I have always wanted to be cremated. After my death. Actually not always, when I was little I firmly rejected it as an option since I was horrified by the idea that anyone would voluntarily subject their freshly-deceased body to liquefaction, poured into some kind of ceremonial beaker from the spigot on an enormous gleaming vat. Children often make such etymological mistakes. "Cremate" sounds like "cream," which is liquid, and in this simple way a nightmarish vision is born in the mind of a child. Who knows what I was thinking, but it was probably something like that, that stupid. My mother liked non-dairy creamer, there was always Cremora around, I vividly remember being disgusted by the half-congealed Cremora along the top edge of the jar. I probably imagined being reduced to Cremora, what grotesque minds children have. Cremora is pretty nasty all by itself, it doesn't need my help. Imagining Cremora as consisting of dissolved human remains makes it only marginally less palatable.

Nowadays I'm leaning toward traditional burial. I'm starting to like the idea as a kind of sick joke to play on myself, a final act of reflexive self-abasement. With my claustrophobia and fear of being alone, what more terrifying fate could there be than being buried in a snug box on some quiet green hillside with absolutely zero evening foot traffic? Another thing is that in some primitive way burial is meant to suggest the repose of sleep, yet I never sleep on my back. They ought to bury you the way you really slept in life. I'd need to be buried in a wide casket, almost square, to accommodate my most common sleeping posture of "on my belly signaling for a touchdown with one knee bent," otherwise known as the "prostrate pirouette." I'd also like to be made to hug the little satin pillow. In this way people could view me and remark that I look so very natural. And since I am known to suffer from chronic insomnia they could be instructed to bury me with my eyes open, since people will remember me not sleeping more than sleeping. They'll say all kinds of dreadful things like "he could never get to sleep and now he can finally rest," and I'll be absolutely vomiting in disgust in oblivion. I should hire an assassin to patrol my funeral, give him a list of forbidden remarks and expressions to listen for.

The language of it always confuses me. When I die I will cease to be, I will disappear from existence. But then it becomes a matter of "my" funeral, "my" body, and so on. Who do these possessives refer to exactly? For someone who no longer exists I'd suddenly have a lot to deal with, a million details. If Mary throws Lou a surprise birthday party, knowing full well that Lou can't stand surprise parties, whose party is it? Certainly not Lou's, no. It's Mary's party, in Lou's honor perhaps, but Mary's party nonetheless, and the ensuing disaster is therefore also Mary's. Same thing with "my" funeral. There is no "me" to take responsibility for any of the potentially distasteful or embarrassing or memorably catastrophic things that might happen there. A funeral is exactly like a surprise party for someone who hates surprises.