my living will

Recent non-newsworthy but nonetheless newsfilling events have impressed on me the importance of keeping a living will. All you need to keep and maintain a living will is:

1) a terrarium
2) mealworms in oatmeal
3) some lettuce
4) water
5) a heat lamp

Okay, let’s stop that joke now before it grows out of control. In the unlikely event that my heart pops like a stepped-on grape, or my liver flares with cirrhosis, or some brainsucker loose from a childhood joke alights on my scalp and scoops out my cortex, here is what I’d like done with my body.

Under no circumstances allow me to actually, finally, mercifully die. Install an artificial heart if you must. Wire me up with all manner of prostheses. Shove one tube down my throat and another in my lungs. In the event of brainsucker attack, carefully remove whatever is left of my brain and leave me with only a stem and a spinal cord, the better to respond to stimuli with random smiles and occasional eye tracking. Fill my skull with angel food cake and wheel me out for parties. If my faithless, abusive wife attempts to have me removed from the web of machinery that keeps my heart pumping and my lungs exchanging oxygen, know that she is a monster with a pretty nose and bright blue-green eyes that glitter with the obsessive wish to murder me once and for all (I mean, who let that brainsucker loose in the first place?). Please involve Congress if that happens.

Send me on an international tour. I mean it. Cart my corpse-with-a-pulse all over the world, from fabulous cities to negligible burgs, to demonstrate to the world’s people the sanctity of life. I promise to gurgle and smile like an infant. In the terrible event that our freedoms are threatened by unattractive men in foreign countries, or by “death culture” freaks on our home turf, let me be cast in titanium and swung like a living hammer on the heads of our enemies. And on that day when I finally, absolutely, irretrievably die and my soul takes its well-deserved vacation in heaven, strap me to a bunker buster and drop me, your Angel of Life's Sanctity, into the concrete caves of those bad men who plot bad things against us.

I don’t care how you do it. Just do it.