Page 110 of What You Wish For

He turned to me then, like I might get the wrong idea. “I’m not suicidal, understand. I don’twantto die. I’m just aware that Icoulddie. At any moment. And, if I do… I want a kick-ass funeral.”

Of course, now that I knew he had almost died, the whole thing made sense. I could see why he might have started thinking about it, anyway. Why hekeptthinking about it was another question.

“What is a kick-ass funeral, exactly?” I asked. “Are we talking like a New Orleans marching-jazz-band parade? Or, like, skydivers? Fireworks?”

“Those are all great ideas.” He gave me a little sideways smile.

“What, then?”

“Just a normal funeral… but cool. I don’t like organ music, for example. So I made a playlist. You know, of favorites.”

“Like?”

“Oh, you know. Maybe some Talking Heads. A little Curtis Mayfield. Some Johnny Cash. A little hint of James Brown. And, of course: Queen.”

“Sure,” I said, “Queen goes without saying. At a funeral.”

Duncan gave me a look.

“I guess ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ is too on the nose.”

Duncan pointed at me. “Great rhythm-guitar line, though.”

“Is your funeral a sing-along?” I asked. “Wait—is it karaoke?”

“No, but that’s not a bad idea. I’ve got some poems set aside, too. One I found about harvesting peaches and, you know, the cycle of life, and another one about the death of the spider inCharlotte’s Web.”

“You’ve really thought about this.”

“Nobody wants a shitty funeral.”

I thought about Max’s funeral. “Aren’t they all ultimately kind of shitty, though?”

He shook his head. “We’ve set the bar too low. We can do better.”

I lifted my hands in surrender. “Fair enough.”

He nodded. “And, then, you know… I typed up a few words.”

“You wrote your own obituary?”

“Eulogy.”

“What does it say?”

“It stresses how handsome and heroic I am—”

“Naturally,” I said.

“And mentions my Nobel Prize and my Pulitzer.”

“Fair enough.”

“And then, at the end, there’s a dance party.”

“In the church?”

He frowned at me like I hadn’t been paying attention. “None of this is happening in a church. This is abeachfuneral.”

---