The Best Funeral Possible
By Timothy Dennis - December 25th, 2009Human existence is plagued by impotent rituals. A large amount of our time is taken up by repetitive traditions that lose meaning due to thoughtless monotony, and it would serve us well to revise them. As such, I've mapped out a quick guideline to what's surely been on our minds for a good long while - the deaths of our family and friends.
Guests should arrive thinking they're going to attend a marriage or birthday party, gifts in tow. Ushers will seat guests and instruct them to wait quietly for an important announcement regarding the birthday boy/girl/betrothed/deceased. Finding out a friend or family member is dead on scene will increase emotion ten-fold, and ensure that even people who didn't much care for the body are firmly swept up in a collective wave of sadness.
A video will is then displayed to all, taking time to highlight those who may have recently irritated the deceased. It will become commonplace for video wills to be recorded weekly, to promote a kinder environment for all, since nobody wants to be called out on being a jerk in front of a dead person's close ones. Also, uproarious topical humor will be much more prevalent while the estate is divvied up to beneficiaries, brightening the mood considerably as the corpse is lowered into the ground.
The one-two punch of a funeral's immediacy and hilarity will no doubt be a roller coaster, and as such folks will want to remember the occasion with something tangible. Boom - Yankee Swap. The gifts everyone brought along are traded at random, so even folks who didn't receive anything in the deceased individual's will get a little something to remember them by.
Granted, the whole thing implodes on itself if your friends and relatives keep any sort of track of your life, what with them probably being aware of your birthday and whether or not you're in serious enough of a relationship to warrant marriage. But if you're a cagey loner like myself, the situation is ideal. Unless people simply don't show up.
But who cares, I'd be dead.
Guests should arrive thinking they're going to attend a marriage or birthday party, gifts in tow. Ushers will seat guests and instruct them to wait quietly for an important announcement regarding the birthday boy/girl/betrothed/deceased. Finding out a friend or family member is dead on scene will increase emotion ten-fold, and ensure that even people who didn't much care for the body are firmly swept up in a collective wave of sadness.
A video will is then displayed to all, taking time to highlight those who may have recently irritated the deceased. It will become commonplace for video wills to be recorded weekly, to promote a kinder environment for all, since nobody wants to be called out on being a jerk in front of a dead person's close ones. Also, uproarious topical humor will be much more prevalent while the estate is divvied up to beneficiaries, brightening the mood considerably as the corpse is lowered into the ground.
The one-two punch of a funeral's immediacy and hilarity will no doubt be a roller coaster, and as such folks will want to remember the occasion with something tangible. Boom - Yankee Swap. The gifts everyone brought along are traded at random, so even folks who didn't receive anything in the deceased individual's will get a little something to remember them by.
Granted, the whole thing implodes on itself if your friends and relatives keep any sort of track of your life, what with them probably being aware of your birthday and whether or not you're in serious enough of a relationship to warrant marriage. But if you're a cagey loner like myself, the situation is ideal. Unless people simply don't show up.
But who cares, I'd be dead.
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