Eulogy In D Minor

I have come to see myself so differently than I used to that I forget sometimes about the magic of adornment. I forget to wear lipstick. I forget to put on jewels and bangles. I can't wear the clothes that suit me as well as my own skin because they won't fit over my skin anymore. One day several weeks ago now I received a package from Alice of Futuregirl with two wonderful bracelets she made in it. They are all at once bold and delicate, lightness in thread and yet somehow more than that. I put them where I could see them. Often. Like I do all my pretty things now. They fit as perfectly as a couture glove. Yet I felt that to put them on would somehow muddle their charge.

I'm treading carefully with words to try and tell you something that has come to me in code. Thoughts that aren't thoughts and yet stand in for them. Sometimes we have to remind ourselves to stop hiding behind our own nakedness. Common wisdom is that we hide in our make up, our clothes, our adornment, as though we are never real until we strip down to what we were wearing when we arrived in this world.

I vehemently disagree.

Adornment isn't in itself a vanity. Adornment is a celebration of what we arrived in, of what we found when we got here, and what's left when we leave. Our breasts will go south, our teeth will darken, ear hairs will sprout, balls will shrivel, all of us in our wonderful skin of every color will change. At every stop there is call for celebration. For wearing your favorite fancy golf pants, or your diamonds, your Bakelite bangles, or your finest threads. I've forgotten this. Too wrapped up in wondering how people will judge me for not being what I used to be.

That is the ultimate vanity.

I am reminded of my eulogy. I have been writing my own eulogy since I was ten years old. I don't trust anyone else to write it. If I die and leave behind me silence, someone is going to fill it with tripe and I can't bear to leave in a smoky veil of lies. So I keep on writing it. As I somehow keep surviving I have to revise and make amendments to the text constantly. There are people who would consider this a morbid past time (mother), but I don't want anyone stealing the truth of my life just to appease themselves (or me) in my death. You can't ameliorate the pain of life by saying it aint so.

If for some reason this becomes the great work I leave unfinished, it's important to me that everyone I know is aware that there are some things you must not say when I die. If you say them I will poltergeist your ass.

• You must not say I died too soon or too young. I will stick my finger in my ghosty throat and I will retch up slime all over your lies. To say this is tantamount to a sacrilege in my peculiar worship of the truth as I see it. Whenever I go, however I am relieved of this body, I can guarantee you it was the right time. People don't die at the wrong time, they don't die "too young" or "too soon". We all die exactly when we are through with this world and no one on earth can possibly know that it was too soon.

• If anyone makes vapid generalizations such as "Everyone loved her!" I will smite the whole funeral party and make all the cubed cheese curdle in your mouths. I know for a fact that this isn't true. Erin Fry hated me. Or else she was a lesbian unable to show me how much she loved me and so tortured me with her bullying instead from third grade through sixth grade. I know there are a lot of people I've pissed off. I don't doubt there are plenty of people who I haven't yet met who won't like me.

• If anyone suggests that I am in heaven with God I will not smite them because it would be rude since they obviously believe in the pearly gates (a very fragile type of belief relying largely on your ability to believe that people sprout wings), but I will feel disrespected. I don't want anyone talking about me and my "relationship" with god. I believe I will be evaporating, liquefying, and rising up through the prairie grasses, into the bellies of birds, and out again onto the caps of unwary tourists. I will be everywhere there is air, I will be your next breath, I will be the dirt you're collecting on your shoe. If you must imagine that I've become an angel in death, as I never was in life, then you should keep that close to your chest, quiet like.

I want to remembered for being human. Being imperfect. I want never to be raised on that familiar pedestal of the dead. I don't do that to others. I think it disrespects who we've all really been. How can we remember a person, honor them, and truly appreciate what they brought to our lives if we're too busy trying to say only nice things when they've left us with their dust?

I write letters to my dead all the time. I think I may have to write them down soon. I was full of them while I was picking the most perfect green beans I've ever seen. Out there in the light and the blustery fall air, the dead were all around me and I only spoke truths with them and my love of them is not less for it.

Mostly I want people to remember that no matter how thin or how fat I have been or will become, no matter what age I have the privilege to reach, I want people to remember that I celebrated this world by putting it's jewels on my person, keeping the ocean close, the mountains closer. I want people to remember that I eventually learned not to take myself so damn seriously.

If you want people to remember anything you have to remind them. So I am going to wear what few diamonds I own, I am going to drape myself in my pretty buttons, and I'm going to wear lipstick most days again. Not to be something I'm not, but rather, to be what I've always been.