Monday, March 31, 2014

Bury me not in the old Harley

When I die (not that I'm planning to do it anytime soon), please don't put me in a coffin covered with money or shaped like a duck (see them here) and don't bury me atop a Harley-Davidson (here) or any other vehicle, no matter how beloved. Don't put me in a pine box either--I'm too claustrophobic for boxes. I prefer to be cremated and have my ashes spread where trilliums grow, and if someone will read Wendell Berry's poem "The Peace of Wild Things," I'll be happy.

I'm thinking of this now because of two recent essays my Creative Nonfiction class discussed: "The Washing" by Reshma Memon Yaqub and "Building a Funeral" by Joni Tevis. Tevis offers a backstage look at the funeral industry, from the banal cliches of pre-need sales pitches to the varieties of gravestone gewgaws. She ends with a plea to whoever eventually plans her funeral: "Do what you can and hope that when your time comes, someone will do the same for you and for those who stand around the hole in the ground, looking in."

A similar appeal lies at the heart of Yaqub's "The Washing" (read it here), an account of one woman's experience of ritually washing a stranger's body before burial. In the end, the dead woman's body is wrapped in cotton until it resembles "a wrapped gift," but Yaqub makes it clear that the gift of community is born out of a group of hands working together silently in respect for both body and soul.    

One hand washing another: this image is evoked beautifully in "The Undertaking," in which poet/undertaker Thomas Lynch portrays the beauty of communal connections in funeral practices but also keeps repeating the refrain "The dead don't care." And it's true: the funeral is for the survivors, not the carcass, so if someone slips up and forgets to sprinkle me on the trilliums, I won't be demanding a refund.

But if you put plastic flowers on my grave, I swear I'll find a way to come back and haunt you!
 

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