you can't take it with you

The thing about dead bodies is, they're not really people. I haven't seen many in my life, but I don't like to do it.

I had to today. I had to go really close to it, and I kept thinking, "Why is this a tradition? Why would anyone ever want to keep a corpse around for longer than necessary? Why pay for such a fancy nice coffin when dead matter is just gonna rot in it?" It's almost reminiscent of Egyptian burial rituals...how they preserved the body and gave it a room full of gold and crap, cause the person might need gold in the afterlife. And a boat to cross the Nile.

I'm not trying to be disrespectful to the person who died by calling their body decaying matter. It's just that...the person is gone. What made you love them and care about them and be their friend has nothing to do with what is now just a dead shell. I don't want people's last memories of me to be associated with some sickly strange corpse that looks vaguely like I did, and is for some reason wearing my nice clothes.

So here are some instructions when I die: Don't have a funeral. Just cremate me. In whatever I was wearing at the time. Don't put my ashes in some weird expensive urn; just put them in a box and then scatter them somewhere really cool like Massachusetts or the top of Half Dome or somewhere I've been and loved. Please don't leave them on your shelf or in your basement to discover later. You don't wanna do that. You can have a memorial service for some closure after everyone has had a little time to deal with it. At the service, you can put lots of pictures up of when I was alive; that would be very nice.

I'm very serious about this. I mean, maybe I'll change my mind about some of this later, cause I like the idea of a tombstone. But one thing's for certain: whatever you do; please, please don't buy me an expensive coffin.