Bury Me Not …
what I imagine Heaven may look like…
It’s late at night, and I’m avoiding sleep on the night before my grandmother’s funeral, where I will be a pallbearer. It’s been a long week since she first started slipping away at hospice care, and quite frankly I’ve missed her kind and gentle spirit for a while, so it’s a blessing in a way. But it got me thinking.
As much as I love high culture and would love to have fancy foods at my wake or a vault space at the cemetery, it’s not appropriate or the right thing to do. If there’s anything that I want to be remembered for, it’s that I always endeavored to do the just and verdant thing. So after I’m gone – some 50 years into the future let’s say – here’s what I want:
I want sloppy joes served at the wake. I’ll allow a hymn at the service, but then I want Carl Stalling scores played. You can’t prevent tears if people loved you (and I hope someone does), but play the music from a Tex Avery cartoon and force-feed them one of my mother’s famous garlic dill pickles and the emotion will change.
No burial, but rather scatter my ashes. There’s a dirt road near the northwest coast of Madeline Island in the Apostle chain where a wooden pole with Buddhist prayer flags whips in the wind. That would be a pretty good spot, I’d say.
I’m probably still going to be in debt, as I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to live in a higher caste by buying more stuff when I really didn’t have the money for it. So go ahead and sell 95% of what I owned. Give the rest to Salvation Army or Goodwill – just make sure they get more than just a VCR or secondhand books.
Keep anything from my possessions that inspire whimsy. Most of this ‘stuff’ I kept in boxes. Try the ornate box with the baoding balls and my old wisdom teeth inside. Try the smooth wooden box that has all my movie ticket stubs inside. There’s a steamer trunk inside a storage container I rent with a lot of comic books from 1979-1992.
I just picked up a recent copy of Phoenix magazine. It included an article about “Alcor,” where you too can become a popsicle after death, not only that but you get your very own insulated case for the sicle that is YOU, albeit dead. Is $150,000 really so much to pay to be frozen in liquid nitrogen and preserved until science discovers a cure for what made you drop dead Ted Williams is, or was an Alcor
patient, though a few years ago his relatives were wrangling over having him thawed…