Book Introduction
The introduction published in the book is an edited version of this one. We thought you'd enjoy the "full" story!
“Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.”
We sat in the church with our mouths wide open wondering if we were in the wrong place. The person the preacher was talking about was not our friend. Why do so many people try to sanctify someone when they die, instead of honoring and celebrating their personality and life? We wanted the man who drank too much, left his family for weeks on end and went through a journey that brought him back to his family and friends a whole person. His true story had courage.
It was on the drive home from that funeral that we began to toy with the idea of writing this book. Once we got home and drank enough champagne we made the commitment to write it.
Life is such a rich, complicated, joyous, mysterious wild ride. Everyone has stories to tell and lessons to pass on, and what better way to do that than when you’re dead? It was your life; your funeral is the one time you can do and say absolutely whatever you want.
Were you reluctant to pick up this book? Have you been dreaming of a royal, “pull out all the stops” funeral like Princess Diana had? Or perhaps in lieu of a formal funeral, you’ve been planning to send your closest friends to a sexy tropical island to celebrate your life. Maybe, you want a lovely, tasteful tribute to yourself including your joys, sorrows, triumphs and yes, some mistakes. Are you worried that your family will be embarrassed by your end-of-life festivities plans that include sending your ashes up in a spaceship? What if they want to embalm you and put you in a huge, metal casket with your leftover internal organs lying right next to your legs? If you said yes to any of these questions or have other ones . . . this is the book for you.
As of this writing, there is no alternative to dying. (You can be cryogenically frozen…but we wouldn’t call that life.) Since there’s no getting out of it, why not go ahead and plan your fantasy going “away” party? Is it just us or have you been seeing too many “She’s not dead… she’s just away” bereavement cards? Of course you can’t really be too upset since according to the card she’s coming back. . . .
Carmen and Sue were destined to write a book about planning one’s own funeral. Between Sue and Carmen, they’ve personally experienced three weddings, two divorces (all Carmen) and five suicides of close family members. They’ve nursed four relatives and friends through deaths due to cancer. They’ve survived cancer (Sue) and meningitis (Carmen) and if all that’s not enough, they are both orphans. In spite of these experiences, or because of them, they do not fear death at all…they appreciate life that much more.
Sue lost her fear of death after a serious depression when her spiritual teacher recommended she read one of those near-death experience books—Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon—Survival of Bodily Death by Raymond A. Moody Jr., M.D. After this first book, she was hooked and went on to read most every major book on near death experiences, past life regression, life between life, and spirit guides. From her studies, Sue feels there is no real “death” just a transformation from one form—the physical—to another form—the non-physical spirit body.
When Carmen was seven, she read a Life magazine article on building the Aswan Dam and the temples of Abu Simbel in Egypt. She showed the magazine to her father and said, “I lived there before.” He answered her with, “Well, let’s talk about that.” He taught her about reincarnation and the religions of the world and different cultures of death. Carmen was fifteen when her mother killed herself, which spurred Carmen on to examine death in a personal way. Since then she has surrounded herself with surrogate mothers (astrologers, psychics, mediums, and tarot card and palm readers) whom Carmen lovingly refers to as her “spooks.”
At the beginning, when Carmen came to New York, poltergeist issues, shall we say, around this whole project began. A couple of excellent psychics told them that there were many spirits who wanted to help with the book. Apparently there were so many they were bumping into each other and created disturbances.
Sue came home at the end of Carmen’s first day of writing and saw that a mirrored chest had a big half moon break across the entire top drawer, with tiny “sprays” breaking off from that main crack. Carmen had used the middle drawer the day before, but she swore she hadn’t touched it recently. It was hard to believe, but Sue couldn’t see Carmen kicking in the drawer. Even if Carmen had kicked it, making that crack would be physically impossible for her. The next day the same long arched crack with additional “branches” appeared on the bottom drawer. That was the official announcement that we had “help” with the book. Oddly, the one intact drawer was the one Carmen put her clothes in.
Around this time Sue’s cats became, we are not kidding, possessed. Only those who have seen it would believe it. Thank God for the Tibetans bowls Sue used to do “exorcisms” on her apartment and the cats. These normally sweet creatures became vicious tigers and scary effigies of themselves. They literally bounced off the walls (Sue’s neighbor could see them from across the street) and would scare the heck out of each other. Mischa stalked Bodhi who would attack Hannah who would try to kill Mischa and on and on. Sue finally got a psychic reading as a last resort, thinking she would have to split up her little family, and within ten minutes, the cats became calm, for a while. . . Soon this wacky, possessed behavior returned and required another “clearing” with the Tibetan bowls to ease their freakiness.
