What Is Your "Eternal" Walk-off song?

I just love this piece. Great call.

 

I need to put it on paper but I want music to be a big part of my sendoff.

My best friend died our senior year of college. “In My Life” was part of the service. Need that.

My bride walked down the aisle to “Give a Little Bit” by Supertramp. Gotta have that.

“Running Down a Dream” by Tom Petty because it reminds me of carefree summer days.

The list will be extensive.

 

Wow, tough question to answer.

I guess it would be cool if my kids propped up my old turntable, reached into one of my milkcrates of LPs and chose a song like this:

(BTW, one of the last songs Danny Kirwan wrote for the Mac)

 

Or if they went one record closer to the front of the crate, they could choose this early Bob Welch gem:

 

I’m having a
Big surgery on Tuesday. If you don’t here from me in a couple of weeks play this

 

In addition to my aunt and two uncles dying in the last six months, I've discovered on the intertubes that one of my closest former co-worker friends from 35 years ago died in 2019, and another former co-worker I'd been fairly close to died last February. (During COVID, but not from it.)

So a couple days ago I was talking about another co-worker, a pretty rough-edged dude with a very checkered past I worked with 30 years ago, who left our small paper abruptly in 1990 and then moved 3/4 of the way across the country, and discovered he had died in January 1994 (utterly coincidentally, four days before my mom died).

That discovery came as no real surprise to me, I knew this MFker had been involved in some seriously sketchy shit previous to my knowing him, and his lifestyle hadn't exactly been an advertisement for healthy living, but I was still half expecting to find he was living in some desert commune or something somewhere. He had a somewhat unusual ethnic name so I figured if I googled I'd probably come up with stuff on him.

I did come up with some college paper issues from the early Seventies which filled in some of the gaps on his "sketchy shit," he was pinched a couple times for selling pills, pot possession, possession of meth with intent to distribute, etc etc. He got probation in most of the cases but it wasn't hard to see how he was gonna wind up in Illinois state prison, where our general manager hired him a year before I arrived as M.E. After he left our little dishrag, he moved out west, but also seemed to drop off the Google timeline

But there it was, a one line obit in newspapers.com:

"Sam Sketchydude, 42, newspaper reporter, died Jan. 1, 1994, in Pounding Rocks, AZ."

That's it. Nothing more. The only indication on the internet he had shuffled off this mortal coil.

Anyway, mortality's been hitting me from every angle lately.

My mother, her father, BOTH her grandfathers, and two more of my fairly direct ancestors all died at 63 (from no related causes as far as I know) and I'm about halfway through to 64 (September). I feel generally ok, but I do have a few nagging health things going on, so I'll still be nervous a few more months.

So now I'm definitely devoting some thoughts to my playlist.

One complicating factor is that the Catholic Church is still pretty sticky about what music they allow at in-church ceremonies (baptisms, weddings, funerals) -- basically very few "popular" songs.

I've been a very loosely connected semi-fallen Catholic for about 40 years, but as Bruce Springsteen says, "once you're on the team, you never really leave," and if nothing else as an example for my godchildren and grand-godchildren, I want to have at least an ecclesiastically acceptable funeral ceremony -- that is, something they won't risk excommunication for taking part in.

So instead I'm planning a toe tapping Irish wake to follow the funeral. That's where I'll program the audio and visual production.

My youngest niece, in addition to a crackerjack basketball and softball player, is becoming quite a prodigy in Irish dance. Maybe she'll lead the crowd in a high stepping jig to Dropkick Murphy's.

 

Another death-related problem between the Catholic Church and me involves burial. The church has tiptoed backwards on its stance on cremation in the last couple decades-- it's now "allowed but not encouraged" -- but they are still sticklers against ash scattering or water burial, probably my preference.

We'll see. I've never been very big on grave visitations -- I've lived 5 miles from my parents (and brother's) gravesite for 6 years and I think I've gone twice.

At my aunt's funeral a couple weeks ago, I realized my grandmother has been dead 25 years and I think I've been to her gravesite twice. My other grandparents, my dad's folks, have been gone 45 years and I think I've visited their plot three times. I just don't see the point to the expense or land wastage of a gravesite.

Another thought that hit me at my aunt's funeral was, ixnay on the open-casket stuff for me. My aunt looked ok for 85, and the funeral crew did a good job, but she still looked, well ... dead.

I've picked out a few pictures of me from various stages in my life in which I look reasonably presentable, and those are the images I want people to remember. Not lying stiff in a casket.

 

I'm toying around ideas for my farewell playlist: I started out with a list of about 40 songs.
Figuring nobody's particularly going to want to sit around for four hours at a funeral home listening to a playlist, I figure to cut it down to a half-hour tops, maybe 6-8 songs.

For starters: