Notes on a Funeral

So I had to go to a funeral recently, and it had me pondering many aspects of life and death.

You can’t help but sit there and reflect on every other funeral you’ve ever attended in your life (which makes you even sadder as you sit there).

But worse, you can’t help but let your mind wander to consider all of the funerals you have YET to attend in your life. Now that thought is truly terrifying and heartbreaking.

So when those thoughts hit me, I quickly shifted gears into something more constructive…planning my own funeral. Hell, I’ll be dead, so no sense in being sad about that myself. Unless all my science training has failed me, I’m pretty sure death is inevitable, so I figure it’s just good planning…very Stephen Covey Quadrant 2 of me to think about this now.

Anyway, so let’s face it, we all have thoughts, preferences, etc. about what we want for our funeral, so here I shall record my requirements so that it can be said that “Even in death, she was bossy!”

The Crying…Some people will say that they want people to be happy and remember the good times and make it a happy celebration of life. Well what the heck! I want people to be SAD! I want to have lived the kind of life and be the kind of person that people are PISSED about not being around anymore. I mean I want people doing the ugly cry, throwing themselves at the coffin, screaming “Why?” ala Nancy Kerrigan and the clubbing incident, etc. I want to have made that kind of impression on the world that people are devastated that I’m not in it anymore! Just give me 2 hours of drama devoted to me…then after the funeral you’re welcome to get drunk and “celebrate” my life and all that ; )

The Singing…good LORD if you have someone in there in a girdle and blue hair singing off key with too much vibrato I may in fact come back to haunt the person responsible.

The Program…If there is a spelling mistake, again, please expect to be haunted if you are responsible! Check your refrigerator magnets for evil messages.

The Flowers…If you know me at all, you know that I think that carnations are the cockroach of the flower world. If I see a carnation in my arrangements, I will most likely jump out of that coffin and pluck them out one by one myself!

The Pictures…Good funerals usually have nice photo slideshows of the deceased. Should I live to be old, please make sure to have plenty of pictures of me in my younger days. I don’t workout this hard now to not get credit for it later ; )

The Eulogy…While I’m being very tongue-in-cheek about the above statements (except for the carnations…seriously), my only true wish for my funeral is that my kids have something nice to say about me. I hope that they have so many stories of “Remember that time Mom…” that they can’t even choose. There will inevitably be stories that start with “Remember that time Mom fell…” and “Remember that time Mom got mad about…” I do hope that I’ve lived the kind of life and done enough for them that they miss me, but more than that, I hope I’ve done enough for them that they’ll be just fine without me.

And I need to go before Patrick because I’ll never survive without him…