Epitaphs

While I wish not to hasten my demise, I do recognize that it is forthcoming and inevitable. In that regard, it is therefore useless to try and hide from it, or bide my remaining time, be it minutes or decades, being concerned about it.

I have a pretty strong set of beliefs that come with them a great calm and even a certain sense of longing for the end. This is no suicide note. I'm a happy camper. But some days I do think, "Dead people don't have to work..."

Beside all that, I love a good mystery, and as mysteries go, death is a good one. The closest we can come is the "near death" experience. These firsthand accounts seem to have a number of common elements, but I don't regard these with any real accuracy. These stories and their similarities can be too easily explained away in a number of ways from "common brain chemistry" to "birds (weirdos) of a feather". And who is to say "near death" is any more like actual death than a "near collision" of two airplanes is like two planes actually colliding. Right up to the end they're pretty similar, but then, they couldn't be more different. At most, near death experiences are a simple whetting of our collective appetites.

See? Mysterious. I love it. I have this great curiosity about things and try to have at least a rudimentary understanding of all I can. You never know when you will meet a vulcanologist at his mother's wake who needs to talk about anything other than his mom in the box up front, surrounded by flowers. That actually happened to me. So happy was he to talk to someone about his work, and I could actually hold a conversation.

Knowing stuff comes in handy.

Why am I getting into this? I don't know. Seriously, I sit down and let my fingers do the walking. The last week has been a lot of blank pages with a cursor blinking malevolently at me. Failed attempts to commit something to the page. Yesterday, I hit upon it accidentally. I said that I wanted my epitaph to read as follows:

In life, like a hotdog.
Adored by many.
Reviled by some.
A mystery to all.

Maybe in Latin it sounds classier:

In vitae a farcimen.
Adoraverunt multis.
Maledicimur aliqua.
A mysterium ad omnes.

I had to substitute hotdog for sausage, as I am reminded that hotdogs are more or less a 20th century invention. Thank you, Polish and German immigrants! My waistline, and indeed the waistline of all the world owes you a swift kick in the ass!

Of course, I've taken you around the block, (assuming you are still reading, I know I'm not, I gave up 3 paragraphs ago), for nothing, since my epitaph doesn't matter. I am gonna be cremated, so unless someone wants an urn filled with "ash of Bill" and this charming little phrase engraved into it, then you can be my guest. Do they sell urns at Things Remembered? Do really want to be in an urn? So dour. How about a genie lamp? That would be awesome. I'd probably get rubbed more in death than in life.

Zing!

So, what would be a good epitaph for you? What two or three lines would distill your essence for the ages? It isn't so easy to figure out; and in trying, you may find you don't like what you come up with.