It’s hard to imagine how a funeral for a five-week-old baby lost to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) could become a more heartbreaking occasion for grieving parents.

But Terrie Rouse, 32, was shocked when she discovered she’d been fined £86 by her local council for lingering too long at baby Zane’s funeral, by ten whole minutes. Rouse explained the incident to The Sun:

Heartbroken Terrie said: “The vicar asked if I would like to spend a bit more time saying goodbye. I sat by the coffin for ten minutes, telling my son how much we loved him, begging him not to be scared.”

Terrie and her partner Lee Smythe were devastated when Zane died suddenly of SIDS in April at their home in Milton Keynes, Bucks. The couple waited three months for Zane’s body to be tested before he was released for funeral services. Terrie’s partner Lee described his outrage to Sky News:

“Terrie was weeping hysterically,” he said. “She just wanted a few extra minutes to say goodbye to our much-loved little boy.

“Nobody told us to speed up or said that we had to leave because we were taking up too much time. How could anyone be cruel enough to charge for this?”

A council spokesperson apologized for the charges and told Sky:

“We understand that sometimes more time may be preferred and so families are offered the chance to book extra time if they need it,” he said.

“This means when funerals that have not taken up this option over-run, a fee is automatically charged.

“However, when we learned that there were extenuating circumstances we, of course, refunded the extra charge.”

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Ryan O’Neal admits to a doubly shocking faux pas in September’s issue of Vanity Fair.

At length, O’Neal discusses why he doesn’t believe he should have been a father. He describes the incident with Tatum at Farrah’s funeral:

“I had just put the casket in the hearse and I was watching it drive away when a beautiful blonde woman comes up and embraces me,” Ryan told me. “I said to her, ‘You have a drink on you? You have a car?’ She said, ‘Daddy, it’s me—Tatum!’ I was just trying to be funny with a strange Swedish woman, and it’s my daughter. It’s so sick.”

“That’s our relationship in a nutshell,” Tatum said when I asked her about it. “You make of it what you will.” She sighed. “It had been a few years since we’d seen each other, and he was always a ladies’ man, a bon vivant.”

Maintaining contact with only one of his several children (Redmond, his son with Farrah), O’Neal says he’s “never been happier.

“A couple of them I would take back.

“I don’t think I was supposed to be a father,” said the actor, who had Tatum, 45, and Griffin, 44, with first wife Joanna Moore; son Patrick, 42, with actress Leigh Taylor-Young; and son Redmond, 24, with Fawcett.

“Just look around at my work — they’re either in jail or they should be,” O’Neal said.

The Vanity Fair piece, entitled Beautiful People, Ugly Choices, is one of two VF covers for September. Farrah again is sharing the spotlight with Michael Jackson, who is the subject of the other September cover hitting newstands this week.

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For an extra fee, you can get your final farewell broadcast across the entire Web. Have some relatives who don’t want to make the journey? Let them watch from home! Want to digitally immortalize the moment to relive over and over at the click of a button? You’ve got it!

Now, to be fair, this place isn’t the first to try the idea — though it’s far from a widespread practice.

Is it a bad idea? Not necessarily. It is, after all, putting technology to a new and modern use — albeit it in an odd sort of way.

Still, for some reason, the whole thing leaves me with a bit of a weird feeling. Maybe there are some places where technology shouldn’t go. Maybe this is one of them.

Any thoughts?

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