The One Thing We All Have in Common
I can’t believe it, you don’t look a day over 900
We’ll never make it out of this world alive…
Unless you’re the first one, of course.
Some of us live too short. Some of us live too long. Many, like baby bear, live ‘just right.’
Longest-lived family, if you accept the bible’s account, has to be Adam and Eve. I think their last name had to be Smith since there are so many in the phone book.
Adam celebrated his 930th birthday, says the bible, “Your wish will come true if you blow out all the candles in one breath…” but he didn’t beget his first child, Cain, until he was in his hundreds. And look how he turned out.
A Jewish translatation credits Adam and Eve with 33 sons and 23 daughters — 56 in all. Eve lived about as long as Adam but it must have seemed like thousands to her. Imagine having your first child when you are over 100… then having 55 more.
The longest-lived is Methuselah at 969 years.
“I can’t believe it,” said a friend, “you don’t look a day over 900.”
So the Grim Reaper does his job and “poof,” you’re dead. Then ya’ gotta’ get rid of the body. That’s an earth-y thing pretty much out of your hands unless you have expressed yourself before you-know-what.
(If you want to read something interesting on the subject, check out Stiff, a most unusual non-fiction paperback by Mary Roach that made the NYTimes bestseller list for a while.)
For those who know what they want, some funeral directors will do it your way. And ‘your way’ could be kind of unusual.
One woman wanted to be remembered as she lived. So after she died, she was posed in a room sitting at a familiar table decorated with miniature New Orleans Saints helmets, an ashtray, a deck of cards and a framed photo.
She was wearing sunglasses and smartly dressed in a denim jacket with Saints emblems and a yellow scarf around her neck. There was an open can of Busch beer by one hand and a menthol cigarette between the fingers of her other, just as she had spent a good number of her living days. “My, doesn’t she look wonderful?” And so she did… maybe at an early age it seems.
*Non Sequitur c2014 Wiley Ink, Inc. Dis. by Universal Uclick. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.
