ok... so I'm skipping the interment of my mom's cousin's ashes today. I know it's not a real funeral, but I just can't do it. I've been to too many this year already. I went to a dedication of a little garden plot for a friend's mom only a week or two ago, and that was hard enough. I witnessed/signed/copied my mother's last wishes back in May or so (happy mother's day, happy graduation), or maybe it was around her birthday...
I just can't anymore. I want to go to weddings, and even baby showers, as stupid as I think it is to be bringing children into our society right now (be careful, it'll be Idiocracy before we know it because people like me aren't having kids). I want to go to birthdays and random parties, and rejoice. I want to tie a few on and not end up crying; I'm tired of wiping my damn nose. Tired of watching the makeup run into my eyes.
When I die, there will be a party. Set my ashes on the mantle, pour me a kettle & tonic or a white russian, and turn up the music. Put some pictures up on a projector, and make sure at least 40% of them are embarrassing as hell (there are PLENTY of pictures of me cramming food in my face). Laugh. Don't freaking cry. Everyone needs to drink and dance and rejoice. Share stories, if it makes you laugh. But good god, when I die, please don't make it some big deal with tears and tissue. I don't want a priest, I want a poet. And if you're going to insist on creating a scene, throw yourself at the urn and dance it around the floor once or twice. Don't put my ashes in a can next to no one or nothing, but spread them all over hell and back. Take a matchbox of me to every place I've never been, and throw a handful under a willow tree in Indiana. Dump a little of me at Foster beach, and at Montrose harbor. Put a pinch full in a cup of Starbucks and throw it on the hood of a BMW owned by some douche.
But listen here, I don't know how much ash there'll be. I'm going to donate whatever they want to science. Having smoked for 4 years, I'm pretty sure I won't make much of a donor, but maybe they can learn something from me. Maybe they'll take out my brain and run some magical electric currents through it and be able to play my memories through my eyes like a projection. Maybe they'll find all sorts of neat things.
So don't cry when I die. It's just the beginning to something different, not really an end. No one gets out alive, you know, so just let it happen. I'm not saying go quietly, and I'm not saying I'll go quietly, just that there's no reason to fear, no reason to despair. In the long run, we're all merely a blink, and maybe what we have is all some grand illusion and maybe I'll go to some greater consciousness and spend eternity with all the great minds that had died long before I lived, which really would be an exercise in heavenly education.
Here's to fewer funerals. Here's to less sadness. Here's to fewer plots of land taken up by headstones, as beautiful as cemeteries are, and to a good, old fashioned, Irish wake. Use my life insurance to buy the top shelf, and enjoy. Spike your coffee on your day off and toast to me. Mourning just strikes me as something we let far too much of our energy go towards, when the people we're mourning would rather we were smiling and laughing and remembering them in life.
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