I have told him
I don’t want a funeral
just scatter my dust along our beach
and let it spread across the seven seas
six ways til Sunday
I have told him
I have no desire
for a permanent memento
or prominent monument
or for people to gather in grief
I have no wish to leave a lasting memory
just add my ashes
like some extra dashes of salt on the sea
and I’ll be free
and then you needn’t mourn for me
anymore
Aw, Mel. No one ever need mourn, and we will all be free. Monuments can't hold us in them. Even though they do make a place - a place we can be drawn to, to commune in memory with someone loved and lost.
ReplyDeleteBut there's nothing you can do to prevent that place being made. You are making it now: you scatter monuments in your wake, you drift through the world impishly rechristening things. I'm sure it can't be different, where you are! Wherever you pass, those who were there with you will remember you first, after. There's a tree by a lake, if I find it again, and a park on the top of a hill - and a great many places and things between.
It needs no new thing, carved by hand in your name, to make a monument. What others have carved, have made, will stand in testament to you, ever since you were there and you laid your hand on a moment that will be forever tied to that place. There is a shrine to you, in the minds of those you've touched - there, and scattered throughout the world, and you inhabit that shrine, leaning out prompted by a stray, impertinent thought - leaning out probably with some smartass remark, you are there every time. But you are not tied, and not prisoner to it.
Not while we live, and never when we die will we be prisoner to the monuments we leave behind.
For example: I was in San Fran a little while ago, and I totally found the idiot tree!
ReplyDelete