When I was very young, my grandfather died of a massive heart attack. I was too young to understand death, but old enough to understand loss. So I was confused by my grandfather's body in the casket, with rouge on his cheeks and his mouth sewn shut. I didn't understand why they did that to him or why he was gone. It didn't look or seem real.

Decades later, my grandmother finally succumbed to her illnesses and was buried at the same cemetery. I viewed her corpse as an adult, and found it to be nothing but an empty husk - she wasn't in there and thankfully the makeup job was minimal - just enough to hide gruesome coloring. It didn't seem real either, although I did find closure in seeing the body. I get why people do it.

But both funerals were... too sanitized. I grieved beforehand, and I teared up at some of the eulogizing, but the bodies were just... weird to me. Like you said. Weird and a little creepy.

On my father's side of the family, the funerals were different. Closed casket. We all carried the casket to the hole ourselves, and held some of our eulogies over the hole in the ground, and then we all picked up shovels and filled that horrible hole until our own sorrows burst forth. I threw in maybe a dozen shovelfuls onto my grandpa before I lost it. My uncle... poor man filled almost half the hole by himself. But you know what? I have never... never had a more cathartic, healing experience. We buried my father's mom the same way a few years later. The act of participating so intimately in the burial brings home the reality much better for me then a made-up body did.

I want to be buried this way someday (preferably after I am dead, haha), and then afterwards I want everyone to throw a big party to celebrate my goddamn life. Live it up in my honor, because isn't there enough pain in the world? Why should people dwell on my departure... let them reminisce the good times instead, and cry on each other's shoulders as needed in between margaritas.