Thoughts From A Chair by Jennifer Nordberg
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"Leave Your Shells Behind"

  Growing up in a small midwestern town in Minnesota, you needed to make 
your own fun. Being the only girl in my neighborhood, that left me with lots of 
extra hours to fill up. One of my favorite things to do was simply to walk up 
and down the country roads.
  I would do this and talk to myself for hours, having conversations, working 
out problems that might come up, what I might say, would say, would have 
said if I had been thinking quicker. This is something I still do; though now I 
try not to move my lips, so people do not think I am crazy. It helps me figure 
out what to do with a problem that I just can not figure out.
  In the autumn, I liked taking walks on rainy evenings through a local 
cemetery. I still do this. I like reading the names on the old headstones, 
figuring out when the person died, trying to guess what they may have died of. 
A man dying in his early 20s in the nineteen-twenties, possibly the Depression
or the Flu epidemic? A teenager dying in the early '50s, maybe polio. A 
couple dying together in the mid 1960's most likely a car accident. Of course, 
soldier's graves are marked well, with their rank engraved and a Bronze Star 
on a post next to it. I would wonder who keeps those there and looking nice.
  My husband and I have already got our grave plots picked out. We received
them for my birthday about ten years ago as a gift from my parents. What an 
odd gift, many said, but I thought it was a great idea. The gift of an eternal 
place to leave our walking shells behind.
  Actually, I think if I had a choice, and since I am a donor, I would leave 
everything to be donated. I have made my wishes known to my husband to use
every part of me that can be used, then put the rest into a cardboard box, put it 
in the ground, no vault, no formaldehyde, and just plant me somewhere where 
I can turn into worm food. Whatever God wants to bring back, I think He has 
the ultimate power to do. Call me morbid, call me mulch.

by Jennifer Nordberg       copyright 2003

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