Gone to be with the Lord, called home by the Lord, passed away, slipped the mortal coil ... eh, at least it sounds better than "kicked the bucket". Apparently ANYTHING but "died". Our terror of mortality on full display.

I don't care enough about what people say or do about my death to pre-script it. I won't care, and my survivors, to the extent they care or need to, can decide how to handle it. Funerals are for the living, not the dead.

I think there may be a bit of, "Whew! At least I didn't go THAT way!" but for the most part, I think such curiosity is normal, especially in a culture such as ours that avoids honest discussions about death.

I admit I read obits sometimes to a game--figure how how the person died. I started doing this during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, looking for coded wording that showed the lengths to which families would go to avoid the shame associated with AIDS then.

In literature, we such things "the fascination with the abomination" and it's made many an author of the horror genre popular.