Anticipating the Grim Reaper

 Many older people I know are preparing for their eventual deaths.

One friend is planning her funeral, naming pallbearers and dictating the hymns to be sung,

One uses a package (called Nokbox) that allows him to sort out all of his estate plans, passwords, possessions and final wishes for once he is gone.

Some write their own obituaries. I wrote mine, but I can’t find it.

I am in denial about death. Yes, I have made a will and signed do-not-resuscitate agreements. But since I have no known terminal illness, I haven’t any idea how I will go or when.

Sometimes you can prepare too soon. My wife, Pickett, planned for her burial almost 35 years ago by acquiring a wooden coffin stored at our church in D.C.

She had me take the ugly pine box home on our pickup truck. I suspect that our neighbors’ eyes popped out as I unloaded it onto our driveway. Did he kill her? Is he going to? Nobody called the police.

The coffin freaked out my poker friends when they went into our basement. If she ever died, they would be able to finger me as the first suspect.

I’ll have to admit that it came in handy once at Halloween. I rose from the coffin on the front porch in some ghastly costume, amusing and horrifying trick-or-treaters.

I probably would have refused to put Pickett’s remains in the awful pine box. But then she decided anyway that she wanted to be cremated, so what good was this chunk of wood?

And then we moved. What were we going to do with that warped box, which had gotten even dirtier and uglier with time. I finally found a theater company that accepted it gladly and with great admiration. Not sure what the play was. “Hamlet?” “A Christmas Carol?”

Well, now that I have begun this article, maybe I should start making some plans of my own, after all.

I shall have a memorial built for me in Constitution Square with bicycles, typewriters and pianos piled on top of each other.  Grand pianos only. If Bob Cage were still with us, I would have him build it out of junkyard parts. If it is good enough, I will have it placed on the Washington Mall.

And then I will have infrastucture renamed in my honor: The Mike Doan Heritage Hiking and Biking Trail and the Mike’s Mic Fine Arts Center in Clarksville. Trouble is, that would be quite expensive. My heirs might not like it.

I shall write the Mike Doan Requiem, the kind composed by my peers, Verdi, Brahms and Mozart. But counterpoint is too time-consuming to write. I will get AI to write my requiem!

So I really did that, but it’s all in Latin! And the phrases with “Agnus Dei”, “Dies Ire” and “Sanctus, sanctius,” are the same ones Mozart used. Plagiarism! I can’t have that! What’s more, it can’t write classical music.

So I had ChatGPT write me a song in my memory to the tune of “The Heart of Rock ‘n Roll” by Huey Lewis and the News.  Here is part of it:

“He was always rollin’, with a smile on his face,

Lighting up the room, no one could take his place.”

Hmmm. I don’t think this chatbot knows me very well!

So I will have a prestigious musician write and conduct my requiem.

 It will be performed by the Danville Symphony and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir at the Mike Doan Prizery Center in South Boston before it tours world capitals.

I select: Leonard Bernstein! What? Mr. Bernstein is no longer available? No one else could do it!  Then the whole idea just falls apart.