What to Do With a Dead Body

My friend Sue is into death. By that I mean she is a professional expert in hospice and palliative care, a subject most people would rather not think about, let alone talk about. But Sue soldiers on, comforting people at the end of their lives, and for that she will definitely enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Posting articles on Facebook about dying and death that make it impossible to ignore the inevitable, today Sue shared a cartoon about the difficulty of getting aging parents to discuss what they want done with their dead bodies.

Nobody likes to talk about this stuff. One exception was another old friend of mine, Nancy, who made me promise that I would stop by her casket before the memorial service to make sure her bangs were pulled down over her forehead, which she always believed was too big. Anyway, she's not dead yet but we are no longer friends, and it wasn't her gigantic forehead that drove me away. I trust Nancy has found someone else for forehead duty at her funeral, since I won't be attending.

As for me, I'm hoping not to leave a body behind. How embarrassing--to be dead and have people touching you and dressing you in clothes you didn't choose and laying you out like a giant whitefish in a deli case. The lack of a dead body is one of the things that an airplane crash has going for it, which is a morbid thought, but on those trans-Atlantic flights any comforting thought helps, especially since recent findings suggest that consuming alcohol while flying is bad for you. Explosions and drowning at sea also take care of the body, so I'm hoping to meet my maker in one of those ways. Otherwise, good old-fashioned cremation works for me, continuing a family tradition including my parents, several dogs and cats and a couple of very endearing parakeets.