TO-DO LIST WHEN I AM DEAD
Relax. I’m dead.
Get that sleep you said, “You can always sleep when you’re dead.”
Ease into letting go of your body. You will bloat and wither, and if you thought you had a funny face, watch what happens.
Don’t worry about dental appointments. No one cares about perfect teeth anymore.
Feel the rain seep in. Feel the soil. Feel the tickle of beetles and ants and centipedes and little critters, once tiny and annoying that you squashed, now get their karma. (And at least they are company.)
Feel the roots, mycelium wrap around you and poke and wiggle and weave into you. Offer up all your nutrients like an after-holiday sale.
Donate bone marrow.
Learn patience in a new time. What are days, these days? Think more of the heave and sigh of glaciers, the giddy dizzy of spinning around the axis of polar antipodes and the solstice sashay around the sun, and the ambivalent flip-flop of the magnetic fields every 200,000 years.
Scatter. Let each piece of each piece travel now, slide up the xylem of fir trees, transpire into mist, rub and cuddle the forest top, then rise, rise, become a cloud, meet other clouds, circle and swirl, drift and rake mountain peaks, fall as snow, fall as rain. Your choice.
Come back to those you loved as a petal of Columbine each spring.
