If I Die Before You

If I die before you, sell all my stuff. Well, you don’t have to sell all of it, you can keep the stuff you like, maybe that flat screen I bought for the garage. But the other stuff, those baseball jerseys I bought and never wore or my collection of bobble-heads, sell all that shit and use the money to buy something you like.

Take those teeth-whitening strips out of the medicine cabinet. That fucking box has been taking up space on the bottom shelf for two goddamn years now. I keep telling myself that I’ll use them once I have the time to wear them twice a day, but that will never happen, so get that shit out of there. Spread the other stuff out, the pills and toothbrushes or whatever. It’s always been too cramped in there.

Walk the dog a lot. Or, be like me, and act like you walk the dogs a lot. If anyone asks you how much you walk the dog, with me gone and them remembering how I used to say I walked the dog a lot, tell them, “A lot.”

For the love of God, please buy a new water heater. Sell my body to science if you have to pay for it. I am sick to death, in fact it may be the way I die, of those fugue-infested mornings when the hot water runs out. Take that old pile of shit to the backyard and let the boys hack at it with my old softball bats. Cover it in wood and set it on fire. Invite over the whole block to see the blaze and tell them that I’d be happy to know that that fucking water heater was actually producing some heat for once. Then laugh and tell them that’s not true; wherever I am, I still hate that fucking water heater.

Throw out my CD collection. Even though they are worthless pieces of plastic that I have on the computer in infinitely more usable form, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to throw them out myself. To me, it seems like a waste to get rid of them. But later, it won’t seem like anything to me, so get them out of here. Don’t listen to them for nostalgic reasons, they don’t mean anything anyway.

Make the boys get off their asses and cut the lawn. If you hire a service, I swear to God I will come back and haunt all of you.

Watch all those movies I didn’t let you watch over the years. Every time I changed the channel and said, “Under no circumstances are we watching this”, find those movies and watch them. See if I was right about them, or just a dumb-fuck pig who couldn’t sit through a romantic comedy. Make a list of all the other movies we watched instead and crinkle it up and spray it with the faucet hose until it drips down into the garbage disposal. Ignore all the movies that when mentioned I would scoff that you hadn’t seen them and then tell you that you needed to see them. You don’t need to see anything. I was wrong.

The boys can have any clothes that fit them, but the rest, give to charity or some such shit. My underwear, however, pull directly from the laundry bin and then drive around town, stuffing them into mailboxes of people I don’t like. This will take you a while – not because I have a lot of dirty underwear in the laundry bin, but because I have a lot of people I don’t like.

Find people I like. Invite them to the funeral. Let them say nice things about me. Then whisper in their ear that it’s just a practical joke I’m playing on everyone, I’m not really dead. Tell them the body in the coffin, my body, is a fake. Tell them they are the only ones in on the joke. Smile mischievously. If anyone laughs, winks, says, “I knew it”, or “That old rascal”; immediately tell them that I am actually dead. Carry my removed heart in a glass jar for proof. If anyone gives you shit, make them take the jar home.

Go to a bar by yourself and get plastered. Talk to no one. Feign deafness. I’ve always wanted to do this, but I never understood why. You do it and decide why.

Take my pillows off our bed. I always like it when you get up and the bed is suddenly enormous and I can spread my arms out. Throw my pillows in the trash. Spread your arms out on the bed. Feel what I felt.

Tell people you’re going on a trip around the world to scatter my ashes in exotic locales. Tell people I had always wanted to travel, but, “You know, life got in the way.” Then roll your head back and laugh, and say, “Actually, death got in the way.” Drive twenty minutes north, into the city, and find a street performer: a dancer, a toothless saxophonist, or even those drumming bucket boys who aren’t half bad. Give my ashes as a tip to anyone of these buffoons. Then stay at a classy downtown hotel for a month and rack up huge room service bills. When you finally go home and people ask how the trip was, tell them I ended up where I’d always wanted, had seen the world, and was now at peace.

Find peace for yourself. I won’t be around to reconcile to perverse memory of what I was like with how I really was. Don’t let this bother you. In some respects I was worse. In others, better. Let yourself smile, not because I’m asking you to, but because you can and need to smile, and think, “Only a dickhead like that would write a list like this.”

Love me for writing a list like this and die after me. For the love of God, please. I intend to give you this list before it becomes necessary, and if you die before me, I’ll have to do these fucking things myself. And if that happens…well, I’ll never have the honor of you doing them for me.