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Wow. You wake up and switch on the news and find that economic forecasts have gone from deluded happy-talk about a recovery to some serious doom and gloom after one bad day on the markets. Not that we&#39;ll need to worry about it, of course, because the next item up is all about how we won&#39;t be around to collect on our worthless 401(k)&#39;s anyway, thanks to the guvmint&#39;s inability to complete the simple task of overseeing the manufacture of 120 million doses of the H1N1 vaccine by October. Apparently, we&#39;ll only have 45 million by then, with a mere 20 million a week to follow afterwards. Correct me if I&#39;m wrong, but being only 1 month behind on the production of 120 million of anything we hadn&#39;t heard of 18 months ago doesn&#39;t seem too bad. Regardless; hell in a handbasket seems to be where we&#39;re headed, and at warp speed, at least if a media desperate for a story following a solid month of not much happening is to be believed (unless you count eternal speculation on the healthcare front as &quot;action&quot;).&lt;p&gt;Then, just when you think it might be safe to dip a toe back into the media water in search of some light titillation, you click a link and come across this piece in the Washington Post. People so desperate for cash they&#39;re selling their burial plots in cemeteries across the nation—a pastime that apparently used to be reserved only for people who couldn&#39;t stand the sight of each other. No, really; check out this quote from the piece:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&quot;We usually hear, &#39;I&#39;m selling because I hate that son of a gun and the only thing we&#39;ve got together is burial plots, and I&#39;ll be damned if I&#39;m going to be buried next to that so-and-so,&#39; &quot; said Bob Ward cemetery property specialist with the Cemetery Registry. &quot;Or, &#39;Grandpa bought these plots in 1932 , and I&#39;ll be damned if I&#39;m going back to New Jersey to be buried. I live in Arizona.&#39; Now we&#39;re hearing, &#39;I&#39;m losing my house.&#39; Or, &#39;I&#39;m out of work.&#39;&quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Throughout the piece, litanies of misery proliferate as the journalist digs deep (their pun from the headline) to unearth (OK, that&#39;s mine) the reasons that have led people to such dire circumstances that they&#39;d consider selling their eternal resting place. (The question of why people had them in the first place is, sadly, somewhat overlooked.)&lt;p&gt;Still, despite the inherent misery in the piece, there are a couple of positive things for any Pink Slipped reader to take away from the article.  First, that regardless of the current state of the economy we&#39;re all headed for the same place. Or, as Fairfax Memorial Park vice president Mike Doherty puts it in a thinly veiled sales pitch in the piece: &quot;Death is not optional.&quot;&lt;p&gt;Not cheerful enough for you? OK, how about this as a positive takeaway: you&#39;re not selling gravesites for a living &lt;i&gt;a la&lt;/i&gt; the two sources excerpted here. That&#39;s something to be thankful for at any time—and especially at a time when it would appear that there&#39;s a glut of available real estate.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&lt;b&gt;Posted by Phil Stott, Vault Staff Writer&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img class=&quot;embeddedObject&quot; src=&quot;http://content.screencast.com/users/pstott/folders/Jing/media/814dea69-a505-40b6-aee8-8ba61bf6d271/2009-08-18_1455.png&quot; width=&quot;310&quot; height=&quot;464&quot; border=&quot;0&quot;&gt;&lt;br&gt;Associated Press/Plinio Leprio

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How to Handle Survivors’ Guilt After Layoffs 

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