When I’m Gone, I’m Gone

When I’m gone, I’m happily gone and with all due respect, it’s the last day your love will matter to me. The fat lady sings, the casket closes and the shovel sifts through fresh dirt to cover the box of lifeless bones I leave behind. Yesterday was the last day to give me flowers and if you missed yesterday, you missed it; you missed me. Now they will lay in withering decay; a memorial to be trampled underfoot and eventually tidied up by laborers attempting to beautify in honor of more recent death. No personally-themed party plans necessary to foster honor or respect; I will no longer have the ability to care. Box or bag, tomb or hole-in-the-ground, paper or plastic; none of that will matter to the absentee spirit that will be joyously celebrating a life gloriously and finally transitioned.
You can hold my mail. You can read it if you like. Do what makes you happy. I won’t be there to witness any Broadway production of a celebratory send-off, nor the dramatic sadness competition between fourth-grade best friends I haven’t seen since the fourth grade. There’s absolutely nothing I’ll be needing during that time when gentle earthly touches smear cosmetic subterfuge and leave skin dentations in the lifeless opaque mannequin figure representing the guest of honor. I will have moved from my previous address, never to return.
Have your ceremony! The cake I loved so much is yours now. I hope you enjoy it. Don’t feel obligated to read my poetry or sing my songs unless it’s for your own comfort. Those things will never matter to me again because the me that I am, will be me no more. Nothing will bring me more joy than the joyous afterlife I will be clinging to in celebration of my new body and magnified spirit. In fact, I’m certain that I wouldn’t consider letting go of it for a split second to even acknowledge your earthly tribute. I promise not to be disappointed if you didn’t love me like you said you did or if you never visited in my times of need. I won’t know if you intended to be a better friend. I won’t carry any grudges to my coronation. I won’t care if my life mattered less to you than my death and my death less than the funeral services that memorialize it. My death will cancel all of those feelings for me but for you the pendulum of irreversible choices may cause some conviction.
There’ll be no earthly status checks and no startling conversations or family life choices powerful enough to resurrect my glorified spirit or cause my yesterday-body to turn over in the memoriam designated as my grave; I won’t be there.
If you are a friend, you’re a friend today, while it matters. Send your flowers today when heavy hearts burst with anguish and gentle touches can breathe the warmth of concern. Send your flowers while the flowery smell of love permeates the atmosphere of discontent and while love sent can produce love’s scent and mark all the places where love went. Today is all we have to show Jesus to the blind and preach Him to the deaf. Tomorrow friendships will fade into lost opportunity; where broken souls are left on the threshold of possibility. A place where unrevealed testimonies magnify guilt and funeral services symbolize time’s abandonment of those who held back their flowers for too long.

Don’t wait until it’s too late to tell someone how much you love and how much care about them, because when they’re gone, no matter how loud you shout and cry, they won’t hear you anymore. – Unknown

“We are confident, yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord.” 2 Corinthians 5:8 (NKJV)