The Funeral Songs List

Source of photo: Wikepedia

I love music. It fills me; heals me, sooths me and brings me out of any dark mood. I am the type of person who reflects deeply on the hypocrisies and the idiosyncrasies of life and I often get mired in the muck because of it. Sometimes, when I have gone way too far down the rabbit hole, some little voice will nudge me to my music lists and remind me that there is something that always makes me feel better.

I am not all that technologically savvy so YouTube is my platform of choice. I currently have six very long music lists. There is my ‘Angry Music List’, that I listen to – and sometimes scream along with – when I am furious (Linkin Park, One Step Closer, is particularly therapeutic). There are a number of ‘dance Lists’ because, well, I love to (no, have to) dance. There are the lists of music that take me back to my childhood and the lists of eclectic music I have loved throughout the six decades I have resided on this earth.

I’m not sure what possessed me, at the time, to start the ‘Funeral Songs List’. One day, I was listening to Johnny Nash singing I Can See Clearly Now and I just knew that this was the song I would like to have played at my funeral.

That was the first song on my Funeral Songs List but it sure wasn’t the last. Over the past few years, I’ve added dozens more songs to the list (my husband jokes that my funeral will have to be at least three days long for him to get through the whole thing).

Some are songs I sang to my children when they were very little:

Most of the songs make me feel hopeful and joyful:

Some of the songs are a bit (or even a lot) irreverent:

Some are even a bit silly: when I am gone and my kids find the following on a Post-It note amongst my things, no, I was not losing it: I was phonetically singing back-up to The Circle of Life (I love this version: Flash Mob for Paris Parc Attraction Land: The Lion King). And yes, that one is on my funeral songs list too…

Ing wing ya/ Ma ding/ Ming wanna Batha

As I was doing a few chores and listening to my very long funeral-songs list one day not too long ago: it occurred to me: of all my song lists, this is the list I tend to play the most. And not because I have a death wish. Not because I am thinking of death at all.

I realised, as I sang, danced and hummed along, that it really isn’t my funeral songs list. Instead, it’s my ultimate life list.

It makes me feel happy. It makes me feel joyful. It makes me feel alive.

I have arrived at that beautiful place in my life where I understand that one day, all things die. On a selfish level, I do hope that my death will be fast and painless, of course. And as another great song goes, mostly, I hope I die before I get old. But I accept that one day, I will be gone from memory.

I hope that when I go, the folks who have loved me the very most will take an afternoon to listen to my funeral (aka life songs), and that they will smile and be glad that for a short time, I lived.

And oh, it would be good to die singing.

Or dancing…

Patti Moore Wilson/© wednesdayschildca.wordpress.com

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Author: Patti Moore Wilson, wednesdayschild2

I write what I feel. And I rarely know exactly what I feel until I write. I have lived long enough to have known many joys and many sorrows. I have made many mistakes; I have forgiven myself for a few… I have learned that there are lessons in every step of this journey, if we only take the time to pay attention… I hope you will feel free to pick and choose the stories that resonate for you…

18 thoughts on “The Funeral Songs List”

  2. My father was always transported by “Ode to Joy.” Very late in his life, when he was already losing the ability to identify his surroundings accurately, we took him to hear it live. Oh, what a happy, happy man he was.

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      1. Beautiful. Brought a tear to see him so happy for a moment. I always brought radios, you know, to his care homes. I’d set them to the classical music station and tell them to turn it on to make him quiet and smiling. Every time, those radios disappeared. You don’t want to antagonize staff in a ln indigent nursing home which has your father in its clutches so to speak, so I said nothing.

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      2. Aw… 😕💕 It MIGHT have been the residents, if they, too had dementia. Things at my Mom’s seniors’ home tend to wander off and (most of the time) eventually wander back. Mom takes the remote control from the big sitting room ALL the time 😬 I understand you not wanting to antagonize the staff, though. That’s a big problem here, too 😕

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      1. That band plus Mick Jagger and Keith Richards attacked a man and beat him brutally. They taunted him afterwards. But, the man replied, “Styx and Stones might break my bones but names will never harm me”

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