To whom it may concern: this is my last will and testimony regarding my body and its disposal after my death.
After considering the matter of maggots, the advancement of Science and the hope of my heart pounding in someone else's chest for umpteen years, I have decided to dedicate my body to the Plant World.
Therefore, it is my last will, wish, and desire that I be placed in a plain wooden casket and buried beneath a cottonwood tree in such a way that the tree can absorb my body for nourishment.
For those who want to measure the degree of my sanity in making this request, let me say I wish to feed trees because trees fed me. I am a writer who words have gobbled many a forest.
My choice of a cottonwood is childhood nostalgia for my days near a river bank where the rustling of wind through the cottonwoods seemed the purest music I ever heard.
I wish to be a lullaby, my body singing to some other child.
Also, I believe that in our world it is crucial that plants outlive humans.
We are tearing the earth apart, limb from limb. I wish to replenish it.
So do not give my eyes to science, my heart to my next-door neighbor
or my son; no, just put me inside a simple unfinished wood casket (I hate the thought of dirt on my eyes) and bury us both in the earth beneath the tooth of a cottonwood tree.
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