I Don't Want to be Embalmed:

I don’t want to be embalmed—pickled in formaldehyde like a dissection frog, smelling like an experiment gone wrong. My body fixed up as if by a taxidermist to give my loved ones a close facsimile of what I looked like alive. Wearing formal clothes I (pun intended) wouldn’t be caught dead in—my feet discreetly hidden in the lower half of the ...casket because there’s no way to force shoes onto my stiff, immobile hooves. I don’t want to be buried. I don’t want to take up space like a landfill. I don’t want, fifty years hence, for my forgotten grave to be on some sorry, neglected patch of real estate wedged between a freeway and a Quiznos.

I want to be cremated. Cremation. Ashes. Dust. A tradition in my family: my great-grandmother, my grandmother, and, of course, my father. A fitting sendoff for a self-proclaimed wizard: burning in a conflagration like Beowulf and the heathen kings of old. Dad would’ve been fascinated by it all—biologist that he is. The bones and tissues releasing into kinetic energy and combusting down into their carbonic, base forms. I know the rest of the story, though. You aren’t burned fully. You don’t reduce down to the ashes you see in the urn or the box or scattered on the wind. But my work behind the scenes of mortuary gave me insight no loved one or family member should ever have.

Looking at my dad. There, in the box. I thought hard about those ashes. Which pieces were his lips that kissed me as a child? What piece was his hand I held as he lay dying? Could I somehow reassemble him—reconstitute those ashes like a jigsaw puzzle back into the man that made me who I am, who touched a thousand times a thousand lives with his wisdom and care?

Cliché, I know, but aren’t we all just dust and ashes, scattering on the wind? Aren’t we all just motes, dancing in shafts of sunlight, ascending into heaven?