Some sort-of-poetry thoughts inspired by my Grandad this past week. 

Funerals

If I die tomorrow please

Don’t wear black at my funeral.

Make everyone wear coloured ribbons

In their hair, and have their faces painted.

Don’t spend hours fussing over your looks.

Just chuck something on,

Wear trackpants if you want, no one cares.

(And if they do, don’t worry. I won’t.)

Don’t show nice pictures of me.

If I don’t have at least two chins per pic,

What’s the point?

Don’t play music that’ll make people cry.

Blast some Fall Out Boy or something,

Cry and dance all at once, knock yourself out.

Don’t try to think ‘what would she do?’

Because I wouldn’t do anything

I’m dead, remember?

Don’t forget to live.

I might be gone,

But you are not.

Life?

What’s the point of living if you’re lying in a hospital bed with a food-drip shoved up your nose and fluids being pumped from your lungs and an oxygen mask covering your face?

What’s the point of living if you don’t know who you are or where you are and you can’t walk or talk or feed yourself and you’re stuck in a nursing home?

What’s the point of living anyway?

Thoughts.

I am a firm believer that there is a difference between the body and the soul.

I think – or know, rather – that once you die, there’s somewhere else you go.

I don’t know if it’s heaven or hell or some other place we go, but I believe it’s somewhere.

And I suppose I find comfort in that.

I do not fear death.

Someone once said ‘yeah, but you don’t face it every day’

‘Don’t we?’ I asked

I got told off for ‘being too deep for three am’

I do not fear death, but I fear leaving everyone behind. I know That I’ll be safe somewhere.

But not everyone believes.

My grandad, for example, doesn’t believe that there is anything else.

Once you’re dead, you’re dead.

Your body will rot in the ground.

And no one will remember you.

So now as he’s grasping onto any tendril of life, terrified that he’ll go, he doesn’t have that comfort,

Just a nagging feeling that ‘this is it’.

And maybe I’m wrong, and maybe this is it.

Maybe we’re given one body and one fragile existence

And once we’re gone we’re gone, and we’ll be forgotten and that’s the end of the story.

Why can’t that be enough?

What’s wrong with dying, getting buried and helping the trees and flowers to grow?

Death is inevitable, the only certainty, and we fear it.

It’s all a little strange.