Any Last Wishes?

"Everyone in your life will have a last day with you, and you don't even know when it'll be. " - unknown.

I attended a funeral recently. It was nice, as far as funerals go, but I found out later that it was not carried out in the way the deceased had wanted. Her husband and his family had taken over and done what they thought best. She did not want a viewing; she wanted to be cremated. But there she was, embalmed and on display.

This made me think about my own funeral plans and whether or not they were a worthwhile endeavor. This leads me to the following question: Should a person's wishes be respected when they can no longer advocate for themselves?

I have asked this question of a few people and have been given a couple of different answers. The first is that what the dead want is no longer relevant because they are dead and don't know what is going on anyway. In a way, you can't argue with that. Unless arrangements have been made that require their wishes to be honored, they really have no control over what happens after they die.

You may feel differently if you believe you will see them again. If you think they might come back and haunt you, or that they will throat-punch you when you meet in the next life, it is possible that you might be more inclined to do what they asked.

The second answer is that, of course, you honor their wishes because you loved them. Now, this applies to rational wishes that can be carried out legally and that aren't prohibitively costly or outrageous. If someone makes a request such as, "I would like a closed casket," or, "Please read this poem," you should try to honor it, even if it isn't what you would have chosen for yourself.

I have a song that I want sung at my own funeral. I want it sung by one person accompanied by a guitar. I understand now that it may or may not happen.

This leads me to another question: Is requesting that your favorite songs be played or certain pictures be displayed being a control freak? I did not think so before writing this, but Oscar Wilde said:

"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."

To me, the songs were going to be a way of participating in my own goodbyes. I was hoping it would be understood that I was trying to say, "I want you to hear this song. The lyrics are words that I wanted to say to you. Please listen to them as though they are coming from me."

Now, I am not so sure.

There is another way to look at it, though. When we tell someone what we want to happen after we die, we are giving them information that we know we will someday be unable to enforce. In a strange way, it is an act of trust. We are saying, "When I can no longer speak for myself, I trust you to remember what mattered to me." Maybe honoring the wishes of the dead isn't really about whether they will ever know what happened. Maybe it is about whether the living keep promises when no one is left to hold them accountable.

Everyone seems to handle death and the grieving process differently. Some people need others around them so they can tell stories, remember, cry, laugh, and feel comforted. This can give them a sense of closure—closure they might not get if someone they love says, "I do not want a funeral."

Here is our moral dilemma: Grieving someone's death belongs to the living. Honoring someone's last wishes belongs to the dead. To honor means to hold someone in high esteem and to respect them. So which one is more important?

Maybe a funeral has to make room for both. The living need a place to grieve, but the person who died should still be recognizable in the goodbye. Otherwise, at what point does a funeral stop being something we do for a person and become something we do to them?

"The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude." — Thornton Wilder.

William Saroyan wrote:

"The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough." — William Saroyan.

That is advice I intend to take.

I guess what I learned from all of this is that I will die. I can make a list of things that I would like done, but I cannot guarantee that the people laying me to rest will do them. If they do, hopefully it will be because they loved me and not because they are afraid of getting throttled when they see me on the other side. If they don't, hopefully I will understand that they had their reasons.

Do I still have any last wishes?

Yes, but the most important ones are for the living.

I wish to really live right up to my last breath. To taste my food. To laugh like hell. To notice the people I love while they are still here. To say the things I want them to know before I have to rely on a song at my funeral to say them for me.

This is my wish for the rest of you as well.

Love and Hope,

Big Sky Baby