TASK #27

July 1st--July 8th

The Dead Zone

In the long run we are all dead.  John Maynard Keynes

No man believes that he's going to die. We rarely think about it. It doesn't cross our mind until we see the runaway truck careening towards us or an alarmed doctor pulls his finger out of our ass. If we had a lick of sense we'd live each day with a cautious respect for life and never put ourselves in harm's way. 

But we're men. Ask a soldier before a battle if he thinks that he's going to die. He'll say, "Not me. The guy next to me, maybe, but not me." Maybe we have some sort of built-in innate override system that assures that men will always be stupid enough, and brave enough, to willingly face death. 

Last summer I visited the graves of my mother and father. They're buried next to each other beneath an oak tree. In front of my dad's grave is a small glass vase and an American flag, symbolic of his short stint in the U.S. Army. My mother's grave has no adornment. Just her name and dates. 

I stared at the graves for a while. I tried to conjour up my mother's voice, but it's gone. And the only image of my dad still stored in my memory is him an old man, ravaged by Alzheimers. 

After a bit I wandered away from the grave. I looked at the tombstones. I stopped in front of one that had a baseball sculpted into the headstone. It marked the grave of a 10 year old boy. The inscription read: To Our Beloved Aaron. He loved baseball and his family. 

It made me cry. i was crying for Aaron's lost youth and I was crying for my parents, too. And after a while, after I stopped crying, I felt better. 

Later I wrote down some epitaphs. An epitaph is a phrase that you'd put on your headstone. It's important, because it has to represent who you were until that headstone wears away. 

TASK:

This week you're taking a road trip. To a cemetery. Walk around. Read the inscriptions on the headstones, and try to picture them in your mind's eye. 

Then go home and open your notebook and think up an epitaph for your headstone. Actually it doesn't have to be original. It can be a poem, or a phrase, or a line from the movie "Scarface". 

Me? I like "The Buckeye Stops Here", or my favorite poem, by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

My candle burns at both ends, 
It will not last the night,
But ahh, my foes,
And oh, my friends, 
It gives a lovely light...

Send me your epitaph. JoeDoeBula@gmail.com