Helpful tips for dying on your own terms

Question 1: What song do you want played at your funeral?

- MARION ROACH SMITH GUEST CONTRIBUTOR

WHEN A LIFELONG friend died recently, his family asked me what of his I might want. “Just his meatloaf pans,” I replied. They looked at me askance, responding as they always did, these people who would never accept him for who he was nor know him as some of us did.

His meatloaf pans, small and precise, defined the well-patrolled borders he'd refused to budge under his family's failure to accept him as gay. To ensure I see them — and him — every day, I bake in one pan and keep my lipsticks in the other.

His family didn't attend the memorial that we who knew and loved him held, where we celebrated him and talked openly about who he was. They will never know.

Another friend remains as disturbed by the scene of our mutual pal's death as he was by the loss itself, when the family ringed the bed of our diapered and unconscious loved one,

inviting everyone in the room to join an impromptu crowded singalong. “He would have hated it,” my friend said. Yes, he would.

Occurring back-to-back as they did, these events compelled me to consider how best to exit this life. Could I prevent being misunderstood or misrepresented, or prevent leaving others unprepared? Maybe. So, I planned a dinner party.

Scheduling the Date With Death

Dinner began as a Doodle poll to friends who, I learned, had no advance end-of-life directives in place. Easy pickings, since no one I know had done more with the healthcare proxies supplied by their physicians than stuff them in a purse or shove them in a drawer. Experience has taught me that even when forms are filed, they are frequently misplaced. My own mother's “do not resuscitate” order was repeatedly lost by the nursing home where she spent her last years, forcing me to resend it via telegram one memorable night. The Western Union operator sobbed into the phone while I comforted her.