Chuck

I haven't lost a lot of close friends.

Like, has anyone ever lost, like, close friends and had to, like, preside over their funeral?

And the guy just puts his napkin in his lap.

That's pretty cool.

Yeah, a life-preserving coffin, I believe, is what the patent file was in 1843 from Christian Eisenbrant of...

Baltimore, Maryland, and this had a spring-loaded lid where if you, the quote was, the slightest motion of either the head or the hand would spring this thing up.

Of course, that's no good if you're buried under six feet of dirt.

So his suggestion is like, hey, this coffin only works if you're in a tomb, like an above-ground vault.

And

you got to leave a key on the inside of that thing.

So if you pop out of the coffin and you're still locked in the tomb, that's no good either.

Yeah, for sure.

Edgar Allan Poe didn't help things much when in 1844 he wrote a short story called The Premature Burial, where in it he says –

To be buried alive is beyond question the most terrific of these extremes, which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality that it has frequently, very frequently so fallen will scarcely be denied by those who think.

And then he talks about the boundaries between life and death being shadowy and vague, kind of playing into that.

He was writing of the times, you know, because that's like we talked about.

That's kind of how people thought of things.

So after that, I think there were even more people coming out with these things.

Yeah.

Yeah, he's not the only one.