photo credit: urnsonline.com 

Isabella from Freedom Insurance called today.  She was friendly and thanked me for asking how her day was going after she had asked me the same.

It turned out that Isabella was calling due to a form I had completed online.  I had recently been looking for and had purchased private health insurance, and had completed a couple of questionnaires on the websites that help compare various policies.

Isabella wanted to tell me that if I had completed the form correctly, then I had qualified for 12 months of free furff insurance.  Wait, what did she say?  It didn’t matter, so I waited for her to take a breath, told her I wasn’t interested and asked her to remove me from her list.

She took it in good stride and said of course she would, and that given how important it was for people to have fnral insurance she just wanted to take me through the questionnaire, give me a quote and if I wasn’t interested then of course she would take me off the list.

Wait—fu-ner—funeral insurance?!  I’m 43. What had I put down on the form that made her so confident that I was in the market for funeral insurance?  I hadn’t said I ride a motorcycle.  I always joke about stocking up on the caskets we walk past at Costco.  But as well-informed as Isabella was, I didn’t think she had been monitoring my travelling dad-comedy show.

She was at least four more bullet points into her script when I stopped day dreaming and interrupted again to tell her that I was sorry, but that I needed to go and to ask her to just remove me from the list now.  Again, she wasn’t deterred and said yes, of course.  She was just curious as to why.  Did I already have funeral insurance?  No.  Then why not?  She said that many people had different reasons and she was just curious.  And I think she really was curious.

My first and most honest thought was “because I’m not going to die.”  But I immediately saw the idiocy of saying that out loud—I’m immortal.  I moved on to “because I don’t want to be buried or, for that matter, to have some stinky fucking funeral.”

I would never saddle my loved ones with trying to negotiate with an insurance company for whatever my last wishes may be.  Perhaps I want to be dragged behind a boat as chum to be in one of those amazing videos of a great white shark jumping out of the water.  Perhaps I want to be donated to a home for necrophiliacs.  Which made me think, “is the domain name myfunnyfuneral.com taken?” (it is, but homefornecrophiliacs.com and getheroffdead.com are available).  No way I would leave to my remaining loved ones the task of convincing an insurance company that these sorts of expenses should be covered under the policy.

Instead of all of this, I told Isabella that I just didn’t need it.  She asked why.  I paused, but eventually held my ground and repeated: I just didn’t need it.

I pictured her shrugging as she sighed her acceptance.  She thanked me very much for time and said she would remove me from the list.

I imagined her co-worker, Stan, in an adjacent cubicle, glancing across as she geared up for the next call and asking “another immortal?”

“Yep.”