102311

On days like this you need to put on a jacket, put on another jacket, put on music you've never listened to before, and take a walk. Take a good long walk. One where you walk til you don't want to hate your life anymore and then turn around and walk back home.
Make side trips. Go past a friend's old house. Go to the grocery store. Go through the cemetery.
A cemetery is just a park.
Go to the grave of Mildred McCome who died 86yrs ago, age 16, and now her headstone lies flat on top of a concrete base staring up at you with letters so worn you can't be sure her name is even really McCome.
I thought it was the children's section of the cemetery but right in the middle are buried people who lived full lives and it looks so wrong next to the tiny markers with dates spanning less than a decade, a year, a week. Baby Daniels. Infant Roberts. All of them engraved with lambs.
I don't know what it means to be "asleep in jesus."
If I ever got a headstone, I want it to have a secret compartment. I want it to have a quote worth thinking about, like something from margaret Atwood or Joey Comeau. I don't even think I need my name on it. If I had visitors, I hope they'd known me well enough to know it's my heavy body down there.
But I don't really want a tombstone. I want a tree planted over my body so it can feed off of it and grow and make new life and bring beauty to a place most people find cold and dead. I want to tell my friends to make me executor of their estates in their wills if they want to be memorialized with a tree, because that's what I would do for every single one of them and we'd all be big strong gorgeous trees somewhere laughing in the wind about who got peed on by some man's dog in the dead people park.

I don't want to live forever and I'm glad I won't.