When I Die

I’ll be honest – death can intimidate me sometimes. When I was a kid I always thought I was invincible. You hear about people you don’t know that died, you hear about how people die, you hear about young people that die but it never really hits all the way home. When I was young I had a family friend die of AIDS, but he was old (or so I thought at the time) so… it wasn’t okay, but it was somewhat justified. My first real shock at death was towards the end of junior high when the boy I had a mad crush on died. He was riding on his skateboard and hanging onto his friends truck when he tripped and his friend ran him over. Bummer how stuff like that happens. But anyway, I’m not here to tell you sad stories, I’m just saying that kind of set me off a bit. I didn’t know him well, I liked him but we never talked much – the point is that he died, he was dead, and he was my age, just about to go to high school. Yeah, it happens. It could happen to anyone, it could happen to me and tomorrow you may not be here anymore. I always figured death wouldn’t, no, couldn’t happen to ME. Me! I’d always say to myself, well, I can’t die yet I haven’t even insert something cool I hadn’t done here. Then I started to check those things off the list, and finally I couldn’t think of many things that would make a difference if that makes sense at all. Keep in mind, this was the reasoning of me at ages 12-15ish.

I have this friend. I’ve known her for a few years and love her to death. Only problem is she’s a junkie. She’s kind of obnoxious and says shit out of the blue. I don’t see her much when she’s doing drugs, but when she’s clean and I know she is for sure I’m with her a lot. I haven’t seen her in a while, but the other day I found something that made me think a lot. I found her will in my jacket pocket. I was getting dressed up for a punk show and thought I’d wear my old leather jacket. I put it on and reached in my pocket, and there was her will written on a piece of cardboard torn from a Natural Ice box. It said, “I,{name} would like to be buried with all of my possessions including my two stupid cats except the things that Chloe (too_fast_to_live) and {boyfriend} do not want. I also want to be buried with a neon green beehive.—name”

At first I laughed when I read it, but then I remembered when she wrote it. She had called me around one or two in the morning, crying. For a while I was always her moral support, always around to be a shoulder to cry on. The thing is, she’s a tough ass bitch. She’s not even eighteen yet but she’s tattoo’d, mohawked, and tried to kick my ass the first time we met. After I got to know her better I realized that most people aren’t the act they put on around other people. Most people, including myself, put up a wall around everyone – but she’s the most extreme case of this I’ve ever seen. In reality she’s an extremely sad little girl. She even still has dolls, and all she wanted for her birthday was an easy-bake oven. But, back to the story – I drove over to see her. When I saw her she was sitting in an empty room, sitting in the corner crying. She told me that it was important that I take her will and keep it forever. She said she loved me and I was the best friend she’d ever had, and wanted me to have all her records and posters. She also explained she wanted her cats to be with her in the grave and that she wanted to be buried with a green beehive because it would be the most punk rock thing anyone could ever do. I kind of laughed, and then realized… God damn, she’s actually serious. So I put her will in the inside pocket of my leather jacket, talked for an hour and watched Flavor of Love, we did some New York impressions and I left, but not before she reminded me to keep her will. Since then she’s asked me twice if I still had it with about a month in between each inquiry.

My boyfriend has told me at least over 30 times what he wants to happen when he dies. He wants to donate his body to necropheliacs after I get to have sex with his body first, then he wants to be shot into space. Sad thing is my boyfriend’s a little crazy and really wants this. Enough about all that. Here’s the real reason for me writing this – I’ve never truly thought about what I want to happen after I die. I’m eighteen, and hopefully I’ve got some time to live – but hey, I might not. I could be driving down the street and get hit by a drunk driver. I could be sitting on the windowsill smoking and fall over and land on my neck and die. I could take some bad acid, or even take acid and then do something stupid. I could get lung cancer, at the rate I smoke it’s very possible. I could… I could die a lot of ways. I could even kill myself if I wanted to, which I’ve thought about – even when I thought about it I didn’t really think too hard about what it would be like after I was dead. You could argue it doesn’t matter because you won’t be there. I guess it doesn’t matter, but if I could choose what happens to me it would go something like this:

First, I don’t want to be cremated. The last thing I want is my dead body to be put into an incinerator. That’s bullshit. If some mother fucker tries to burn my body, I’ll come back as a pissed off ghost and haunt them ‘til they join me in hell (because I’m sure as a ghost you’re able to visit hell whenever you’d like).

I want to be buried. I don’t want a fucking plaque in the ground. I hate those little rectangle plaques in the ground that people step all over, walk around, and don’t notice until they’re standing right over them. I’m not a clone, I don’t try to be the same as everyone else and I sure as hell don’t want my grave marking to be like everyone else either. Ideally, I’d like a statue of myself making a really sexy pose. If I couldn’t be a sex symbol in real life, I’d like my statue to be one. I also want lots of roses to grow around my grave. I wouldn’t want my middle name initialed, I’d want it to be my middle name – Rose.

Okay, so if I couldn’t have a statue I at least want a tombstone – as long as it’s not a fucking plaque. If possible, I’d like a photograph on my tombstone of me when I was seventeen in my leather jacket and hair teased. A lot of people say I look like Nancy Spungen in it and I get pissed off. I think it would be pretty cool if someone was walking past my grave and was like, “oh shit! Look, it’s Nancy Spungen’s grave! And then they’d read the name and say, “oh shit, it’s not. But that girl’s pretty hot too.”

Next, I’d want to be buried with my Billy Idol autographs, all my records and CD’s. I want to be buried with one picture for each person I’ve ever loved in my life, which I’m starting to put together. I want to be buried with Alice in Wonderland accompanied by Salvador Dali’s renditions of Alice in Wonderland (wouldn’t have to be the originals, a print out would be fine as well).

I want my funeral to be at night, in the graveyard. I want all my friends to be there, and I want everyone to remember me how I was and keep that with them forever, but to not dwell on it.

I want my picture in the newspaper.

I want all of my poetry/novels to be published because I’m too embarrassed to share anything I write with people I know, but I would like it to be read by people someday seeing as that’s pretty much what I do all the damn time.

Other than that, I don’t really care what happens to my stuff. People can have what they want, but I want my old punk clothes to be saved and never sold. I don’t want any of my clothes to go to a thrift store because they’re my clothes. I read a book in junior high, I forget what it was called – it was a book of short stories. There was one story where a girls mother dies and her father donates all of her mothers clothes to thrift stores around town and she goes to all of them and finds all of her mothers clothes. For some reason that’s always stuck with me. I guess the reason I don’t want my clothes to go to strangers is because they’re so personal to me, my punk stuff anyway. I don’t care about the shit I wear because I work and have to dress like everyone else, or the stuff I just like. It’s my leather jackets, my vintage coats, the shirts I made when I was twelve.

Other than that, it doesn’t matter. I’ll be dead, I’ll be gone. I don’t think anything happens to you when you’re dead – but believe me, if there is some sort of after life you can be sure I’ll raise hell.