All this talk of writing your own obit reminds me that while I haven't done that, I do have my best-of-all-possible funerals planned in my head. First of all, I definitely don't want a traditional service and I definitely definitely don't want a wake. The very last thing I would want to do to my survivors is to torture them from beyond the grave by making them attend a wake.
For all your acquaintances and not-close-friends and extended family, a wake is just a forced social obligation that everyone dreads with every fiber of their being. "Andrea died? OMG, that's terrible! Wow. Wait--does this mean I have to go to the wake? Crap!" And for those people who are actually really mourning you, your wake is just, if I remember from my mom's, physically and mentally and emotionally exhausting. So, no wake.
I wanna be cremated. Then, no matter what month it happens to be when I kick, I want my remains to be put into storage until some beautiful evening in mid-summer, right around dusk, at which point a bunch of the people who really loved me are going to take them to Red Rock Park and go down out onto the rocks that the immigrant guys fish off of, as far out as the tide allows, and sit down and reminisce and/or talk smack about me briefly, and then toss the ashes into the Atlantic just as the sun is setting. Then everyone can pile into a couple of cars and go to the real Kellys in Revere and have some Memorial Onion Rings.
I realize there's probably a couple of problems with this plan. First of all, the Commonwealth probably has laws against disposing of human remains that way. Secondly, it presupposes that I die at an age where my friends are still capable of climbing out onto a bunch of slippery rocks in the ocean. (See! Just another reason to want the step-grandchildren. They could scamper out onto the rocks and toss me if all my loved ones were otherwise too decrepit and had to stay on the pavement. But I think I'm probably going to die young anyway, so that may not be necessary.)
In any case, doable or not, that is how I would like things to go after I am dead.
xoxo
6 comments:
It occurs to me now that the funeral would be even beddah if I could convince my friends to sing "I wanna be cremated!" as a Ramones song.
No?
Laws, feh! They gonna arrest you?
Tales my blog shouldn't tell. When my mother died, her will (which included EVERYTHING! DOAN' DO THAT!!) stipulated that her ashes be scattered on the island I written about. Trouble was, we hadn't owned it for 20 years.
After a couple of years of hemming and hawing, my brother went and got the ashes from the funeral director one winter day, blew over to the island on a snowmobile, and scattered them, telling nobody. This did good for everyone.
So make any rules you want: there's always a way to make these things happen.
Not taking bets on you dying young either, but if you don't, I won't be around to prove you wrong ;)
PS: I totally agree about wakes. Made sense in the day when you had to make sure the SOB was dead. Now, it's just barbaric, without even a chance to inject the black humour and drunkenness that enlivened wakes in the good ol' days.
Getting back to the Ramones: karaoke version OK?
Thank you for that story :-) That's very cool.
Now, c'mon, sing with me:
Twenty twenty twenty four hours to go
I wanna be cremated!
Nothing to do, nowhere to go, oh
I wanna be cremated!
I say invest in a collection of little vials of colored glass that can hang on lanyards that get handed out at the door of the wake in lieu of party favors, and give everybody a little something twisted to remember you by. Then the scattering can be done piecemeal depending on whether the recipients want to hang on to a piece of you more or less than respecting your wishes to climb out on the slippery rocks and do the toss. And those who don't really want to choose can toss the bottles themselves, to wash up somewhere for the next person to wonder what the prize is inside.
I'd know, so I'd be keeping mine...
Passing out vials of myself as party favors...this funeral just keeps getting better and better. This is why it pays to toss ideas around before you actually kick off! :-)
Post a Comment