Digging My Own Grave

So here's the thing: My father calls me up today and tells me my uncle and aunt were in town to purchase their cemetery plots. My father says this got my mother thinking (and when that happens, look out! Armageddon usually follows!) about purchasing grave sites for the whole family. She wanted to know if I wanted a cemetery plot with them.

What a pleasant way to start the day: dwelling on your own mortality.

My father said my uncle wanted a cemetery plot, while my aunt didn't want to be buried and instead stored in a mausoleum.

Dad wanted to know what my plans for interring my earthly remains were.

I'm in my 40s, so the thought hadn't crossed my mind.

Unless you're dying, who really contemplates such morbid things?

My cousin wants to be cremated and have her ashes scattered in the ocean. What kind of depressive state does one have to be in to make such plans?

I told my dad I want to have traps installed in my crypt to deter grave robbers, like a rolling boulder or spikes shooting from the walls like in Raiders of the Lost Ark. How about mummifying my body and enshrining it inside a sarcophagus decorated with Anubis and Horus? Oh, and naked chicks. Lots of gratuitous nudity in my tomb so the family wonders if I was really Larry Flynt.

My mom worried if I die before her, my body would not rest in the cemetery where my grandparents are buried. She also worried because I don't have children, nobody would mourn me.

I think the entire concept of western burial is overblown. You saddle your loved ones with paying for a coffin which costs thousands of dollars, then thousands of dollars for funeral arrangements, then buying a burial plot and headstone. An extravagant funeral is the ultimate "fuck you" to cash-strapped, grieving family members.

Why should I have a burial plot now? I plan on living for another 50 years. A grave site is so final. I can take my girlfriend there on the weekends and look down at this grassy piece of earth and tell her, "When I die, I will be laid to rest right here, for worms to gnaw my face off."

After that date, she'd dump me.

What about donating your body to medical research? Having some fidgeting medical student dissect you like a bloated frog? Or a perverted necrophiliac lab tech molest your cold corpse? Actually, that last one describes sex when I was married. Banging away on something cold an immovable.

How about cremation? Stored in an urn and placed on someone's mantle for decades? What happens when they die? Do they suck you into the vacuum cleaner and toss you out?

Who obsesses about this crap? Dark, brooding goth teenagers, maybe.

What if you marry somebody your family hates and both of you are buried side by side. Your family, visiting your grave has to stand near the grave of the person they despise. They lay flowers on your half while taking a piss on the other half.

"Shame about Eric. I always hated that bitch!"

I don't know where my bones will rest, whether in a marble tomb in some distant graveyard with haunting willow trees blowing in the wind, in a pauper's grave for failed writers or in a serial killer's cabin in a jar with the remains of a dozen hookers.

Don't really know where I'll end up.

When you're dead, you're dead.

It isn't how you die, but how you live, right?