Then Carmen’s computer went extra crazy with entire paragraphs jumping all over. She also lost a day’s work without her doing anything out of the ordinary. She spent five hours on the phone with her husband and the computer company, to try to retrieve the document. Didn’t get it. So Carmen got a new computer and it was better, but weird stuff continued to happen all the time. Documents disappeared without prompting, the cursor would blink but she couldn’t type, her homepage would change on its own, and each day a different icon would disappear, until she had almost no icons on the desktop. Good thing she’s patient. By the way, Carmen’s hair is one of the most creative parts of her body—one day it’s the Bob Fosse bend/reach out to the side, one day it’s the Bono fist in the air from the top, but she says it only started when she began work at Sue’s apartment! We documented this weird, possibly psychic phenomenon on an almost daily basis. Watch for it on YouTube.
And then it went from bad to worse. We went to Vermont to spend the Christmas holiday with Carmen’s good friends. A good time was had by all—except that Sue caught the flu and Carmen’s old friend Ken thought he pulled a muscle in chest. We all made it back to New York without incident.
The day Carmen, Sue, and Ken got back, our hostess Amy’s father died. Two days after that, Ken suddenly died at age fifty-two. Carmen’s husband, Vern, came down and they went to a friend’s empty apartment on the beach, so they could mourn Ken. Unbeknownst to them, the friend had decided to throw a Super Bowl party the next day at his beach place. In the midst of corks popping, beer flying, and food being delivered, Didi—Carmen’s godmother, the woman who raised her—died.
Two weeks later, our wonderful editor Alice’s brother-in-law died unexpectedly in his fifties. Around then (we had lost track of time at this point), Maciek, another friend from the Christmas holiday celebration, lost his father. The publisher then became afraid of the project and wondered if he should pull out. You might be thinking: “This is all a good example of why you should buy this book. Best to be prepared, because you just truly never know!”
Carmen went home to Maine to recover. Later Sue joined her to work on the book. When they returned to New York, the living room smelled as if someone had been smoking there, heavily—especially around the mirrored cabinet. Sue’s neighbor Sharon, who had been taking care of the cats, swore she did not smoke in there. The mysterious smell stayed for three or four days. Quite disturbing.
Every day it seemed like something else weird happened: the Tibetan bowl striker flew off the stick as Sue mentioned that Hannah was possessed again; a large Roman shade fell down; veneer came off new untouched furniture; a bottle of roll-on deodorant was opened and the ball and liquid flew out. On the other hand, the flowers that Sue had artfully arranged around her apartment seemed to last forever.
Then there was the dime found one night, placed on the “cracked-mirror-poltergeist-cabinet,” in front of the Tibetan bowls. FDR, whose image is on the dime, is famous for the quote: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” This is important, because this has been our approach—death is nothing to fear. So, we’d like to help people address, and perhaps reduce, their fear of death. Then the words “E Pluribus Unum”—which means, “Out of many, one.” We thought this meant that “they” (the spirits lined up to help us work on this book) wanted us to acknowledge their participation. Okay, you’ve got it! Thank you to “the many” who are helping us to make the “one”—our book. We could have used a referee, perhaps, to control the melee, but we’re glad (most of) you were there.
There is a bright side to this story (Carmen is perpetually optimistic)—Didi had written her wishes in an early draft of Grave Expectations, which gave Carmen and her “God-brothers” an easy-to-follow “funeral map.” Didi had chosen the church, the liturgy, the friends and family she wanted to speak, and in some cases, the topics they would address. She was an artist and she had chosen the various drawings, illustrations, and paintings to be displayed at her memorial. New Orleans Jazz recordings were peppered throughout the service and at the end she led the crowd outside as Louis Armstrong sang “What a Wonderful World.”
In planning ahead, Didi gave her sons and Carmen a huge gift. She gave them the recipe so all they had to do was put the ingredients together. Since it was her “dish” they never had to question if they were making the right choices. This gave them the luxury of time to mourn, reunite, tell tales, and grieve with family and friends. Just what Didi wanted. . . .
Carmen and Sue are not being facetious when they say they look forward to death. It’s the road to it that can be a bit bumpy. They believe in a great afterlife, in fact they feel life is the challenge and death is the reward. Sue always says to people after a discussion about death and the afterlife, “I’ll meet you on the other side, and I’ll say, ‘See. . . I was right!’”
“Eat well; stay fit; die anyway!”
