Just to clear up any confusion; Halloween was Saturday, All Saints’ Day was Sunday and today is All Souls’ Day. It's also the Day of the Dead in Mexico and Los Angeles, which is a 3 day celebration. While I've never celebrated Day of the Dead, I hope to once I move back to LA. The photo included here is from my sister-in-law, on Olvera Street, Pueblo District. In the past the holiday took place at the beginning of summer but was moved to October 31, November 1 and November 2 to coincide with the Western Christian holidays in America. What you may not know is that it is also Plan Your Epitaph Day. The day was created by Lance Hardie, a Californian, ironically whose own epitaph is unknown to us. The day is meant to help prevent family and friend from having the last word.
Being raised in a family that was not afraid to talk about death, it did not surprise me when I saw that my parents' will had be very explicit directions for how they were to be buried, including what they should be wearing and what was to be written on their headstones. I suppose that's too big of a decision to leave for your kids to decide? I don't have a will yet, as there isn't much to leave behind, but I have left instructions. Since having children, when I've gone on trips, I've left instructions behind, just in case. When the girls were younger I wanted my friend Joe to be their guardian so that they could continue going to their schools here in Madison and continue with a life with as little interruption as possible. Once Erika was old enough, I made her their guardian in my instructions. I'm not sure how legal it all was, but that didn't matter, since it never was needed.
The last time I went on a trip and left instructions, I realized none of my girls needed a guardian anymore. My instructions were all about my needs and the things I wanted in the after life. I no longer had to worry about my kid's lives once I was gone since they are all adults. I don't think it's overly morbid to prepare for death. One of my biggest concerns is my life on the Internet after death. I had a student who passed but who's Facebook page continue to live. I'm not sure who was posting things on his page for him since obviously he could not. Occasionally when his post would show up on my feed, it would kind of freak me out. In my instructions I ask the girls either to delete my page or to simply change it. I had another student who passed and whose family changed his Facebook page to "In memory of..." with his name, and I thought it was pretty nice to see people still writing on his page years after he had passed away. That's a much healthier way to deal with a Facebook page after a death but I would leave that up to my family. I'm fine with just disappearing. When I talked to Erika about my instructions, she insisted that there needed to be a place for people to write comments but since I would not be able to read those comments, I told her it was up to her. I asked her simply to delete all my other accounts-- Twitter, Instagram, myspace, etc. There's a lot out there of me on the World Wide Web. I have a sheet of paper with all my accounts and passwords listed so that the girls could take care of that for me. I often wonder how many accounts are out there by dead people. It just seems like a lot of unfinished business and I'm not comfortable with that.
My blog has been a source of family history for myself and the girls. I love to occasionally check on dates in the past to see what we were doing. It has been a great source of information for me and I would hate for that to disappear. I do pay a fee annually, so in order for it to stay online that bill would need to be paid. Ideally I would love the girls to take the blog over and continue the tradition that I've started there. Each of them could take turns on a weekly basis letting people know what was going on in our family. I know that's a lot to ask of them. Knowing that that blog would someday disappear, I began to transfer it into written form. It's a long process and I have only just begun. Each year is enough information to create a large scrapbook. I've created two and have about seven or eight more to go, depending on how long it takes me to get to the project.
I have thought a lot about what I want right after I die, which I know sounds strange. I don't want to have a traditional funeral, mostly because it seems like a big waste of money. I asked the girls to have me cremated and to commission Geof or Josh to make a ceramic urn for those ashes. I'd love my urn to be somehow symbolic of my life with glazes in earth tones, splashy blues, some bright green and a bit of yellow. I know that either one of them know me well enough to make something I would love to have my ashes spend eternity in. I instructed the girls to simply put me in a large white cardboard box on the kitchen table with a set of colored sharpie markers and have my friends pop by the condo and draw or write all over the box before it was sent into the oven. I especially want a Josh Newland drawing on there. I saw something like that on a PBS documentary and it looked like so fun, but the drawing with sharpie idea is all mine, though. Then the girls could take the money that they saved from not having to pay for a funeral and go to Disney World instead. I've always wanted to go to Disney World with them but we never had the money to go as a family. One of these days I hope to make it there, maybe with my grandchildren. I would love them to visit all the Disney attractions in Florida along with The Wizarding World of Harry Potter and all the other fun attractions nearby. I would love them to enjoy a week away celebrating the wonderful life we all had together doing something that I always wanted to share with them.
As for my epitaph, if I'm in an urn, I suppose that's the only place for an inscription. I don't want to be buried anywhere. I certainly don't want my bones left in Wisconsin. I guess I want to sit on a shelf with family back in California. It would be great to be on display but even if I'm just tossed in the back yard, I'm fine with that as long as I'm back home. As for words, just having my name spelled correctly on my urn would make me happy, and I'd be fine with it on the bottom of the urn, unseen, especially if it was a fine piece of ceramic art with beautifully colored glazes, unique. I'll pray for another year and revisit the idea of words and what they might say about me and my life. Right now all I can think of is, Teri Parris Ford; Honest Life, True Love, and a Loud Laugh.
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