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  • My Final Resting Place
  • Karl S Monroe (bio)

When I first thought of dying into the marsh at Juanita Bay, I was sitting on Vic Roe's memorial bench.1,2 It was a fine winter day. I could see across and into the marsh, for the burgeoning spring had not yet obliterated the view. I had been visiting and writing about the marsh frequently for more than a year.

Really, the thought of dying came as a vision of my own future. One day I find myself on the central boardwalk, gazing over a railing, hoping to glimpse—just once—the furtive streak of a shrew or a vole in the undergrowth. Suddenly, I am contorted by a massive heart attack. Instinctually, as if to rise out of my body and escape the pain, I bolt upward, catapulting my body over the railing and into the marsh. I'm dead before my body splats into the peat. It's early evening, and over the next few hours the bog gently engulfs my remains. By the time early-morning visitors enter the park, I have vanished completely.

Maybe this sounds insanely macabre, a fantasy of deranged depression, but please understand. Consider that the risk factors for heart disease are essentially the same as for Alzheimer's disease. Which ending would you choose: quick and oddly poetic, or a lingering and excruciating descent away from yourself? An eradicating coronary could be attractive, if I could just choose the time and place. [End Page 101]

Dying into the marsh. The beginning of a great adventure—not for me, but for my remains. We read of mummies cast forth by other bogs or melting glaciers, and how they set archaeologists all atwitter. Oh, they would give me a name! And think about me as they went to sleep!

But alas, impediments beset my vision. For one, when I lean over Juanita Bay railings, it's usually to peer into Lilypad Inlet or the Great Beaver Pond. Both are too wet for instant interment, and park workers would discover my body in the morning. Hey, Joe, there's another stiff over here in the shallows.

Even if the marsh did swallow me up, it couldn't keep me. I always drive to the park, and the search would start with my car. I'd hate to have the entire marsh exhumed in a quixotic search for my body, especially since someone might be slipping my ashes into the peat in just a few weeks. This might be avoided by taking a bus to the park.3 Still, telltale clues might betray my location. Some light object, maybe a ballpoint pen, would float to the top. Yes, he favored that brand, my wife might tell rescue workers, as if the pen were scrawling the first phrase of her widowhood upon the marsh.

Juanita Bay is not ideally suited to preserve corpses. Riding on the edge of a giant lake, our marsh faces too many volatile, destabilizing influences. Ideally, you want an isolated blackwater bog. There's a great one about 25 miles away at Snoqualmie Ridge. But if the homeowners' association there got wind of this idea, it might take offense.

Okay, so mummification is very unlikely. I'm just saying that it could happen, right here.4

Say it did happen. I would become a relic, a time traveler whose peculiar qualities could help foment theories about his own, long-ago society. Noting evidence of mild cerebral palsy, the researchers might conclude that this man lived in a society too primitive to make effective use of psycho-neural-kinetic medications, which will have virtually eliminated such deformities. Further [End Page 102] observing signs that this man had led a pampered and sedentary life, they may speculate that his primitive society viewed its disabled brethren with a particular honor and deference, as if they had been touched by the gods. I think of having a haiku tattooed on my rump:

Life was so easylolling over Sunday brunchthen dying of stress5

I show an early version of this essay to my wife, and she sniffs: It's such an ego trip. At first...

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