Funeral Day

I had a riff going about how my worst nightmare would be dying during quarantine and not getting to enjoy the elaborate, 4-day funeral I've been crafting for years. But after reading what Springsteen said on his show earlier, it's not really funny anymore:

“One of the most heartrending aspects of these deaths is that the virus has stolen from us our rituals, our funerals, our wakes, our house meetings with family after the burial,” he said. “Our ability to stand by our loved ones, to touch them, to kiss them as they pass, to look into their eyes and let them physically know how we love them. This is the cruelty of this disease. To say our last goodbyes to our loved ones by phone and then to return home alone to an empty house. It is a heartbreaking and lonely death for those afflicted and for those left behind to pick up the pieces.”

Unspoken was the fact that his elderly mother Adele has been suffering from Alzheimer’s for a number of years. He did speak about the loss of his father Douglas Springsteen back in 1998. “When my father died, we stood in the graveyard in the midst of our large family and we took shovels and we buried my father ourselves. It meant a great, great, great deal to me and is a memory I’ll cherish as long as I live.”

(Ok now let's switch back to some comedy, please, people)

But "But Xmastime", you say in the voice of Craig “Ironhead” Heyward from those soap commercials (RIP), “didn't your least-selling novel point out the foolishness of planning on enjoying your own funeral?"

Sigh. Yes, faithful readers. Yes I did.

Thoughts of suicide came to me. Maybe I’d just kill myself, and then everybody would stand around at my funeral shaking their heads in admiration about how honorable I’d been, ending my life before I became someone else’s problem. “What a class act,” they’d all say as they toasted glass after glass to me and my incredible sense of honor. Or maybe everyone would be so grief-stricken with guilt they’d spend years wondering what terrible things they had done to make me do such a thing, other than living their own lives as fully as possible and being perfectly nice to me. This was like my dream that if I ever did for some reason become a success I’d tell everybody to go fuck themselves since they never believed in me, even though they’d never done or said anything even remotely close to insinuating such a thing and were, in fact, far more supportive and generous than I’d ever been to any of them.

But of course death’s permanence meant I wouldn’t be able to stroll through my own memorial service and revel in all those hosannas, and even in the depths of my wallowing I knew I’d never have the guts to do the right thing and kill myself - for once, my lack of initiative would be useful to my own survival. Also, I was pretty sure that the day after I killed myself would be the day in which it would have all turned around for me. My best hope for living was that the next moment would offer a reason to live.