The Smile

I hope I die smiling. One time I saw this commercial; a coroner was dressing an old man and prepping his lifeless body. The coroner takes one last look over the corpse, and notices this outrageous look on the old man’s face. It’s a smile, a real one. It’s not one of those smiles that you give people who’re trying to communicate something that they believe is important to you. The one’s where you're nodding your head slowly, feigning interest, and they’re in the heat of the description blabbering on about something you don’t know or care about. Those stupid, silly, hurtful, maliciously mean smiles; I hate them all of them, I wish I could tear the smiles from their faces with something completely out of context.

This smile is different than those. It’s from ear to ear.

The old man is thin. He is bony, sharp looking in his suit. I imagine him smelling of ink, and the glue found on the flaps of the high-priced letters he may have once mailed.

The coroner doesn’t like his job, it all too obvious on the fact. From the tight tie baring suits he wears to the way he dressed this old man. The way he did it is not unnatural. It is however very unpleasant. He had to make the man look good for the funeral and his family. So the coroner made sure that the pants, vest, tie, and jacket were all placed just so. He cuffed the sleeves of the jacket punctually; he creased the pants perfectly from one leg to the other.

Then the coroner sees the smile. He thinks something’s wrong with the body. The coroner tries to straighten the smile out of the dead man’s face with his hands. The dead man’s face pulls back into place like a cartoon characters. The smile is still there, just as big, just as bold, just as happy. It wraps around the coroner like a boa constricts and squeezes the unhappiness from his mind. The coroner’s face was once full of sternness, and morose thoughts, and now it’s smiling; a real smile.

The commercial then says some witty thing, and life continues. You’d never know that a second before all the room was still. It bowed before an old man who was laughing with stride.

There are those who fear death, and those who welcome it. I do neither; I hide from it. I think maybe that old man hid too. And if someone so old, with millenniums of experience in his skull, can be so overjoyed at the point of death, maybe we all can.

I know that you think I’m stupid for writing about a commercial. I don’t care. I will never care. It was more than commercial for that moment. It was art, it was life, it was sadness, and happiness. It wrapped all beings and feelings into a one-minute segment. That is something to celebrate, not condemn.

What I hope for you though is that you die in the way you want. Whatever it may be.

I hope that I die beaming.