My Eulogy

This won’t be the last art I make or the last thing I say about death but I am thinking less about death after a nourishing spell in Greece or perhaps I’ve shifted slightly in my relationship to it.

At times I have believed I should be dead, even that the world would be a better place without me, that the lives of others would flow better , if I like a boulder in a stream , was taken out.

I have seen myself repeatedly falling sideways under vehicles , being found dead in woodlands or pathways complete and still and face down. Similarly I have explored my ghost self standing up from this and running naked and free as a child in a harm free landscape where nature circles me with invisible protective force.

My parent’s deaths within three years of each other had a dramatic impact. Surely I should go with them. I believed I should, how would my father know where to go, I must escort him through the next life as I did in this life . I was so devastated to lose him I didn’t want to breath when he was no longer here.

I had the same dream twice, in which my parents clearly told me, ‘Tracie do not come, we don’t want you here.’

I felt maddened by the ennui of death the pointlessness of all the pointlessness in striving in lives which made so little impact. The things left behind. It led me to think not only about how I will live my life but also how I will ‘do’ my death.

Less than one handful of my friends came to my father’s funeral. I felt so alone as I read his eulogy. It occurred to me, after all the years of rehearsing my death and fantasising that everyone would be terribly sorry that I had died, that no one might come.

Then I knew, ‘no one is coming to help you’.

Somehow I have imagined I would exist more brightly in my death than in my life. I comforted many lonely times with this sad tale as I prepared to take my life. I never did, I always reached for professional help recognising my own head was trying to kill me. It’s part of having complex ptsd . It’s part of sometimes being overwhelmed, getting too isolated and getting ill.

Forgetting , for a moment that this smacks of my narcissism give me a minute to tell you what I decided to do with this story that was debunked by the reality of deaths around me.

I decided with a mix of courage and audacity to make some art that celebrates and evidences my existence. After all I’m not just ‘anybody’ I want to mark the occasion with my own stamp.

I had an epiphany once during a period of depression, ‘ but wait… what if I am not nothing? What if I am

Something? What then?’

I realised the difficulty of picking up one’s life and taking responsibility for it. Existing essentially involves action.

I felt assertive. I paid for my funeral, the most basic plan. Ashes to Greece please. I then asked opera singer Laure Meloy if she would help me record a song to be played at my funeral. I’m not a singer. I chose a track by an Artist my father liked Shirley Bassey . You can hear it through the link below. We recorded it in a chapel in Goodnestone. 

It speaks for itself . It’s mostly for my daughter and everyone’s daughter.

Be yourself.

I will write about the tomb stone I’ve been carving in another post.