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Benedict Richard O’Gorman Anderson died on 13 December 2015 in East Java, Indonesia. The news spread swiftly — through Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp messages and email — from multiple sources that those who received it considered reliable. Nevertheless, the news was unbelievable, not so much in the sense that the fact was suspect, but in the sense that we found it difficult to habituate ourselves to the fact. In writing about Javanese death practices, Jim Siegel, one of Anderson’s closest friends, started by saying that “[a] person is dead when he has been given up for dead by those closest to him” (Siegel 1983, p. 1). That is, the phenomenology of death includes both biological death and social death. Siegel adds that, in Java, the time lapse between the two is short, sometimes a matter of minutes. With Anderson, this was not the case. He was not given the “hurried, subdued, yet methodically efficient” Javanese funeral (Geertz 1973, p. 146), which would have been too short. Instead, he had an Indonesian funeral, and a unique one at that. Anderson’s body reposed at Rumah Duka Adi Jasa, a Chinese funeral parlour in Surabaya, starting 15 December. Chinese funerals typically take a few days, and so this arrangement allowed time for family and friends to come to the funeral from the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, Thailand, the Philippines and other parts of Indonesia, among other places. The funeral rituals were held on the evening of 18 December, the cremation took place on 19 December, and the ashes were cast into the Java Sea on 20 December. Notes on the events of these days follow.