The Music of Death - Did you choose yours?

I couldn’t think of a fitting title for this article, it could have been named, ‘Funeral Songs’ or ‘What does your ghost want to hear?’ or ‘The last song ever’, but the crux of it is what do you want played at your funeral?

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Is this too morbid a subject to talk about? Possibly but I will continue regardless as several times I have mentioned to @bingbabe that I would like this song or that song to be played at my funeral.

She always shies away from the subject, and I’m quite sure she won’t remember what I have requested. Now she can read this article that is permanently on the block-chain so there can be no excuses.

My wife likes conventional music, and is one of these people that repeatedly plays the same song over and over again, frankly driving me insane sometimes. If it’s not ‘I Run to You’ by Lady Antebellum then it’s ‘Many of Horror’ by Biffy Clyro. I really don’t care to EVER hear either song again.

Back to the funeral topic; I seem to be attending more and more of them as I age. So far, they have been my friends’ mothers or fathers or in my case, my own father many years ago.

I have been fortunate enough so far to not have attended any of my friend’s funerals and I hope it will be many years before I have to.

I am expecting different types of music to be played at some future funerals. Crematoriums are respectful, quiet places where we show respect and remember the people we once knew, whether they be family or friends.

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The music played is usually serene but sometimes happy to remind us of the person who left us in a positive way; don’t we?

Do I want this at my funeral? No bloody way!

There may be serenity but I want guitars, and they better turn up that damn volume too. None of this, ‘I can barely hear the music’, levels.

It’s unlikely that anyone attending my funeral will have heard the song(s) I choose too. Why do people want to hear that radio friendly song they have heard 10,000 times before?

Bugger that too! My choice(s) will all be weird album tracks.

This is MY funeral and I will play that weird loud guitar music, and you funeral directors better get used to it, because some the new generation of people dying are likely to be Metal Heads rather than Patsy Cline fans.

My choices are always changing; it started with ‘Afterglow’ – Genesis. The lyrics are appropriate, it’s quite serene, and you probably have never heard it before though it is considered a band anthem.

Like the dust that settles all around me I must find a new home
The ways and holes that used to give me shelter They're all as one to me now.

Later I changed my mind to ‘High Hopes’ – Pink Floyd. It’s quite subdued and sombre with the bell, and the lyrics are once again in remembrance, but check out that guitar at the end.

Beyond the horizon of the place we lived when we were young
In a world of magnets and miracles
Our thoughts strayed constantly and without boundary
The ringing of the division bell had begun

More recently, I have changed ‘my song’ once again. Now it’s, ‘One Last Goodbye’ – Anathema. I can almost guarantee you have never heard of the touching song that was a tribute to the mother of the Cavanagh brothers on her death. The lyrics are perfect:

How I needed you
How I grieve now, you're gone
In my dreams I see you
I'm awake, so alone

It has everything, it’s a song of loss, it’s serene, but has all those noisy guitars the further it gets going. I want to blast out the eardrums of those dowdy funeral directors and make their eyelids rise in surprise and shock at what they are hearing.

There will be no Jim Reeves, Frank Sinatra, Bobby Darin for me. I will leave that for the people who have died before me. There had better be some guitars or there’s gonna be trouble!

I'll be playing air guitar while standing on top of the coffin before they send me in to burn, you had better believe it.

Skull Icon courtesy of http://www.freestockphotos.biz/stockphoto/12106

This post was created in #esteem thanks @good-karma