Advice from a small town girl

I’ve been thinking about what I would want people to say about me at my funeral three years from now.

Don’t start celebrating prematurely – I’m not dying, at least as far as I know.

No, this is an exercise from a book called “Managing Your Mind, The Mental Fitness Guide,” by Gillian Butler, PhD and Tony Hope, MD.

I think the theory is that if you want people to say something nice about you when you die, you need at least three years to set them up for it.

I picked the book up at a Friends of the Library book sale (I think), mostly because I’m not yet ready to give up on my theory that the more self-help books you have in your library, the more normal you will appear to be.

This particular book has some fairly entertaining exercises, and this is one of them. Up to this point, it had never occurred to me that anyone would want to say anything about me at my funeral (mostly because I’m not really ready to have one yet), and had limited my imagination to what I would ask to have inscribed on my tombstone when the time comes.

You know the kind of thing.

“Rest in peace,” and “Gone but not forgotten” are nice but awfully generic. “She never did learn to polka” might be more truthful.

“When the going got tough, she got going” springs to mind. Or how about “For someone who couldn’t bake, she sure stuck her finger in a lot of pies.”

Oops. Guess I got a wee bit off track.

At any rate, this exercise involves imagining three people speaking at your funeral; a family member, a co-worker and a friend.

This is harder than you’d think.

I keep getting sidetracked with what people would say if I keeled over right now.

“Whew!” comes to mind, closely followed by tea and crumpets.

See what I mean?

The book gives examples such as “She was fun to be around” or “She had a wonderful work ethic.”

Those would be nice, I guess, but they sound just the tiniest bit boring. Maybe I need to shoot for something a bit more eccentric.

“She was always interesting.” Now that one is really open to interpretation. It’s much more likely that someone would comment on my short attention span.

I still want someone (anyone) to say of me, “She left the world better than she found it,” the mantra in my head from my scoutmaster dad.

I know I should want a family member to say that I could be relied on to be there for others, but I’m pretty sure that earning that accolade would take more than three years.

And I would want a friend to say that they were always comfortable in my presence; that they could trust me to be open, fair and tolerant, because that’s what I would want in a friend.

This could go on and on, but it just occurred to me that the one thing I don’t want anyone to say is “Boy, was she fat!”

Of course, that would be way better than “Boy, was she dumb!”

I think maybe I’d settle for “She made me laugh!”