What song/s do you want played at your funeral?

I can pretty much lay out my whole funeral....


Song 1) Johnny Cash - Hurt.

Played a people enter wherever it is I'm being disposed of [Having said I can lay out my whole funeral this most important element is kinda proving a stumbling block! I basically don't want to burden anyone with costs so nothing fancy - I'll be dead so makes no odds to me what they do with the corpse. Something cool like being taken to the zoo and fed to the lions would be preferable but I don't think they let you do that]


Song 2) [More undecided here] Possibly either Guns 'n' Roses with November Rain, The Smashing Pumpkins with either Disarm or 1979, Dune Tran with Dark Star, The Stone Roses with I Am The Resurrection or something from 'The Bends' era Radiohead or early Manic Street Preachers.

Played once everyone is in seated.... or stood? Or reclined on beach loungers? Again with no idea of body disposal and therefore potential venue I can't really say for sure, but once everybody is 'there'.


Followed by a reading of Aaron Freeman's "So you want a physicist to speak at your funeral"

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you'd hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you'll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they'll be comforted to know your energy's still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you're just less orderly. Amen.


Song 3) Either The Moonlight Sonata or Fur Elise by Beethoven.


Followed by a reading of Sasha Sagan's (Carl Sagan's Daughter) essay on her father teaching her about death.

One day when I was still very young, I asked my father about his parents. I knew my maternal grandparents intimately, but I wanted to know why I had never met his parents.

“Because they died,” he said wistfully.

“Will you ever see them again?” I asked.

He considered his answer carefully. Finally, he said that there was nothing he would like more in the world than to see his mother and father again, but that he had no reason — and no evidence — to support the idea of an afterlife, so he couldn’t give in to the temptation.

“Why?”

Then he told me, very tenderly, that it can be dangerous to believe things just because you want them to be true. You can get tricked if you don’t question yourself and others, especially people in a position of authority. He told me that anything that’s truly real can stand up to scrutiny.

As far as I can remember, this is the first time I began to understand the permanence of death. As I veered into a kind of mini existential crisis, my parents comforted me without deviating from their scientific worldview.

“You are alive right this second. That is an amazing thing,” they told me. When you consider the nearly infinite number of forks in the road that lead to any single person being born, they said, you must be grateful that you’re you at this very second. Think of the enormous number of potential alternate universes where, for example, your great-great-grandparents never meet and you never come to be. Moreover, you have the pleasure of living on a planet where you have evolved to breathe the air, drink the water, and love the warmth of the closest star. You’re connected to the generations through DNA — and, even farther back, to the universe, because every cell in your body was cooked in the hearts of stars. We are star stuff, my dad famously said, and he made me feel that way.


Song 4) The Source featuring Candi Staton - You Got The Love

(Has special meaning for a few people who will likely be there, and it serves to start the bring the mood up a bit being much more upbeat than previous selections)


Video footage of me:

"I started off with some pretty melancholy music that should have been ample time to get the sobbing over with, now hug each other, buy some beer and laugh about our memories.... Cos if there is an afterlife and you're not sat in the pub remembering the good times and laughing your head off by the end of the evening you damn well better believe I'm gonna be haunting the shit out of you, trifling bitches!"


Song 5) Closing song as people leave - Not really got an idea, change my mind every time I think about it.... But something happy! Something that will stop those miserable fuckers in attendance from being mournful and get them to go out, get drunk, and celebrate my fucking life!

/r/AskReddit Thread