There’s a scene in the great Woody Allen movie Love and Death where an imprisoned Allen has a jail cell vision the night before his execution, telling him he will be spared.
The following day, he’s one cocky fellow, cracking wise before the executioner. In the next scene, Allen’s in a field holding hands with a hooded Grim Reaper. His beloved, played by Diane Keaton, asks, “What happened?” And Allen says, “I got screwed.” Well, we’re all gonna get screwed. There’s a bus with your name on it or an acid rain shower or an escaped gorilla or a disturbed pancreas. In any event, you will get screwed. Fortunately, we have options on how we will be remembered – hopefully not like Allen, whose great comedy has long been overshadowed by the perception that he “married his daughter,” which agitated him so much that he forgot how to be funny.
Before your passing, your succumbing, your moment of going pincers up, you can make choices from a long list of options for easing the pain of those who remain behind, waiting for the day an SUV crushes their Prius on the West Freeway.
You can choose your own casket, of course, but I bet you didn’t realize how much fun that can be. The variety from just one company, called Celebrate Life, is startling.
For folks who spent a great chunk of their speck of time on Earth watching brightly bedecked vehicles turning left, there’s the NASCAR-themed “The Race is Over,” a colorful coffin complete with a checkered flag. Naturally there are Cowboys caskets as well as other pro and collegiate entombers. What could possibly impress God more than a Nebraska Cornhusker coffin? Well, maybe a KISS casket or the Harley-Davidson edition or “The Hunted,” for those freshly harvested humans who wish to be buried in a box with camouflage inside and a carved deer head on the lid.
But maybe a coffin isn’t your style. You’re Green to the bitter end! In North Carolina, you can simply be shrouded and buried just a few feet below the ground. This will especially come in handy should you experience a Vincent Price-like premature burial. It will be much easier to escape the grave through dirt rather than trying to claw your way out of a golf-themed “Fairway to Heaven” casket.
Perhaps you’re into cremation. Not only is it cheaper than a traditional burial, but you can send your friends and family to far-off locales that you liked much better than them (Galveston? Gross!) to scatter your ashes. In doing so, you can impart one last life lesson: Ashes are not powdery at all but more like gritty kitty litter and probably not all that Earth-friendly. (But they do a good job of soaking up driveway stains – how’s the deceased gonna know?)
You could have your ashes parked on a “talking tombstone” where you can record your voice giving visitors, at the push of a button, bon mots of your hard-earned life experience. Initially I had chosen “Love your neighbor,” but recently I heard the single wisest sentence ever (at a eulogy) and have adopted it as my Final Words: “There’s never a time when a fart isn’t funny.”
Since I learned from the first Star Trek movie that we are carbon-based units, you can take your ashes and have them compressed into a diamond. The living recipient can weigh the resulting creepiness against future pawn shop potential. Then there’s Gravescape, a company out of Ohio that will relieve the guilt of those left behind by contracting to tend the graves of their loved ones. Certainly you are too busy with PETA or Kincaid’s to bother with blowing the leaves off Grandpa’s grave, especially since he was thoughtless enough to be buried in Florida. After a $12.95 one-time location fee, the company will clean the gravesite and shoot a photo of it for $45.95. Plus, they’ll sell you flowers in a vase at around $80 a pop. Gramp’s plot will no longer look like one in a Phantasm cemetery.
Whatever you decide, take care when choosing one of those advertised prearranged funeral plans where you pay for everything (or so you think) in advance.
A recent report by AARP (and, let’s face it, who’s going to know more about dying?) said there are scams aplenty in the prearranged funeral business.
You’re already going to be dead – why get screwed twice?
Mark K. Campbell is a local freelance writer whose recent MRI showed his pancreas to be “sludgy.”
