I think with an experience like that I would be loath to keep writing about plane travel.

Word.

But, on the other hand? I had a reservation on Pan Am 103. When I got on the plane to Lockerbie to do lay counseling for the rescue workers and to finish my history with my best friend, everyone around me freaked. How could I fly?

All I could say was borrowed time, baby...the law of averages has got me covered on this one.

I'm sure it will surprise no one that I want them to harvest all donateable things they can and either burn the rest or take it down to the bones so someone can have a skeleton. Though I don't know if the titanium plates would disqualify my skeleton from being used. As far as memorials - I want a blow-out Irish wake, with drinking and singing and crying and laughing and story-telling.

Oh, erika! I'm way behind on my H:LotS watching (I love it - I just don't find the time to sit and watch anything properly), but I got my brother hooked, and he's somewhere on the 5th season or so already, and loving every minute of it.

I flew a few days after 9/11 and was surprised by all the people who said they wouldn't, because to me, it was a safer time than ever to fly, what with all the heightened attention to security.

Oh, that's just awesome, bunky. Are TastyKakes kosher? Because if they are, I hoist a virtual tastykake in honor of The Best Damn Show On Television.
"Oy, vey is mir. I'm so meshuggeneh I could plotz."

"Do it again. Do it again."

"No!"

"Please?

"No."

I think having viewings of both my grandmothers helped me truly understand that they were dead early in the grieving process. Yeah, seeing them like that broke me, but I'd rather have had it happen at the funeral than waited for weeks and then had my brain process that they're gone.

I managed to talk both my parents into family-only viewings before cremation to help everyone get closure, though they've decided against public viewings. (As for me, the mortician can prop me up in costume in front of stage backgrounds and charge admission for all I care once I'm gone.)

My experience has been everything from the open casket, public viewing to doing nothing at all. Closest thing to a ceremony was waiting on the lawn (it just felt too weird to be inside with dead grandpa) as the paramedics wheeled him out of the house. With grandma, for me, there was even less, just a phone call. My parents and my aunt and her husband went up to clear out the house about a month or two later, and did a lot of drinking and laughing while they did so, so I guess that counts as a marking of passage in a way.

All told, I'm ok with the nothing, personally. There is no logic to the way my brain does or does not accept death. I saw one minutes after she died, and I still expect to see her at odd moments. Grandpa was surely dead the moment I was told, before I saw him. Grandma was gone and I hadn't seen her in a couple years. No logic.

When Alex died we had a viewing and then cremation. Because of all the chemo and steroids, he looked nothing like himself. So for me it wasn't all that helpful. I can't speak to the rest of the fam.

I didn't go to the service where his mother buried the ashes because my parents weren't invited, and I didn't want step dad alone that day. So no closure there.

What actually did it was step-dad putting some of the ashes on a great big roman candle we set off on his birthday (a tradition we continue from when Alex was alive). That's when I got hold of the finality of it.

I loathed the one viewing I've attended so viscerally that I will never attend another. I'm told there's a big difference between seeing an ordinary dead body (I've only ever seen photos) and what a gussied-up funeral corpse looks like; but the latter was enough to convince me for ever afterwards to call a dead body "it." That thing didn't deserve a personal pronoun, not from me.

In sum, bury me unsullied, standing up under the roots of a sapling, so that I may at least be useful.

OK, this is just weird....

BAGHDAD (AFP) - Iraqi Shiite residents of Baghdad's Sadr City have expressed anger on over a picture of a grinning Jesus they mistook for a Shiite holy figure that appeared in the area after a joint US-Iraqi operation.

Residents found a picture of "Buddy Jesus" from the 1999 film "Dogma" posted in the streets, accompanied by a badly photocopied pamphlet bearing a crude approximation of a US military crest and outlining a US "plan" to subjugate the neighborhood.

"That picture abuses our Imam Mahdi and his holy character, and mocks our sacred figures," said resident Abu Riyam Sunday, apparently mistaking the satirical movie still of Jesus for one of Shiite Islam's historical imams, whose images adopt a Jesus-like iconography.

The grinning, winking model of Buddy Jesus giving a thumbs-up sign appeared in the comedy film as a fictional attempt by the Catholic Church to present a kinder and more accessible image of Christianity.

"If it wasn't so serious it would be funny," said a coalition spokesman, Major Will Willhoite.

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