Funeral Notes

Funeral Notes

I won’t take death lying down.
Let me sit up so I can curse the day.
I don’t want a martyr’s tinsel crown.

If my poetry should gain renown
And some fool wishes to embalm this clay,
I won’t take death lying down.

A Viking funeral—let me burn and drown--
Is better than the coffin’s slow decay.
I don’t want a martyr’s tinsel crown.

Death is the ancestral hand-me-down,
Your last best suit, it is the great cliché.
I won’t take death lying down.

We hope some deed or word, some towering noun
Might keep our memory forever in play.
I don’t want a martyr’s tinsel crown.

I’ll curse you if you put me in the ground.
(I’d rather you put my books on display.)
I won’t take death lying down.
I don’t want a martyr’s tinsel crown.


I want to thank LKD for her compassionate comment yesterday, proving that she is truly “one acquainted with the night.” It’s easy to tell who knows and who does not know the experience of severe depression. There is no way to fake the knowledge. I wish I were never given the knowledge, but you can’t pick your parents, and both of my grandmothers, not to mention a bunch of aunts and cousins, are manic-depressive, as was my father.

There are certain disadvantages to the diagnosis in terms of practical matters. I can’t get term life insurance because my dad committed suicide at age 62 and I have the same disease. As for health insurance, we are catapulted into the states “high-risk pool”, where we can get Blue Cross for $1200/mo. or sign up with Kaiser for around $800, the only disadvantage being that Kaiser is over two hours away, and not an easy drive on the two-lanes. Even when I was a practicing doctor I favored universal health insurance. Massachusetts is trying it, God bless them. With a third of Americans uninsured, it is one more class division between the haves and have-nots. I worry about Kathleen’s hip, which is painful and clicking, and whether she might need a hip replacement. And if I had insurance, this depression might be over as I could afford ECT. But we muddle on, try to walk each day for an hour, stop when Kathleen’s hip or back become too painful. And Kenyon can’t join us on these walks, they wear him out, although he still swims like a seal.

Today Kathleen has declared housecleaning and I look forward to it since it consists of concrete tasks with immediate rewards. I once asked my pastor at a large Lutheran Church if there were any menial tasks I could do to help me with depression; I ended up vacuuming the whole sanctuary but my back couldn’t take it. And they say irony is dead.

I think I’ll cut this off here and check in with the domestic engineer and receive my sentence.

One crying spell yesterday; I usually try to resist.


At 2 Kilorats,

Craig Erick