Bury me at sea

"Bury me at sea!" He was drunk when he said it, and none of us knew he was dying, least of all the man himself. But he said it a lot, and he didn't say much else before he went. It fell to us to decide whether he meant it. We all felt the romance in the idea as he half-sang it down Brewer Street, but after, we thought of the cold and the wet and his trussed-up body flopping over the side like a sack of coal. Bleak. Nobody wanted it, and nobody really thought he wanted it. But the idea of those words in our heads at the crematorium was bleaker still.