My “Final Wishes”

It sometimes feels strange to me to have thoughts about my “final wishes”.

Come on, everyone knows what those are, right?  The thoughts about the arrangements for disposal of your remains after you die?

Personally, I could care less what happens to my body once I am done using it.  I am not my body.

For one thing, I think I can count ten people, twelve or thirteen at the most, that might actually care enough about me right now and it would matter to them if I die.  How could I possibly know this, you ask?  Because those people are the ones who actually take and make the time for me now, the same way I take and make the time for them.  With everyone else, I feel like what some kids these days like to call the “begger friend”.  These are the kids that no one really wants to be bothered with but most kids will be nice to them when it is actually necessary. 

Trust me, I love and I am so appreciative and grateful for everyone who chooses to make me a part of their life.  However, realistically speaking in the scheme of things, ten – thirteen people is not really a lot of people, is it?  For that amount of people, it hardly seems worth spending, easily, over $10,000.00 to host a party for them and all the other obligatory friends and family who feel the need to show up at a funeral parlor.  $1,000.00 per person?  That would have to be one hell of a party, don’t ya think?

Respectfully, I think dinner at a very nice restaurant would suffice for the occasion.  The only real dilemma here is what to do about the disposal of my remains but, that can be remedied with a simple donation to a medical school or the cheapest crematorium in the state, then my ashes can be scattered into the ocean somewhere near Provincetown, Ma. or anywhere, really, along the New England seashore because I love being near the ocean.

My thoughts about the subject of my final wishes change from time to time.  Before my daughter Katie died, I thought I might like to donate my body to a body farm somewhere in the south of the United States to be used for science.   Believe it or not, I have always been what some people might like to call, in a negative way I might add, “a do-gooder”.  Whether some believe it or not, I am a good person inside and I am always looking for ways to be helpful to others.

After Katie died, I thought I might like to be cremated and placed in the burial plot at the cemetery with her but now, I’m back to not really knowing what I would like to have done with my remains.

In the back of my mind I’m having a kind of tug-o-war going on.  On the one hand, I feel like I have plenty of time to decide what to do about “my final wishes”, after all, I do not feel old, no more so than when I was a young woman.  On the other hand, my chronological age is telling me that I will not be here forever and I do not have all the time in the world anymore.

Ah, decisions, decisions, hopefully I will have made my choices known in time to make other’s lives’ easier once I am gone from this planet. 

Thank you for reading.