In my writing, I like it when I can laugh and make people laugh and feel good, and that’s why I wanted to talk to you all about death.

Death.

Yep, it’s still going on. They haven’t cancelled it.

Death.

Even the word is scary, death.

Death

Death

Death

Death

Death

Death!

I know that some people are sensitive about it, talking about death is uneasy territory, we all kind of want to be offended if someone even brings it up. But, seriously, there’s no reason to be offended, no one reading this is dead.

I don’t really have anything useful to say about death, I just wanted to remind you it’s going to happen. Really. You’re not an exception. You have no reason to think you’ll outlive your statistical life expectancy. But not me of course, I can’t die, I’m the main character. But next time you’re in a group of around ten or so people, assuming their ages and health are randomly distributed, just remember that odds are one of those ten won’t make it through the next ten years. You won’t know which one, and you won’t know if it actually ends up being one, or zero, or two, or all ten of you – it’s just an average.

I sometimes worry what people will think of my life if I die today. Not about my legacy or whatever, and if I ever get to direct a Star Wars sequel or own a pet duck, I’m worried about how people will perceive my everyday stuff.

A while back I had a great-uncle die in California. He was a loner, lived apart from the family, apparently his body wasn’t found for months. My great-aunt went there to clean up and sell the house and was talking about what they found in his house, and I noticed some relatives doing a little psychoanalysis of the guy based on what they found: “The fridge had beer – he was an alcoholic, he had a thirty-year-old radio – he was a cheapskate.”

Since then, I’ve pictured my family going through my apartment after my death and doing the same thing: “When we cleaned out his freezer, we found 10 boxes of bacon in there.” And I won’t be around to try to explain “well they were on sale. It was buy 1 get 9 free. I was going to host a barbecue next week. I was going to invite you, stop being so judgy.” I can’t say anything about it so they can judge all they want.

It makes me worry sometimes about the kind of thing I have out around the house. Like when I leave my apartment in the morning I sometimes look at the record I listened to last on the turntable. And I think to myself, if I get hit by the UVX bus, do I want my brother to be emptying my apartment and see that was the last record I listened to? (low voice) “Look at this, Waterloo by ABBA. Well, that’s one way to live your life.” I imagine them cleaning out the cupboards: “why isn’t there any celery in here? He wasn’t getting any vitamin A. If only he would have eaten carrots he would have seen the bus coming.”

Sometimes when I buy something, unbidden images enter my head of people figuring out what to do with it after I die. I have so much weird stuff, they’ll be wondering for years what my geiger counter is for. No one but me is interested in my records, they’ll completely fail to appreciate the beauty of “The Spirit Of Achievement – Songs from the 1976 Exxon Distributors Convention.” And no, I’m not joking about that one.

I also worry about my funeral. It’s an event I have no control over, I can’t choose what I wear, I can’t write the speeches, and I can’t even pick the music. I would like ‘We Will All Go Together When We Go,’ Tom Lehrer’s Cold War ‘survival hymn,’ but it will probably be end up being something like “The Lord My Pasture Will Prepare,” just to bore me to death.

Sometimes when I worry about my funeral I’m self-conscious of my weight. I have horrible visions of my funeral, they try to haul the casket out of the chapel and have to ask the congregation, “could we please get 4 to 6 more strong-backed volunteers for pallbearers? Or does anyone have access to one of those things Costco uses to move pallets around?”

By the way, wouldn’t it be hilarious if I died while writing this? And if someone finds my body slumped over the keyboard with this unfinished essay on it and posts it online, it will be my version of Mozart’s Requiem. I guess for whoever finds my body, that wouldn’t be funny, but if there’s an afterlife, I’d be cracking up there. And even if there were no humor in the afterlife or no afterlife at all I still kind of think it would be funny. The meaning of my life would be a setup for that joke that only I would get.

I’m not normally this morbid, 99.9 percent of the time I block thoughts like this out and try to pretend, like most people, that death won’t happen to me. It would be a much less scary subject if we were familiar with what would happen when we die. Faith gives us some general ideas about the afterlife, but the specifics are still elusive. That’s why cartoons have escalators and clouds and pearly gates and things – it seems familiar. But for all we know, the afterlife could have an elevator instead of an escalator, or maybe one of those weird rubber moving sidewalks they put in airports. We can only guess because we don’t know, and it’s scary. The unknown is scary. I’m afraid of death the same way I’m afraid of the tacos the place down the street from my apartment sells 24 hours a day.

Sometimes I picture my own death, wonder how I’ll be remembered. I actually wrote my own eulogy, and I pictured how the rest of my life would go, all the great things that would happen to me, and then I realized I wasn’t being realistic, so I added possible setbacks in my life also. So here’s the speech they’ll read at my funeral:

Dearly Beloved,

Andrew was many things: Bestselling writer, filmmaker, chef, crazy uncle. A loving husband and father? Maybe? There’s a rumor he was Batman, but that’s clearly ridiculous, everyone knows Batman doesn’t wear glasses. On a related note, the Riddler sends his condolences. Or does he?

Andrew was born in Idaho, but he considered Utah his home. He attended BYU and a correspondence course from Hamburger University. He worked in banking once, before becoming a bestselling author and songwriter. He wrote books and musicals about love, murder, space travel, suspicion, the paranormal, human nature, and barbecue.

He eventually adapted his own books into low budget films, which led him to a career in filmmaking. He later directed the disastrous reboot of Star Wars, and the public and fan reaction to the film is now considered a major contributing cause of the Third World War. During the war, he opposed the draft, and made several anti-war films, which, in his own words, were “generally boring and pretentious.” They were a big hit with the 2060’s countercultural movement. After the war, he was a strong supporter of our new Canadian overlords.

He was found Monday morning in the library, crushed under a stack of books. He would have been happy to have gone while doing research, though his only regret would be not finishing his book. Or his lunch.

Thanks for reading, may your day be filled with pleasant thoughts of the future!
-A

Death!