Gloria Mundi
Come to my funeral dressed as you would for an autumn walk in the woods. Arrive on your schedule; I give you permission to be late, even without good cause. If my day arrives when you had other plans, please proceed with them instead. Celebrate me there—keep dancing. Tend your gardens. Live well. Don’t stop. Think of me forever assigned to a period, a place, a people. Remember me in stories—not the first time we met, not the last, a time in between. Our moment here is small. I am too—a worldly thing among worldly things— one part per seven billion. Make me smaller still. Repurpose my body. Mix me with soil and seed, compost for a sapling. Make my remains useful, wondrous. Let me bloom and recede, grow and decay, let me be lovely yet temporal, like memories, like mahogany.