An
Unusual Euphemism used to describe a character's death (regardless of whether it has actually occured), where X is a place that exemplifies the deceased's personality, interests or habits.
May or may not be a subtrope of
Never Say "Die" (depending on the target audience of the work) and, should that be the case, a
Sister Trope (albeit more versatile) to
He Didn't Make It. It may also overlap with
No Longer With Us (in which case it is almost always
Played for Laughs) if the character has really gone to some great X in the sky (and this is mistook as an euphemism), or if the character has really died (and others believe that he has gone to the great X in the sky).
Examples:
Literature
- In Stephen King's The Library Policeman, the town's resident drunk, Dirty Dave, is said to have gone to the "great ginmill in the sky".
- In Needful Things, Pop Merrill, who was relatively rich for a resident of Castle Rock, has gone to the "big flea-market in the sky".
- Discworld:
- In The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents some of the rats have a tentative belief that on death the Bone Rat sends them to be with the Big Rat That Lives Underground.
- In The Last Continent, the Wizards momentarily lose sight of The Librarian when he goes through one of his transforming fits. They eventually decide that he went to the big rainforest in the sky.
Music
- "The Great Gig in the Sky" is the 5th track on Pink Floyd's 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon. (The phrase has become popular for this trope since then, especially regarding musicians dying.)
- Allan Sherman's "The Streets of Miami" (a parody of the folk song "The Streets of Laredo") involves two associates who get in a gunfight over which hotel in Miami is better ("I'm going to the Fountain Blue, pardener it's moderner"). One of them dies, and the other is forced to leave Miami forever to avoid mob justice. He ends up complaining that New York is so cold that a person could die, and envies his dead colleague because "he's in that big Fountain Blue in the sky."
- A song by The Dead Milkmen titled "The Thing That Only Eats Hippies" states at one point that the creature sends its victims to 'that great folk festival in the sky'.
Newspaper Comics
- In a Garfield strip, a spider wants to take revenge for his grandfather whom, as he says, Garfield sent to "that big web in the sky".
Webcomics
- In this
The Order of the Stick strip, the wife of a dirt farmer, when reunited with him, states that she was afraid that he had went to the "Great Dirt Pile in the Sky".
Web Original
Western Animation
Real Life
- In his eulogy for fellow Monty Python member Graham Chapman, John Cleese said that he had "gone to meet the great Head of Light Entertainment in the sky".
