There are people in the funeral industry who really piss me off. First they try to guilt trip you into spending more money than you have for a royal send off. If you can't afford the Cadillac funeral, they try to make you feel like you're a cheap son of a bitch. I'd be happy if you all just recycle me as a Domino's pizza when I go.
Everyone is supposed to plan for death. Do you know what color your underwear will be when they put you six feet under? Let's face it—we're all getting older, so you might as well plan for the Grim Reaper now while you can still get a deal on a casket at Costco.
Death by design gives you control over what happens to you after you kiss your ass goodbye. You don't have to buy an overpriced casket from a funeral home when there are casket stores out there who offer better alternatives. And let us not forget the practice of embalming, not mandated by law unless you are planning on being viewed or shipped. I could go on for hours about good versus bad embalming, but sufficed to say that very few who have gone before me have ended up looking like they did in real life. Most people appear hard, caked in orange make-up and about as lifelike as a garbage bag.
It's been because of my experience with breast cancer, having to face mortality and think about how I want to leave the planet, that I started a website called Death Becomes You. I also saw a need to provide information to the public, future morticians, and anyone who wanted to know the truth about what happens when you die. We started out selling mostly embalming and autopsy videos, but that got boring. We added books and other items, but I still wanted to do really wanted to do some odd things with the site, too. I was sitting around at home one night and I remembered that I had a bottle of Supremol embalming fluid. I had never gotten a whiff of embalming fluid before so I decided to open it and see if it would curl my hair. Holy shit, not only did my hair curl, but the fumes instantaneously preserved everything in my house. My pets are now pet rocks.
After this I decided to cut out the middleman (funeral directors), so I developed the "self-embalming kit." And yes, we sell them and they are pretty fun to own. In my research for that kit, I found this interesting little thing I call the "orifice plug." It looks like a big white screw, and it proves my point that there are people out to screw you even when you're dead. I carry one around as a protective device. It's lightweight and long enough to be effective in popping an attacker in the balls or the face.
Death isn't always pretty, and it isn't always possible to design your own exit. If you are a human being reading this (and I'm going to assume you are), you need to be thinking about what you want for your own funeral. I want mine to be festive, a Mardi Gras send off complete with a float, nude dancers, beads and everyone singing Jimmy Buffet's "Why Don't We Get Drunk and Screw." Funerals should be fun, and you can design them to be if you don't listen to the traditionalists and funeralists who see you as their next lobster dinner or car payment.
But this is a society of procrastinators who would rather hand off the care of their loved ones to a stranger than do a little homework. I do believe funerals serve a purpose, but so does research into the diseases. Let's just make it a law—from now on everyone designs their own funeral. But that's too simple. The Republicans would want to spend taxpayer dollars on it, the Supreme Court would probably field requests to repeal it, and I'd be under investigation for carrying a weapon of ass destruction on my website.
TONI RISS
