Music Decomposed by Ken Breadner

The Vinyl Cafe this week was a hoot, as always. Dave was steered into considering music for his funeral (not that he's, you know, dying or anything)...and before you know it he's got a coffin sitting in the middle of his record store and he's trying it on for size, as it were. Of course, his archnemesis Mary Turlington wanders in (first time ever) and hijinks ensue.


It got me thinking. I've said before that I'd like the Crash Test Dummies' "At My Funeral" played, well, at my funeral. Still true, although I'd acknowledge this is almost a knee-jerk pick: the first song I ever heard that considered death without being maudlin or terribly depressing about it all.

Some of the songs you hear at funerals are absolutely heart-wrenching. I think the saddest I've ever heard of (and thank goodness I wasn't at this one, or I would have dissolved) was Lee Ann Womack's I Hope You Dance". It's called her "song of hope", and the word "hope" is repeated some dozen times...but in the context of a funeral, where it's presumably the deceased addressing the congregation, the effect is devastating.

Over the years, whenever my mind moves to the morbid, I've thought about writing my own funeral music. Trouble is, it'd probably be deemed inappropriate. Not as inappropriate as Rod Stewart's "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy" being played at a viewing (and yes, that happened by accident once) but...inappropriate. Because I wouldn't want to go out of my way to elicit tears at my funeral. In fact, I'd rather die.


I know what I'd like read, anyway. The poem served as this blog's epigram for a number of years and it's still the one thing I wish I'd written, the one bit of verse that screams "me" every time I read it.


I have lived and I have loved,
I have waked and I have slept;
I have sung and I have danced;
I have smiled and I have wept;
I have won and wasted treasure;
I have had my fill of pleasure;
And all these things were weariness;
And some of them were dreariness.
And all these things but two things
Were emptiness and pain:
And Love . . it was the best of them;
And Sleep . . worth all the rest of them.
(Charles MacKay)


I'd put that on my tombstone if I wasn't pretty much positive it's already on his.


Also if I wanted a tombstone. In this current Vinyl Cafe episode, Morley tells Dave she wants to be cremated..."put me out with the recycling. Or flush me down the toilet." I don't really care where my ashes go, but keeping my body around to be suckled by worms has never appealed. I know, I know, I'm dead, what do I care? But yecch.
I never really got the religious undertones of burial, either, even back when I was religious. I mean, the whole point of being buried is supposedly so come Last Trump you can be bodily resurrected, right? Have you seen what happens to bodies after burial? If Last Trump's a few years off, I'll get up looking like an uber-leper...and if it's still a long ways away I'll be skin and bones without the skin. What's the point? I figure any all-powerful God with His Scout badge in Intermediate Creationism can craft me a new body lickety-split.

(Consider these religious things too literally and you'll mind-bend yourself into knots. How the Hell can something burn forever? Doesn't that violate just about every law of physics going? And never mind the "all-loving" God Who cast you down there. I can just hear Him. "This hurts Me more than it hurts you!"
Oh, yeah? Well, let's switch places, then.

As it happens, I do believe in an afterlife, for the same reason the astronomer Ellie Arroway (played by Jodie Foster) cites for believing in extraterrestrial life in Contact. She says


I'll tell you one thing about the universe, though. The universe is a pretty big place. It's bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of before. So if it's just us... seems like an awful waste of space. Right?


I'll tell you one thing about time: Time is a pretty long time. It's longer than anything anyone has ever dreamed of before. So if it's just this...seems like an awful waste of time. Right?


What that afterlife is is anyone's guess, although I tend to think it's kind of like this world: what you make of it. See the film What Dreams May Come for a possible afterlife primer. Better yet, read the book by Richard Matheson.
Regardless of whether there's an afterlife or not, the one thing I can be reasonably certain of is that I'm going to die at some point. I think the mechanics of immortality are at least a couple of generations away: it'll be at least that long before we figure out how to upload consciousness, not to mention fashioning new bodies, bionic or otherwise, out of spit and stem cells.
So: at some point, a funeral. There's got to be music and lots of it: my life is full of music even in its silences. What music? I dunno. "Stairway to Heaven"'s way too obvious. So's "Spirit In The Sky" (although I like that one more). Please, spare me that old staple Amazing Grace. I never was a wretch and I absolutely detest the notion, widespread in many religions, that anyone who isn't of a particular faith is by definition a "wretch" or "blind". Or in need of "saving", for that matter.
If I was Scottish, I'd surely pick "Loch Lomond". But I'm not. If I was Australian I'd doubtless choose the song played at Steve Irwin's massive funeral, "Home Among the Gum Trees". But I'm not that, either.
I guess I'm going to have to write this stuff. I'll get around to it. Unless, of course, I die first.