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Jena Isle’s post, Are You Afraid to Die? got me thinking. There was a time I would have answered, “no,” without hesitation. Why fear the inevitable? None of us will make it out of this life alive. But with each passing year, the inevitable creeps nearer and my willingness to embrace it shrinks and withers and runs to find a hiding place. I have so much to live for.

I never really thought about a “bucket list,” either. Life flings opportunities my way, and I take them. I have no regrets. And while there is an almost-infinite number of things I’d like to do before I leave this world – enough things that I pray for reincarnation, knowing one lifetime isn’t enough to experience them all – I am content with who I am and what I’ve accomplished, done, and seen in this life. I’m content.

I have loved and learned. I have married a wonderful man and borne two children – a boy and a girl. I have written and published books. I have traveled, made friends, taken risks, tried new things. Unlike Jen, though, I have no burning desire to try skydiving. Spelunking or SCUBA diving, maybe. Hiking through the mountains. I want to see an active volcano erupting. I want to marvel at the Aurora Borealis.

I want to see my children all grown up, independent, and successful enough to be as contented as I am now. They needn’t find the cure for cancer or be wildly wealthy. They need to be curious about the world around them, and passionate about their work and the causes they support. They need to be happy with who they are, and surround themselves with family and friends who love them.

If I should die under suspicious circumstances, I’d want the CC Bloggers on the case, like CSI. They’d get to the bottom of it, and see that justice was done.

We don’t usually have funerals in my family. We have small, private family burials. But funerals and memorials are for the living, so it is the living who should decide the sort of “send off” they want to give me when I die. The truth is, I won’t be there. Or maybe I will be, but my only care will be for those left behind – and I would ease their pain and sorrow if I could. I want to be remembered with smiles and laughter – though tears, like death, are inevitable. Who would smile and laugh at my memory, that wouldn’t also cry – just a little – for their loss?

I’d like for my body to be cremated, not pumped full of chemicals, put into a box, and buried. Scatter my ashes off the coast of Daytona Beach; place a stone marker in the family plot, in Clarkesville, AR, to say “I was here.” And if you want to do something a little silly for me, get a bagpiper to play “Amazing Grace,” at early dawn or twilight, on the beach or at the “grave.”

I wouldn’t object if writers like my friends Doc Z, Roy, Elmot, Jan, Luke, Lyle, Reyjr, Dee, Kelvin, Yatot, @thirdworldgeek, Ceblogger, Jena Isle, or Ever wrote Inspirational Stories, songs, or poems about me, or if my friend and publisher, Vivian Zabel, would put out a commemorative edition of my stories and poems and send the royalties to my children or grandchildren. If there is a memorial, let it be a celebration. Put it off until the tears have ceased to flow, and nothing’s left but the memories of good times, stories to be shared in smiles and laughter.

But the truth? Unless I’m run over by a bus tomorrow, I plan to live well into my nineties, like both of my grandmothers. After all, as Bill Watterson (author of the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes) said, ?God put me on this earth to accomplish a certain number of things. Right now I am so far behind that I will never die.?