Working around death, through its various phases and endgames — some for profit, some for not, including in our case the rigamarole (or rigor mortis?) of governmental dysfunction, on up through the seemingly practical but in the end rather meaningless decision of what kind of wood you want your last PO Box to be – perhaps most interesting to me is the juxtaposition of all these little decisions an executor in the traditional three-piece suit has to make for someone else, when, in point of fact, the really important decisions have been made, and to some extent, have always been made.

It’s in those last 72 critical hours when someone’s corporeal existence on this earth gets pigeonholed into all its proper folders and forms, charts and databases. Their goods, their favorite things, that red blanket from 1947 that kept her feet warm in the winter months, must all be dispensed with. Homes have to be put up for sale, estate sales scheduled. One one hand we mock the avarice of the hearse-chasers, estate attorneys who don their biohazard feeding bags to sift through the gooshy rubble the rest of us might not want to, those most painfully contaminated family scrums where Aunt Agnes has had her name — neatly scrawled on packing tape since the last Asian war — on the back of the bureau, while Dierdre, our dearest decedent, left that part out of the will and told all the other sisters the rather awkward square box with only three legs was always bound to Fred’s wife Carol as a final jab at Carol’s incessant need to wear one elevator shoe to keep from listing from left to right as she careened down the corridors of her large Diamond Drive home on Arcata.

Some of us decry those labors, call it profit-mongering and opportunistic, but in reality people do so care about all the detritus of their lives, the lives of people they knew and spent boring holiday parties with. In the grand scheme of things, is it any more a waste to fight over who get Agnes’ automatic lift chair than to fight over which contaminated quarter-mile of industrial acreage should be left as kind of homeless theme park, and which gets turned into the most thrillingest red Home Depot Consumerist and Capitalistic holy land for Mad Men? Where will they put the wailing wall?

The real waste would be in not noticing that these types of conflicts need legal and emotional resolution as much as all the rest.

Religion isn’t necessary to get the message of just how absolutely magical it is that each and every one of us are here. And we’re here on a several levels. We’re individual human beings, ruled by the feudal paradigm of head to mind to heart to fist (or something), but we’re also alive as teeming, hive-mound collectives that totter about loosely “living” out our daily lives but really operating mindlessly as more or less slaves to all the microbiomes that through millions of years of evolution have coopted our physical bodies as a rather droll and too-often inefficient manner of getting sugars from plants and meats from the spendidly complicated universe down to a size digestible for critters a thousand times smaller than the summertime no-see-ums we all spend so many wasted hours slapping at. Amy had this notion figured out years ago.

The point of this column, as much as there is one this time around, is that given the pirated, not-quite-free-for-now will we’ve grown comfortable with through collective gut-biome evolution, perhaps it’s those many trinkets — the tea cozies, the beer can airplanes, the 47 velvet copies of the Final Supper only three of whom have 12 diners — perhaps it’s as much these remains that carry more of the meaning of what is what to be James than all the bones and decaying bits we leave for the bug buffet underground after the flowers have all wilted, after the backhoes have been parked again in their oil-drenched shops and the funeral workers have all gone home to drink their Zombie Zinfandel and finally, carefully, recite their meaningless — or maybe not — nightly prayers.

“I pray the Lord my soul to keep…” We should have put some details in what about gets left behind.

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James Faulk is a writer, family man, and cemetery worker. You can reach him at faulk.james@yahoo.com