later.
Walter "Shorty" Jones kept the suds for himself when, in 1933, he became the last man legally hanged in the state of Colorado. He ordered two bottles of beer and gulped them down just before he swung from the gallows. Under the circumstances, you really couldn't blame him for not sharing.
But how about a cold one when you're already six feet under?
