I came back from a bookarama the other week with 41 books for $37.50, including a cartoon book on Old Age. It had a section that suggested ways in which you could die more dramatically, interestingly or irritatingly (to annoy the kids.) One method was to line your do-it-yourself coffin with explosive and demand cremation. Which reminded me of the growing number of news stories I seem to have been seeing of late in which someone finds that the baby, grandma, or dear friend, hasn’t been quite dead when listed as such. The most recent I remember being one in which a premature baby was said to be dead, taken from the mother before she got any kind of a look, dumped in the morgue fridge at the hospital, the baby, many hours later was found to be still alive, by her parents who’d demanded the right to say a proper good-bye to her,
I’m booked for cremation myself, but after all these stories I worry. I don’t want to do a “Fall of the House of Usher†in a cemetery, and, almost as bad, nor do I want to be cremated before I’m definitely dead. It occurs to me that having an explosive-lined coffin would make certain that if there’s been an error at some stage, once I’m slid into the crematorium, and the explosive touches off, one way or another there’ll be no doubt that I’ve died – hopefully before the fire gets past the explosive to me. Wonder where I can get a do-it-yourself coffin?