Embracing Death | Explorer

It's interesting in our society, and you know how we do things. You know, we plan for so many life celebratory events. We plan for a wedding, we plan for a baby, we plan for a graduation from high school, from college. We plan for our career.

But the one thing that's guaranteed in life is our death. But nobody wants to take the time to plan it. I'm actually trying to get people to open up their mind and realize that death is a part of life.

Just as you are making choices in life on how you want to live your life, you have those same opportunities to make those choices of how you want to die and how you want your funeral to be; what you want done with your body afterwards.

I've come across many people during their dying day that basically I said, "Don't cry for me at my funeral." Laughs, you know, share wonderful stories. I think that people are really trying hard to take the sadness out of the funeral as much as possible and trying to say, "You know, celebrate the life I live, celebrate that I was actually here."

A funeral is a time to mourn, to grieve. I'm not trying to take that away because that is very much an innate feeling that resides in us all. We all have to have it. You have to grieve; you have to mourn. But you can also celebrate, and you can laugh, and you can reflect and have memories.

So the funeral is that time to really just bring it all together. I embrace death; I deal with death on a daily basis. It's just, it is really a part of who I am. And I know one day I will die.

When I do, I want to be cremated. I want to do in death the same as I did in life. I want to do as much as I can. Half of my ashes will go to Arlington National Cemetery because I'm a soldier and a veteran. I want my great-great-grandchildren to be able to one day walk into that cemetery and say, "This was my great-great-grandmother."

Then the other half of me I want to just do as much as I can, and I will leave instructions for my children. Allow them to keep a portion of me as a keepsake if they so desire, if that's what brings them comfort. I want to be turned into a diamond, and I want to go into outer space.

I want to go and become a coral reef. I want to be incorporated into a painting. Thankfully, my daughters like tattoos, so one of them can put me into their tattoos. I want to do as much as I can, and I'm hoping that I won't be dying for a while.

When I do, hopefully, there'll be a lot more technology out there that has, you know, come to the forefront and there'll be more things I can do.