The day you’ve been waiting for is finally here; you are dead.
Unless you have a closed-casket funeral, you should worry about how you look. This is your last chance to make a lasting impression, I mean, a last impression.
In life, you always worry about people staring at you. A funeral is no different. The people in the room are celebrating that you are finally gone. They can’t wait to walk to your casket and laugh at your rotting corpse. Don’t let them catch you not properly prepared; prim and proper.
The funeral home, the coffin, the tears, the retention of water, they all conspire to make you look like a rotting plum. This is the moment you’ve been waiting for, don’t let all that ruin your opportunity to shine. Okay, that’s not the correct wording. This is the moment you’ve been dreading, and if you want to shine, you need to let your mortician know your foundation shade.
Death is the new black!
That’s why you need black flowers at your funeral, to shed the fifteen pounds the lighting adds to you. Everyone knows you couldn’t be bothered to exercise while alive, which is why you die of a massive coronary in front of the television.
Black flowers make you look like the intellectual you weren’t in real life, like you didn’t spend all your waking moments on social media and watching trashy reality TV, like you can quote de Beauvoir, Hegel, and Adler just as easily as you can recite Allen Ginsberg’s or James Baldwin’s poems.
Of course, black is not an option available to you if you are Hispanic. Anyone in the fashion world would tell you mixing black and brown is a faux pas, which is not the same as the misstep you took coming off the curb and getting pancaked by a school bus. You might be thinking, “Hey, brown and yellow don’t mix either!” True that, Joan Rivers. But there is little you can do when 40,000 pounds are barreling toward you at 80 MPH.
But still, you are dead, the last thing you want is to be thought of as fashion-impaired, too, so no black flowers for Hispanics!
Cheer up!
Everybody loves the dead. It doesn’t matter if you were not nice, made inappropriate jokes, or killed a handful of people. How many people are too many? The answer is an entire race. Hitler is the only person in history, and in death, we don’t think of fondly. He took it a little too far. But even Hitler, who is generally despised because he was indeed a douche who didn’t know how to finish shaving, still has a fan club.
That’s because all your sins are forgiven and forgotten when you are dead. Who cares if you punched down with your jokes or actually punched down children? Now, you are gone, which makes you a saint.
Next is what to wear, which doesn’t matter as long as you are buried with all your material possessions. Some people say the shroud has no pockets, but that’s only because your family wants to strip you of your wealth at death. You can definitely be buried with your money, or at least part of it, or a money order.
The dead should be buried with all their material possessions so kids don’t have to clean through their parents’ garage, familial relationships are not destroyed over the splitting of the goods, and the government doesn’t attempt to put their hands on something they didn’t work for.
It will also help with safe passage into the afterworld. Charon’s Obol was the Greek practice of putting a coin in the deceased's mouth to bribe Charon, the underworld ferryman. But with inflation, a coin is hardly enough. I’m sure that by now, Charon is either on strike or on LinkedIn looking for something with a more competitive salary, a benefits package, and the nights off, because seriously, who the hell wants to work the graveyard shift?
Yes, yes. As if death anxiety wasn’t enough, now you must worry about how your coffin looks. Of course, all of this can be avoided if you simply opt for cremation. Then you don’t have to worry about your skin’s dreadful ashy afterlife glow.
The ashes of your body are called your remains, as if you left this world but forgot something. “Here is my dad; he is no longer with us but forgot his body.”
Some people get clever, combine the words cremation and remains, and call it cremains, which seems wrong since Cremains could be the brand name for alternative milk ice cream.
Your loved ones are handed your bag of remains; what should they do with it now? You can instruct them to get an urn to celebrate your life turned to dust. Outline on your will if you’d like your urn engraved and if you want the material to be bamboo, metal, or glass (as in the case of a sand clock).
Also, have someone drop some of your remains in the trash before they fit you into the urn, so people think you were smaller in real life than you were. You will finally be able to shed the last five pounds that tormented you.
It is important to know that ashes have no expiration date, and neither do Cremains.
Just because you die doesn’t mean you have to stop being useful. You can request that your remains be turned into a candle-holding urn, a lovely synthetic precious stone, or scattered around the yard to fertilize your citrus tree; god knows that lemon tree could sure use it.
If you are more of a trendsetter, how about becoming a pod?
A pod will cover your entire body, and a tree will be planted on top of it. The tree will serve as the memorial for your remains. People can come to your tree and take selfies with you. Some people might opt for a fruit tree, but this is only an option if you were a well-adjusted person in life, as an apple could display notes of your resentment and feelings of inferiority.
Also, caveat emptor, sometimes, the saying “the apple of my eye” is more than just a saying.
Your loved ones will visit your tree and tell you the things they never told you in real life:
“Grandma, since my sister never visits, can I get the emerald earrings now? ”
“Grandpa, I’m here to prune your leaves back, as I wish I could’ve pruned back your racist remarks.”
“I love you, Dad! Now that you are buried under this tree, you will finally stop moving, and we will make up for the time we lost when you left.”
Whichever way you decide to go, a dozen black flowers would look very nice next to it; you can even light a candle and have your urn hold it. Vanilla is always a good scent when you close your eyes and take a big bite of “Cremains! The ice cream for lactose intolerant cannibals.”
