A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

A few years ago I told Mother of my ideal funeral and the specific way I wanted to be buried. I proclaimed that these luxurious caskets and large processions were just a waste of precious resources. I wanted to be buried buck-naked in the ground and have a tree planted over my grave. The spectacle was going to be a shocking message of life's frailty. The tree: a sign of regeneration and all the good that can come from death. It was a beautiful thing, really.

And I'm not sure if it was the image of my naked, limp body being dropped into a hole while my loved ones stood watching, or the naive idealism of my outrageous funerary ideas at such a young age. Whatever it was that I conveyed, it made Mother laugh, and quite uncontrollably. Upon seeing her reaction I retracted from my passionate intensity, and nervously laughed along. However, I was kind of hurt by my beautiful idea being taken so lightly. Later on at work I talked to my coffee colleague and he further denounced my idea by informing me of the strict laws prohibiting such a burial, due to the likelihood of poisoning the ground water and the unsanitary nature of handling a naked and decomposing body.

Yet it wasn't until a year later, when I read an essay by Thomas Lynch, a funerary undertaker, I fully gave up on planning for my funeral.

...The priest that married me...a man who loved golf and gold ciboria and vestments made of Irish linen; a man who drove a great black sedan with a wine-red interior and who always had his eye on the cardinal's job--this same fellow, leaving the cemetery one day, felt called upon to instruct me thus. "No bronze coffin for me. No sir! No orchids or roses or limousines. The plain pine box is the one I want, a quiet Low Mass and the pauper's grave. No pomp and circumstance."
He wanted, he explained, to be an example of simplicity, of prudence, of piety and austerity--all priestly and, apparently, Christian values. When I told him that he needn't wait, that he could begin his ministry of good example even today, that he could quit the country club and do his hacking at the public links and trade his brougham for a used Chevette; that free of his Floursheims and cashmeres and prime ribs, free of his bingo nights and building funds, he could become, for Christ's sake, the very incarnation of Francis himself, or Anthony of Padua; when I said, in fact, that I would be willing to assist him in this, that I would gladly distribute his savings and credit cards among the worthy poor of the parish, and that I would, when the sad duty called, bury him for free in the manner he would have, by then , become accustomed to; when I told your man these things, he said nothing at all, but turned his wild eye on me in the way that the cleric must have looked on Sweeny years ago, before he cursed him, irreversibly, into a bird.

As Lynch went on to explain, living is the rub. So recently I've been getting rid of what I don't need. Mostly clothes and unused items like that Etch-e-Sketch that sat in my closet for years. I consolidated all my keepsakes into a couple of boxes and have been releasing all that I can. Of course this is only a small step in the larger process of completely bloodletting my selfishness. The harder things to let go of are the ones much less tangible: my pride and objectification of those around me into pleasure machines of lust and attentiveness; my vice in viewing people as personal audience members that measure my self worth by offering applause or jarring taunts in reference to my every move. It?s the simple moral and relational decisions I make everyday that determine the significance of my death, and the example of my life lived that shines brighter than my death spectacle.