My Funeral: The After Party 

by David Smith

Satire

I want to be treated in death as I lived in life. If that sounds profound to you, fasten yourself to your seat, because you’re about to come to some very concerning conclusions about my life, you judgemental asshole. 

My wish, dear genie, is for a FUNeral. I want to put the “laughter” in “slaughter,” because there’s no way I died of natural causes. I’m talking strobe lights bombarding the room in clashing, tacky colors and a non-thematically suitable playlist blasting insensitive reminders that I’m dead as fuck. I’m talking Sia belting proclamations of survival in her song “Alive,” the Bee Gees celebrating their continued ability to stay alive in iconic falsetto. 

Many people have some sort of profound post-mortem wish. Some people want to be buried in a memorable place or by a loved one, others want their ashes scattered. That shit sounds boring as fuck. Flavorless. I want more. I want my dying wish to be memorable. You know what I want? Confetti cannons. I want my ashes shot out of a confetti cannon. Aim that mother-effer at the mourning and soon to be very traumatized guests. Mix me with sparkly glitter so they always find little pieces of me everywhere— like they are being haunted by a young girl that just discovered Justice and Claire’s. People like to say “They’ll always be with you.” I actually will be, every time you do your laundry you’ll be reminded of me, a speck haunting you with hairline-trigger trauma. 

If someone puts my epitaph as some blonde-ass Instagram caption type shit I’m coming back from the grave for vengeance. Don’t insult me with contemporary sincerity— a mark of modernity I don’t adhere to. Instead, pretend I was some ultra-confident pseudo-quasi-multi layered onion boy. I’m talking hard confidence bars that make me sound like I was some sort of overconfident punkass. I don’t want people to think I lived my life like some Taylor Swift lyric, I want them to remember me as a baller. Everyone sings songs they found from Tik Tok, words they heard but can’t remember where they heard it from. That’s the type of epitaph I want: engraved in the memory long after I fade out of it as you scroll onto the next piece of brain rot. I’m thinking something along the lines of “‘I’m 68% water and 100% that bitch’ -David F. Smith” Nobody’s gonna remember someone by the last name “Smith,” but a quote like that might just make some shitty Instagram meme page scamming people with links in the bio, the only hope one has of legacy in this cesspool. 

Hazel, a patient dying of incurable cancer in The Fault in Our Stars, once said “I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?” Eh, fuck that. Everyone gets a piece of me.