the back burner

a last word

i read about it in the paper two days ago,
a legal dispute over how to dispose of a woman's remains:
she wanted something non-traditional and the family disagrees.
apparently she specified a dissection.
her legs belong to her father, she said,
her arms to her mother who lives in schenectady,
but not her fingers; they were to go to the university
where she taught. the mathematics department, i think.
each of her children were to receive an ear;
her hair to be divided between fellow faculty members;
the trunk of her body to be buried in the back garden;
and her head, shorn and staring, to be thrown into the sea.
fifteen miles out.

but i must say,
it doesn't seem worth the publicity.
perhaps a slow news day downtown.
the family, after all, would never comply with this.
they have the responsibility to do something
respectable with her, the right to prove
they had her best intentions in mind, all along.
so ridiculous to divide oneself up into parcels,
attending to the wishes of others even after having died;
you'd think she was trying to make some beastly point.
she published some brilliant papers in her youth,
but clearly she had lost it, by the end.
i wonder they hadn't seen it coming.