FUN-erals

The other day, I was having a drink with a good friend of mine — whose name will be protected under a fake identity, Carmen Sandiego, completely pointlessly, as she will only be mentioned in this sentence — and we were discussing fun ideas for a fun-eral. You get it? Fun-eral. Okay, done with the puns.

Funerals are sad. They’re farewells of loved ones, most of the time. But they don’t have to be completely sad. We thought it made sense for funerals to be a celebration of someone’s life and values, rather than just an accumulation of sad people saying “I’m sorry for your loss” to each other repeatedly until people decide to leave to handle other more earthly matters.

Here are some of the ideas we would recommend you to ask your friends for them to do in your funeral. You can either ask them while alive (awkward) or put it in your will (officially, postmortem awkward):

• Putting a mannequin in the casket and have one or two of the four people carrying it around just letting it fall in the most inappropriate moment, to the dismay and partial disgust of the attendants. Only to discover a few seconds later that the cadaver is peacefully sitting, in ash format, in a little urn somewhere else. Touché.
• Having someone say a heartfelt speech about the life of the defunct. Then taking a white dove from a cage (the most asshole-y, terminally ill dove that can be found in the market), and saying “Let this be a symbol of Carmen’s soul, flying upwards to the heavens”, to then get an air pistol from the jacket and shooting the hell down of that poor animal while airborne.
• Having a quote on the tomb, such as “Look, dude, paragliding is NOT that dangerous. I’ll go first.”
• Agreeing with some friends to be buried together in weird positions, together with some artifacts such as Tamagotchi devices or “Live, Laugh, Love” signs, in order to fool future archaeologists.

Dying sucks, we can all agree on that. But, on the one hand, if you’re dead, you don’t feel sorry about being dead. And if you’re staying behind, I mean, you’ll only have to be in that circumstance for a while anyway. Your life is short: make your afterlife more fun for those that still have a few train stops ahead.