Poem 28

death comes to us all

my legacy made or lost

by the way I live

the way to go

as so often happens around here we kind of got into a ridiculous convo. this one was about my potential funeral at some time in the very far distant future and eco coffins and personalised coffin decor.
yeah so anyhow i have issued some instructions, mainly that i do not wish to have a custom coffin that looks like a screen saver. no sunsets, no rainforests, no dolphins, definitely no dolphins. no sky, no oceans, no soaring eagles.
neither do i want my coffin to proclaim my love for country or sporting team or any other group.
and definitely no cardboard coffin made to look like timber. why have an ecologically sound coffin and pretend it's wood? all that does is reinforce the idea that tearing down forests is the way to go.
i'm thinking maybe a warhol style collection of photos of me. or a car bed.
an all over floral design would have been nice but i want the enormous floral arrangement on top of the coffin to be well appreciated so a floral decorated coffin might clash.....

yeah so anyways, what would you recommend for my personalised mortal remains capsule? or what do you want on yours?

I'm hoping to take the kids to the open day at the cemetery tomorrow. This particular cemetery is near the beach I like to take them to and we have often gone for a little wander among the headstones or the crypts after a morning swimming. They are fascinated, as I am, with the stories behind the stones, the stories we will of course, never know.

I always leave thinking about how little our gravestones say about us. When we were born and when we died place us on a timeline but they don't say anything about who we were.

Mother of...... , wife of........ , daughter of....... list the people we loved and who loved us and that is important but it still doesn't say who we really were. If I'm nobody's wife, nobody's mother, does that make me nobody? I think not.

Gravestones are neccessarily abbreviated representations of a life but why couldn't we, say, list a persons five best qualities or even list them as a cantankerous old eccentric ?

What do you think a gravestone should say?

And what might yours say?