Bring Out Your Dead!!!

One of my friends told me today that he loves Smarties but he doesn’t eat them when he’s alone anymore. Last week he was at home by himself, happily popping Smartie after Smartie into his mouth, and inhaled one. For a moment he thought he was going to die by choking to death on a Smartie.  And all this after beating cancer. I told him at least he would have a cool obituary, and the conversation at the funeral would be interesting as hell:

            “You hear how Bill died?”
            “No, what happened?”
            “He choked to death on a Smartie.”
            “What the hell is a Smartie?”

            “You know, those little candies that come in a cellophane roll.”

            “You can choke to death on a Smartie?”
            “Well, Bill did.”

            I read on the Darwin awards website where some twisted fellow went down into his basement, dressed up in a school girl uniform, placed a gasmask on his face that had a  long rubber tube extending from the end, inserted the other end of the tube into….um, (no way to put this delicately) his rectum ,and asphyxiated himself. Can you imagine the look on the face of whoever discovered the body? Can you imagine the widow trying to explain that shit to the life insurance company?

            One of my mom’s cousins died a dignified death, but left instructions for her favorite pet cat to be “put to sleep” and placed in a box at the bottom of her casket. I didn’t find out about this until after the viewing at the funeral home or I would have been all up in that casket trying to find that poor cat. I don’t even want to know what she had done with the other cat that wasn’t her favorite.

            Speaking of death stories, there’s the one about a distant relative who was cremated. His daughter switched out his cremated remains with some Kingsford ashes from the barbeque grill. The wife, I guess, still has the Kingsford ashes in an urn on her mantle. Her husband, meanwhile, is scattered over a cemetery seven hundred miles away in another state, per his last wishes that the wife did not want to honor.

            Me? I don’t care how I leave this earth as long as it doesn’t involve fire or an overly extended period of suffering. Or anything like the poor guy in the basement. That goes without saying.  Afterwards? I don’t care. I like the idea of shooting my ashes off into space, but that’s probably a tad bit costly. I’ve always half-joked that I want my cremated remains to be given to my daughter. She loses things constantly. She can’t keep up with her driver’s license, her makeup, her shoes, her brush. I figure if she gets my ashes she’ll just lose them and the problem will be solved.  Maybe I'll eventually end up in a warehouse out in East Texas and have my fifteen minutes of fame on the television show "Storage Wars" when my ashes are discovered inside a makeup bag. Could be worse..