THE body of a Sioux chief is to be returned to his tribal homelands, after lying in a Brompton cemetery for 103 years. Do you care where you are buried?

Trevor Huddleston, veteran anti-apartheid campaigner
If I die outside South Africa I want my ashes scattered in what was Sophiatown, and is now Triomf. The body has infinite dignity and we cannot throw it off as if it had no meaning.

Susan Chitty, writer
My mother, Antonia White, is buried in the Catholic cemetery in West Grinstead, next to her parents. I'd want to be buried there too.

P.D. James
Ideally I'd like to go on a great funeral pyre on the sea shore, on a nice hot breezy night. My friends could have a picnic and then go swimming in the sea. But I know I'll end up in some ghastly modern crematorium.

Nicholas Albery, editor of 'The Natural Death Handbook'
I want to be buried in a piece of land given to me as a wedding present. It's part of a woodland on the Downs. Just in case my spirit survives I want it to have a nice place to hover.

Michael Dummett, former philosophy professor at Oxford University
People visit graves because they think it provides some way of being nearer to the dead person. I understand that feeling, but place is not so important to me.

John Martyn, folk singer
I've led a peripatetic existence and I've got no attachment to one particular spot. I'd happily be dumped in a black plastic bag on some old compost heap.

Maggie Annable, owner of a pet cemetery in Lancashire
My husband and I have written in our will that we'll be buried in our pet cemetery. Our Irish wolfhound is buried there. He's a free spirit -he's off and running- but we might as well all be together.

Charlotte O'Sullivan

sitenotes:
A quick and dirty example of gallows humour. No idea why she called John.
This was published in The Observer of Sunday 5 February 1995.
The Sioux chief in question was Long Wolf. He died of pneumonia in 1892 while traveling with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, and was buried in west London’s Brompton Cemetery. Together with a 7-month-old Sioux girl called White Star, who died during a performance in London. A British woman, Elizabeth Knight, read about the Chief and his fate, located the grave and tracked down the relatives. September 1997 both bodies were exhumed and transported back to the ancestral burial grounds at Pine Ridge Reservation, in the Black Hills of South Dakota (near Wounded Knee).