05 February 2008
Death, Funerals and Entertainment
“Ed Truck is dead. And it blows.” Michael Scott, The
Office
My son said to me this morning, “You know, funerals are an underused
entertainment venue.” He went on to describe his own funeral in detail. It
would take quite some planning. The invitations would claim: “This is a funeral
you CAN’T MISS!” There would be gift bags and a eulogy that would start with,
“Death is sad . . .” and then the orchestra would go into a Marx Brothers
number. After a rousing speech full of puns, and a series of other absurd
entertainments, his cremated ashes would explode over the city because they’d
have been stuffed into fireworks.
The whole family has been talking about death and funerals because of a recent
incident involving my dad. He has some trouble walking, and he fell late one
night in the kitchen. When my brother and his fiancé woke up the next morning
for work, they found him laying there in a pool of blood. It was your basic
quintessential nightmare. After a trip to the emergency room, Dad was stitched
up and recovered, but it got everyone talking. My brother, sister and I didn’t
even know what to do if Dad keels before us. We’d never talked about it.
So my sister asked my dad what he wants when he dies. This is the plan. He
wants to be buried a plain, pine coffin. At the funeral, which is to be outside,
he wants the pine box to be set on a series of saw horses and used as a bar.
We’re to have a party and do shots off the box. My dad said, “Alcohol has been
a big part of my life. Everyone has to drink.” I don’t think that’s going to be
a problem.
There seems to be a hands-on tradition of funerals in my family, at least for
the men. My grandfather, Fleming Giles, on my mom’s side, was an Alaska
fisherman. He died inconveniently in the middle of winter. The family stored
his body in the cannery freezer in Seldovia while they dynamited eight feet of
ice in order to bury him. My grandfather, Gus Standish, on my father’s side was
delivered to a tiny cemetery in Soquel, California in the back of his own truck
and buried after the family dug the grave themselves. There’s a certain
irreverence and earthiness to these funerals that I like.
Nevertheless, I’ve decided that when I go, I want to be cremated. This is because
I got scared off by both Forest Lawn in L.A. and the main cemetery in Paris.
Both are massive, and both are exceedingly odd.
The cemetery in Paris is so big that it’s a city unto itself, but a city of
unmoving folk. A friend of mine and I ate lunch there one bright, winter day
and watched herds of mischievous youths dressed in black weave their way to the
graffiti filled area where Jim Morrison is buried. Then there were the old
women who fed the wild cats that roamed the place. It seemed like the cemetery
was a second home to them. They were entirely too comfortable placing plastic
dishes of cat food on the top of stone monuments—monuments that were meant to
symbolize great dignity, but were now being used as cat perches.
My husband’s great uncle, Martin, was buried at Forest Lawn in southern
California, another monolithic cemetary. Martin was an old world L.A. guy who
knew Walt Disney and used to play basketball with John Wayne. He was a sweet,
giant man with a Hitler mustache (or a Oliver Hardy mustache if you’re familiar
with Laurel & Hardy) who used to make doors at a factory his father built
in Burbank. My husband and I missed the funeral, but when we came to visit his
widow, Louella, we decided to visit Martin’s grave. Only we couldn’t find it.
We drove and drove and drove around, looking for it. Then we walked and walked
and walked around, and still we couldn’t find it. What they need at Forest Lawn
is a GPS tracking system for their dear, planted residents. Unfortunately,
there was no such animal at the time we were there. We had to do some research,
plot our plan of attack, and come back the next day after which we finally located
the grave.
I say, just turn up the furnace and make some fine dirt out of me, thank you
very much. Cemetaries aren’t my style.
My son agrees, but he said that if he was going to be buried, he’d be
imaginative about it. Why don’t you see more coffins with shark fins and racing
stripes, for example? Or why not strap the coffin to the top of the car like a
surfboard instead of having it hidden away where no-one could see it? Or why
not dress the pallbearders like thieves and do a gag where they race away with
the coffin? Death, it seemed to both of us, was entirely too serious. I’m not
saying we don’t grieve when one of us decides to stop playing the game, but it
doesn’t have to be as dark and gloomy as we make it out to be.
It’s not that I’ve always had a lighthearted attitude toward death. I used to
be pretty dour about the whole affair. But then, about a year ago, I had an out
of body experience, and once you experience something like that, everything
changes. Or at least it did for me. It’s hard to go along with the idea that
death is this hideous event when you know what comes after it. Once you’ve been
out of the body, you can’t pretend that you ARE the body. You can’t
pretend that life ends at death. The experience taught me that physical life is
a gift you give yourself, that it’s purposeful, and that you’re a fool not to
take it for a test spin. You take it for a test spin by squeezing as much experience,
challenge, love, joy, laughter and fun out of it.
I think that in the future, we may see a lot more celebrating and a lot less
mourning when one of the players we love checks out of the game. Because life
continues on for them. And for those of us who continue on here, each moment is
valuable. Those who transition to the next game know this. They want us to play
this one to the fullest extent of our abilities. That’s why we’re here.
So maybe my son is right. Maybe funerals are an underused entertainment venue.
Maybe his generation is going to use funerals as an excuse to celebrate life
and the living of it. All I know is that I don’t want anyone to miss me when
I’m gone. When I bow out, I hope that those that I love continue to have a
grand old time, playing the game. Because I know one thing for certain. I’m going
to be having a great time on my next adventure. So I wouldn’t want anyone to
use me as their excuse not to enjoy this one.
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About Samantha
Samantha Standish is a writer and a former intellectual property and corporate law lawyer. She received her B.A. in history with honors, and her B.A. in Spanish with honors, in 1989 from the University of California, Santa Barbara and went on to get her law degree Cum Laude from the University of Maine School of Law. In her legal career, Samantha worked in government and the private sector, most notably in the financial planning and software industry. In her personal life, she’s been married for twenty years and has a fifteen year-old home schooled son. Samantha resigned from the bar in 2005 and has devoted herself to bridge writing (making complex ideas about space/time easy to understand for the average reader) ever since, focusing mostly on self-help articles for artists and writing bridge books on the side. In her words, “The first forty years of my life were fact finding; the next forty years are about applying, expanding and exploring what I’ve learned.” Her books can be found at samanthastandish.com. Samantha’s NWV blog is titled The Magical Life.