Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Feed Me, Seymour!!

Sorry, this one was just too, umm, well, I guess there just aren't words.

Potato-chip can found in place of woman's remains in mausoleum
When relatives of Vivian Shulman Lieberman went to visit her final resting place in a Houston mausoleum one year ago today, they discovered that the cedar chest containing her ashes was missing.

In its place, behind the locked, glass door of Lieberman's niche in Congregation Beth Israel's mausoleum, was a can of sour-cream-and-onion potato chips.

I've left instructions for my own cremation, should I assume room temperature before my husband and/or my best friend. They're to divide up the ashes, and they both have specific instructions for how to dispose of their part. I find the whole notion of embalming, burial, caskets, urns, headstones, etc. to be completely NOT ME. To have my family spend MONEY to keep my dead body looking like me? To spend money on a fancy wooden box that you're just going to bury in an expensive hole in the ground, then spend more money to have my name carved in granite? I'm telling you, it just makes absolutely no sense to me, and I do not want it done in my case. Anybody dares waste that much money on my leftover carcass, why not take that $$ and give it to someone who's smuggling Bibles into Saudi Arabia? 'Cuz that's what I'd be doing if I were still alive.

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