Despite whatever feelings I have or don’t have for Ronald Reagan, I have a strange fascination with all the funeral proceedings. You know me, I love anything to do with protocol and event planning. (And I am now acquainted with the vocabulary of death. Caissons, caparisoned horses, and catafalques, oh my! Cue the partridge in the pear tree.) On TV I watched the casket being brought into the Capitol rotunda; I switched channels before the speeches got going. Earlier I had briefly thought about going to the Capitol myself, just in a “ooh, my first presidential funeral” kind of way, but that was when I naively thought I could just saunter in whenever I pleased. Nope, there are thousands of people in line out there. Not worth it. Later that night I tuned in to C-SPAN, which just had a completely silent, steady shot of the casket. After a few seconds, it’s like watching the Yule log on TV at Christmas. I clicked TiVo for the program title: “President Ronald Reagan Lying in State.” Yes, indeed it was. Later still, I checked back on C-SPAN, and disproving my assumption that they would just run a constant casket-cam for the next thirty-some-odd hours, they were instead running tape of the procession from earlier in the day.
So all this makes me think of what I’d like my funeral to be like. Is that morbid, or just practical? I’m thinking, some kind of eternal flame in the backyard surrounded by velvet ropes? Kidding aside, but still somewhat over the top, maybe I’d have the funeral service at Memorial Church at Stanford–it doesn’t really have to be at a church, but of the ones I have any association with, I am most fond of this one, more than the parishes I grew up in–then perhaps a ceremonial motorcade up scenic 280… one last time (and dab at the eyes… now), to be laid to rest in Colma, where my paternal grandmother is buried.
Oh, and I will be commissioning a requiem. (Okay, it just got all over-the-top again.)
6 replies on “Exit strategies”
I got sick and stayed at home all sneezy and blowsy-nosed watching the hyper-mythologizing of Reagan. Very moving ceremony, though. I was appalled that he ever got elected. However, that man could talk! I was always inspired by his speeches. I often thought, “Make this dude King! Give him no real power, but let him give inspiring speeches all the time”. I suppose it’s fitting that he have such a grand exit. And dear Nancy is certainly inspiring with her unflagging devotion to her man.
And we’ll follow it all up by naming a few things for you: the Jeff Tabaco South San Francisco Greyhound Terminal; the Jeff Tabaco Daly City Municipal Airport; and perhaps a small parking lot somewhere in Nebraska. Doubtless some former members of the Tabaco Revolution will insist that we mow your likeness into a corn field somewhere in Kansas, but instead a small statue will be commissioned with the inscription “Gloriously Terminated” on the base.
Sigh. I’m jealous.
Hi Tom G! I miss you!
I also do like a good ceremony. And nobody does ceremony as well as the British. I got quite weepy watching the funeral of HM Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mother – especially as the coffin was drawn up to the Abbey to the skirl of the massed pipes and drums. (The Queen Mother was Scottish).
Yes Reagan was great man in some ways, but the way in which his administration neglected HIV/AIDS was a disgrace.
Whereas I, like Lisa in Six Feet Under, would most like to be just dumped in a shallow grave, sans embalming or coffin, in the woods somewhere, in order to return quickly and poison-free to my component materials, or to be food to the animals.
However, since that’s against the law–though if I were in the end stages of a terminal illness, I might just go away somewhere in the woods to die without letting anyone in authority know–I hope to be cremated immediately, again, without embalming. A simple memorial service–please, no sad, sonorous, religious funeral–preferably in a UU building rather than a Christian church, and a party afterwards.
Maybe you should then have my cremains turned into a synthetic diamond that you can keep until your death years later, and then have embedded in your own memorial stone.
I hated the man but I was oddly facinated by the proceedings as well.