Over Your Dead Body

OVER YOUR DEAD BODY
Death is a drag, for the living. We lament and remorse. We grieve and shout. We cry and quake. It is time we began producing people’s funerals and making them a little less on the macabre side. We speak in whispers like the that dead were in a library, reading. We speak in terms to make sure the dead are respected. They don’t need it and can’t appreciate it. It is not an enlivening thought that the only respect I will get in life is when I am dead. There are other ways to approach funerals than dressing in black and listening to piped in music from pipe organ. Let’s dress up the dearly departed and put the fling back in funeral.
The curtain goes up and on plaster column is a television, which is turned on and a pre recorded monologue begins. As the dearly departed they are now able to share all those things that would never be said in their life time. Copernicus had to do something like this, publishing his papers on Earth’s orbit after he was safely underground knowing full well the church would burn him at the stake if given the chance for his blasphemy.
Nowadays we want to be so politically correct that correctness has become political. In other words, we are correct only when it becomes a means of getting something we want. That is also political sincerity in action. But since you are dead, all convention goes out the window like dust, as it were, in the wind. Do we really have to wait until we have left this world, to truly speak our minds? Who hasn’t heard, “I would rather die than tell him what I really think.” We are too afraid of the consequences and repercussions to be honest with one another. With a pre recorded message you needn’t worry about being interrupted, because nobody would have the gall to ‘butt in’ on the dead.


You will be given a highly polished monologue, just like the kind you see on David Letterman and you can know that in your final resting place, “you killed em’.”
Top Ten Reason’s Why it is Better to Be Dead
1 At last some peace
2 The view is here is better than my apartment in Queens
3 Save a lot of money on clothes
4 Develop Intimate relations with earth worms
5 Get to look forward to “Turning Over in Your Grave”
6 Don’t have to listen to Fox News anymore
7 Finally understand the lyrics to all those Grateful Dead songs
8 Plenty of time to practice actually pushing up daisies
9 Don’t have to diet anymore, because you died.
10 Downsizing doesn’t scare you like it use to.

A production team will script your funeral proceedings and songs like Amazing Grace will be replaced with “Sympathy for the Devil”. Additional music from Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, Cobain, would lend a touching tribute to your once, state of mind.
As none of us can know what God really wants from us so we will make sure all your bases are covered. The presiding priest will wear a rubber mask of Lord Ganish and the Rabbi will be speaking in tongue and brisket.
Funerals and wakes need not be mournful affairs, not if you give your guests the opportunity to party like there is no tomorrow because for you there is no today.
Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we may die…drives the message home, but to make sure that the message gets home, assign a designated driver first.
We have no myths about death in American culture which is a fundamental lacking and perhaps the reason we fear it so much. It is said that 95% of all our medical bills are spent on the last year of our lives. With Eskimos, when you no longer have enough teeth to chew, they put you out on the ice as an offering for a polar bear. The legend goes that your children’s children will one day kill a polar bear and when they cut into the belly, you will come out reborn.
In our consumer culture when you no longer have enough credit to buy food, you will be put out on the curb as an offering for the landfill. Your children’s children, who won’t have enough money to go to college because you tapped all the credit, will be garbage men. They will find you on the curb and toss you into the back of the truck where you will go to your final resting place along with all of the other garbage that you threw away over a lifetime. You may not be able to take it with you, but ‘it’ will be taking you with it.
But back to our mortuary make over. Once your pre recorded message has been played the attendees at the wake will be so incensed they will want to bring you back to life just to kick your butt. So a life size replica will be available for them to punch, kick, insult, stab, burn, and assail with any number of assaults both verbal and physical. Some people feel better after battering. The guests can get it off their chests and go home feeling so much more at peace because in the end they will appreciate that they are living and can still take the time to stop and smell the crematorium.
M. Marlin ©February 2009