For Those Who Pass By

My Australian Twitter-pal @justjenking re-posted the above image from a Tweet by @matthewshaer who offers this explanation:

A lot of my neighbors work for the CDC or the Emory hospital system - needless to say, Halloween lawn decoration season around here really rules. 

Also needless to say, Twitter has velocity. @matthewshaer is based in Atlanta, Georgia, and @justjenking is a retired OR nurse living in a NSW suburb outside Brisbane who has pivoted into a second career in journalism. I'm in New York.

I'm sure someone has by now put together a photo collection of headstones that convey black humor. I've had my own thoughts about a headstone I'd like to see gracing my future plot ever since I was at a funeral for my wife's Aunt Emma in Centerville, Massachusetts a few years ago.

Aunt Emma was everyone's favorite, but certainly lived by a strict set of rules. The one item I distinctly remember that was read from the list of instructions she left behind for her daughter Lorraine to follow as part of her eulogy was that she was not to be laid to rest on a weekday, or obviously a Sunday (which would have been a no-go in Catholic church anyway). Aunt Emma said that no one should miss school, work, or church on account of her funeral. Therefore, it was to take place on a Saturday. And of course it did.

Those kind of instructions have always left me thinking. I could formalize some similar desires. Whether anyone would follow them is another story, and likely one I may not get to know the answer to, but one of my thoughts is that nothing should be placed in the coffin other than myself, suitably dressed.

The coffin is not a toy chest. Keep the memorabilia topside and in a drawer someplace. Do what you like. I can't use it.

One of my wife's other Aunts (and a younger sister of Aunt Emma) used to keep a copy of a cartoon by Chon Day, I think, attached to the refrigerator that showed a headstone that read:

I Told You I Was Sick.

Eventually it was true. Aunt Helen became very sick with cancer and passed away decades before her older sister.

The Halloween headstone pictured above got me to thinking that I could leave instructions as to what I'd like my own to say, and that I could make those instructions known way ahead of time and share them with the living before the last thing I'll do. Go public, so to speak. So here are my sentiments—pick one, I like them both—for all who pass by to see.

I Got Most Things Right

I'm Not At All Happy About This

BTW, any day of the week is fine with me.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com