The post below, Funeral food for thought, has been filed away as a draft for a few months now. I never quite knew what to do with it. Then I was thinking about my “arrangements” for the farewell to my earthly body, but this post, What happens to your website when you die? made me think about death on a different level – cyber death. What happens to your online self when you die? That post, from Cross Channel Marketing Consultants refers to a real estate agent that died a couple of years ago but whose smiling face and contact information are still up on her website.
Something to contemplate for those of us who Google ourselves and find lots more traces of ourselves than we would have ever imagined. So who’s going to clean up that mess when you die? Have you made arrangements to have yourself erased when you pass on, or have you built systems that will assure your cyber immortality? Just something to think about. Please leave a comment.
Funeral food for thought
Last Spring I spent a very long day and logged over 500 miles to attend a funeral and burial. Funerals, no matter what form they take, always bring me to grips with the fact that I am not going to be around, forever and that when I finally break the earthly bonds, someone else is going to have to deal with it. No matter how much I state what I want my “arrangements”, I won’t know if my wife and friends will follow my wishes.
The funeral I attended was pretty traditional. Open casket at the funeral home, piped in hymns, eulogy, prayers, and the burial 200 miles away in a remote family plot in southern Arkansas. One of the good things about church funerals and burials is the food. Food seems to get people’s minds off their grief for a little while. No one sums that up better than Kate Campbell:
Funeral Food: choices, choices
I think we should make our “arrangement” wishes know to everyone who will listen, so they can hold our loved ones accountable. I just know I don’t want to be laid out in an open casket. Hell, I don’t even want a casket. I want a quick cremation, OR my body donated to science. They have a pretty good deal here in Memphis at MERI, where they pick you up, use your body for the advancement of science, then return your cremated remains to your loved ones when they are through.
Of course the biggest part of the arrangements is the Service. I sure don’t want a traditional funeral, but the closest thing I would accept is an Episcopal service – Rite 1, please. Just no priest or preacher who never knew me and would get my name wrong. No,I wouldn’t have a problem with a secular kind of commemoration or memorial service either.
Music- I have a couple of songs I would like played live, not recordings, at the service. My friends know what they are and I am depending on them to pull them off in the most raucous way possible.
All of the stuff above should be paled by the after party: buy that expensive liquor I never shared with my friends, but Keep some PBR iced down for my closest friends.
