Death becomes me
I remember a most beautiful lady, with the most beautiful mind, who wrote the most beautiful satires, and threw her own most beautiful funeral, in the most beautiful parlour, with the most beautiful people, wearing the most beautiful clothes and eating the most beautiful foods. But no one noticed that she was gone.
Watching too much CSI makes you think about your own mortality.
Kind of like how watching too many McDonald's advertisements on tv makes me want to rush out of the house to buy a couple of sausage mcmuffins. Or fries. Or maybe just a diet coke. After I'm done watching CSI, of course.
I imagine how death might arrive for me. In a hat box, carried by a talking alligator, riding in a horse-drawn carriage. The alligator has a name - the horse-alligator of the apocalypse. And death will spring out at me like a jack-in-a-box. Except that he'll be a death-in-a-box.
Death doesn't always come in a box, of course. Death sometimes comes in a domesticated pet, like a civet cat or coop chicken, or in a glass of wine. If you're lucky, it's a lousy vintage that masks the bleach smell from the floor cleaner, and they can serve the good stuff at your funeral. Death doesn't always plod along in a horse-drawn carriage like in my imagination either. Sometimes, death comes quickly. In a Maybach. Or a Bombardier. Or a piece of falling debris.
The unfortunate fact of the matter, as my doctor friend Mark told me once, is that the leading causes of death are all prolonged and painful. I'm not talking about listening to your mother-in-law tell you for the umpteenth time that she prefers to count crickets to sleep because she hasn't been able to tell sheep apart ever since scientists cloned Dolly. I'm talking about diseases that you can't really do much to avoid other than by eating low-fat food and avoiding barbecues your entire life. Heart disease, cancer, stroke, chronic respiratory diseases are the top four killers these days. If you don't give out immediately, your bank account will.
Which is why I'm seriously thinking about signing an advance medical directive. Not because I don't trust my relatives to let me die. I'm sure they'd jump at the chance to put themselves - I mean me - out of their misery. In fact, I'm pretty much certain that they would want me dead more than I'd want myself dead. Doctor, don't you want to club him a couple of times just to be sure that he's really dead? Well, no, I would not like that indeed. That's why I'm choosing to put my life in the doctor's hands.
Be careful what you wish for. Sometimes, we put our lives into our friends' hands without realising it. Like when I asked my friends to shoot me if they ever catch me wearing corduroy. Maybe not today, maybe not next week, and maybe not even next year. But one day, corduroy's going to be fashionably ugly again. And I know that one of my friends is going to be waiting. In a hat box, carried by a talking alligator, riding in a horse-drawn carriage.
I know what you wore last summer.
Watching too much CSI makes you think about your own mortality.
Kind of like how watching too many McDonald's advertisements on tv makes me want to rush out of the house to buy a couple of sausage mcmuffins. Or fries. Or maybe just a diet coke. After I'm done watching CSI, of course.
I imagine how death might arrive for me. In a hat box, carried by a talking alligator, riding in a horse-drawn carriage. The alligator has a name - the horse-alligator of the apocalypse. And death will spring out at me like a jack-in-a-box. Except that he'll be a death-in-a-box.
Death doesn't always come in a box, of course. Death sometimes comes in a domesticated pet, like a civet cat or coop chicken, or in a glass of wine. If you're lucky, it's a lousy vintage that masks the bleach smell from the floor cleaner, and they can serve the good stuff at your funeral. Death doesn't always plod along in a horse-drawn carriage like in my imagination either. Sometimes, death comes quickly. In a Maybach. Or a Bombardier. Or a piece of falling debris.
The unfortunate fact of the matter, as my doctor friend Mark told me once, is that the leading causes of death are all prolonged and painful. I'm not talking about listening to your mother-in-law tell you for the umpteenth time that she prefers to count crickets to sleep because she hasn't been able to tell sheep apart ever since scientists cloned Dolly. I'm talking about diseases that you can't really do much to avoid other than by eating low-fat food and avoiding barbecues your entire life. Heart disease, cancer, stroke, chronic respiratory diseases are the top four killers these days. If you don't give out immediately, your bank account will.
Which is why I'm seriously thinking about signing an advance medical directive. Not because I don't trust my relatives to let me die. I'm sure they'd jump at the chance to put themselves - I mean me - out of their misery. In fact, I'm pretty much certain that they would want me dead more than I'd want myself dead. Doctor, don't you want to club him a couple of times just to be sure that he's really dead? Well, no, I would not like that indeed. That's why I'm choosing to put my life in the doctor's hands.
Be careful what you wish for. Sometimes, we put our lives into our friends' hands without realising it. Like when I asked my friends to shoot me if they ever catch me wearing corduroy. Maybe not today, maybe not next week, and maybe not even next year. But one day, corduroy's going to be fashionably ugly again. And I know that one of my friends is going to be waiting. In a hat box, carried by a talking alligator, riding in a horse-drawn carriage.
I know what you wore last summer.