Other than the well armed and red haired Bonnie Parker showing up in my dreams on occasion there isn’t a whole lot of room in my personal mythology for ghosts. My theory is that if indeed ghosts existed we would be overrun by the damn things by now. World War Two ghosts would litter Europe and Asia like a tornado hitting a Klan Rally in Lower Alabama. To think there are lost souls out there haunting the sites of their lives, deaths, or burials is a stretch considering how many people have lived and died.

There is something a little bizarre in our preoccupation with the dead. My father, who is a man very much unlike myself, has at least one weird little quirk; he kidnaps family members. Oh, this isn’t to say he pulls a gun and forces someone into the truck of a car, but if you ever go anywhere with him, and he’s driving, then you’ve signed on to go anywhere else he might decide to go, even if you don’t want to go there. The cemetery is one of his favorite destinations for his victims, and my grandmother’s grave is where he always stops. Don’t be misled here. My father is just as likely to take you to see an old friend who lives thirty minutes away, or to show you what they’re building on the other side of town.  Alien abduction might be explained by that same need, don’t you know.

I don’t do cemeteries. I do not visit graves. I, in no shape, fashion or form, think it does me, or anyone else any good whatsoever, to go stand in front of a piece of granite, and talk to someone whose body lies somewhat preserved six feet beneath the ground. I think putting flowers on these stones is a waste of resources. I think getting a bunch of dead people together in a field is a waste of space. I think pumping a dead human body full of chemicals, putting it into a box, putting the box into a box, then burying all of this underground is silly. In nature, the purpose of the dead is to return life to earth, by returning the dead to the earth. We humans keep life from the earth by keeping the dead from the earth. It’s backwards, and it is detrimental to the environment, and to those who have lost loved ones, too. We need to let go of the dead, so we can continue to go on living.

Saying this in The South is paramount to teaching the fine art of eating babies.

Since I was a kid I thought cremation would be cool. Ideally, my cremation would involve a really large bonfire, or something of that sort. Cremation via volcano would be a neat way to go, and you have to admit the most efficient. The big argument I get against cremation down in this part of the world is the aversion to fire after death. It’s a religious thing, and therefore not subject to reasonable debate. There are people in my family who have openly said they believe our long dead relatives are watching over us. How would anything possibly go wrong then? With just two, maybe three or four generations alive at any given moment, wouldn’t stand to reason there were dozens upon dozens watching over us then?

Yet apparently the dead have much to be pissed about. Remember the movie “Poltergeist”? In that movie an entire neighborhood was haunted because the subdivision was built on a graveyard, and therefore, the dead were restless and apparently appalled. Worse, many of the cast died in the next few years fueling the idea that if people are stupid enough to be scared by dead people in a movie, they are stupid enough to be scared by dead people in real life.  Were the dead truly bothered by the disturbed grave thing doesn’t it stand to reason that, once again, there would be ghosts flying around like a large pack of rolling papers thrown out of a hippie’s van at ninety miles an hour right after the blue lights come on?

Okay, that analogy didn’t work, but you get the point.

The thing here is our perception of death, and what happens after we die, is just plain wrong. Why spend so much money on a funeral when the living needs the money much more than the dead? Why plant people in places you could plant food? Why have these marble slabs thrown down on the ground to mark the memory of a life if that life isn’t remembered anywhere else? And if it is, why then the slab and if not then why bother? The dead are dead. If their memories do not live within the people who loved them then they are truly gone, are they not?

I’d love to be planted in an open field, in a hole, and covered up. I’d love to be tossed into the ocean, and left to sink. I’d love to be burned to ash, and those ashes spilled into the black waters of the Okefenokee Swamp. If someone wants to bring flowers, they’ll have to do it from a canoe. If my life does not give my life any reason to be remembered, then I will slip quietly away in death.

It is the only way to go.

Take Care,,
Mike