Scottish Funeral Quotes

The term originated in a religious context with the psalm Placebo Domine, “I shall please the Lord,” but by the fourteenth century had taken on a more negative association within the church to describe fake mourners paid to attend funerals to “sing placebos” about the dead. The word made its way into medicine five centuries later, when, in 1772, Scottish physician and chemist William Cullen gave his patients mustard powder treatments for all manner of ailments, even though he knew it was a sham: “What I call a placebo.

she’s a passion for funerals, like all uneducated Scottish people,

We often see people who do things that look a bit crazy. We see somebody all the time not succeeding at things they could succeed at, or they are pulling out of relationships that looked promising, or they are putting up a wall when anyone tries to love them, or they’re sabotaging their chances, or whatever. And we think “Why does that person do it, it’s completely crazy, there’s no logic to it?” Here’s a very important point, there is always a point. Those behaviors once upon a time made great sense. I want to go further, not only did they make great sense, they were very often the difference between life and death, between managing to continue with life and giving up on life. We needed those patterns. Imagine someone growing up with a parent who is suicidal, they are threatening suicide, how on Earth does a child survive that experience? One of the ways they might learn to survive that experience is to shut down completely, right? They will never ever let anyone in because to let someone in is to risk their own annihilation. That when you’re 5 years old, to work that out, that is near genius, to work out that in order to survive you need to shut the drawbridge very tight. Fast forward 25, 35, 45, family situation resolved itself in whatever way, and you’ve moved on and you’re trying to have relationships or whatever, but in a horrible way that defense mechanism is still active, and now it’s trouble because now it means that when somebody comes along and says “Oh we could have a relationship”, “Umm, no not possible” because the drawbridge is still shut so a lot of the behavior that is suboptimal in adult life, once had a logic which we don’t understand, and we’re not sympathetic to it, we don’t even see it, but if we can learn to see that logic we can largely then come to unpick it. Or imagine somebody who, let’s say, we all know these people, who can’t stop joking around, somebody who is completely optimistic and sunny and even when something’s sad they’re at a funeral, they make a joke around the casket, and you go “Why are you not able to get in touch with your sadness?” Again imagine that former child has come through a journey where once upon a time it was absolutely essential that they be the clown and cheer up maybe a depressive mother or a father who was very angry and couldn’t find anything optimistic. That child needed to become a clown to get to the next stage of life, but now that precise behavior starts to be extremely negative. Another thing that children constantly do, is when children are brought up in suboptimal surroundings with parents who maybe are not that nice to them, it would be devastating to the child to have to see that the fault lies with their parent. Right? To imagine when you’re a four-year-old that your father or mother is really not a very nice person and maybe really quite disturbed and kind of awful, this is an unbearable thought. This was the pioneering work of the Scottish Psychoanalyst Ronald Faban. He was working with very deprived people in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the 1930s and he arrived at a fascinating conclusion. He talked to children from the most deprived most violent abusive families and he discovered that those children spoke very highly of their parents, they would say “My father is a great man”, this is the guy who was hitting the child, “My mother, she’s amazing”, mother you know left the kid unclean and unfed for days. In Faben’s view, it’s better to think that you are the problem than that you’ve been born into a problematic situation, so what happens when you’re in a suboptimal parental situation, is you start to hate yourself, and blame yourself and feel bad about yourself because it is preferable to the other bit of really bad news which is to think that you’ve been born into such an inadequate family, that you may not survive it.

He’d suspected it when he’d found Fraser in the chapel with Geneva Dunsany’s coffin, just before her funeral. But now he knew, beyond doubt. Knew, too, why Fraser did not desire his freedom.

He felt both elated and peaceful, almost valedictory: a strange state of mind to experience in the wake of a funeral. Part of it was Charlie, of course, and the knowledge that he had not failed his dead friend. Beyond that, though, was the knowledge that it lay within his power to do something equally important for the living one. He could keep James Fraser prisoner.

In this instance, the point of showing you the king’s funeral was primarily that it provided Lord John with his moment of enlightenment regarding Jamie’s motive for remaining at Helwater. Secondarily, it shows a historical turning point that a) anchors the reader in time, b) metaphorically underlines the conclusion of the Grey brothers’ quest, c) marks a turning point in Lord John’s relationship with Jamie Fraser, and d) opens the door to a new phase of both personal and public history—for George III (who was the grandson, not the son, of George II) is, of course, the king from whom the American colonies revolted, and we see in the later books of the Outlander series just how that affects the lives of Lord John, Jamie Fraser, and William.