Grandpa Lou used to joke: “I’m not afraid of death; I was dead for billions of years before I was born and it didn’t bother me a damn.” I later discovered he ripped that line off from Mark Twain. Maybe everyone, at some point in their lives, claims they’re not afraid of death. For years my line was “There’s nothing after death, so why fear nothing?” But in this moment I realize I am, of course I am, I’m fucking terrified and everyone is, particularly those who claim not to be, them more so than anyone. I’ll never again believe anyone who says otherwise. I won’t believe it from the religious or the irreligious, the old or the young. Of course the fear of death motivates everything — art, romance, capitalism, crime, social order, religion.

You’ve always said you want to be cremated (quick and easy) and kept in a place where your friends could visit you. A little niche, a marble wall, a brass plaque. Canada doesn’t allow people to prepare the bodies of their loved ones for burial as humans did for millennia. It forces us to contract these services out to professionals, like a furnace repair. But if you’re dead I want to touch your death with my hands. I want to understand your absence through the ritual of preparing your body. I wonder how long I could withhold your death from the state? Maybe I can buy just enough time to invite a couple of your girlfriends over, put on some Gloria Estefan and Annie Lennox, open a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, and lay your body down on the dining table. We’ll wash your thinning hair and put some styling wax in it to give it volume. Lydia and Alice will drive out to Home Depot to buy some wood for the pyre. And as they build it in the backyard, I’ll wash and moisturize your skin, anointing it with scented oils, running my hands over every part of your body without shame. I’ll then dress you in a clean pair of underwear, a freshly laundered bra, your “funky” leather pants, black silk blouse, and the showpiece necklace of interconnected silver hoops you bought from a craft fair in Quebec City last summer. And finally we will carry you outside surrounded by your loved ones, and we will place you on the pyre built of fresh cedar and dried sage so that after we light it you won’t smell like meat grilling on a barbecue. And just as the fallen seeds of a sequoia tree open only from the heat of a forest fire, the flames will release your soul through divine sublimation, from solid into vapour, from seen into the unseen, all within the confines of a modest backyard in suburban Ottawa.