It was during the early Victorian era that people first began to get really paranoid about being buried alive, which, considering all of the other ridiculous ways there were to die back then, was actually kind of silly (in the days before Neosporin, cutting yourself shaving could be a death sentence). Who knows why this was so: maybe Edgar Allen Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado” was the “Snakes on a Plane” of its day, a bit of pop culture that crept into the public consciousness and created an irrational fear where none had existed before. Or maybe undertakers were just really lazy back then, and it wasn’t such an irrational fear after all. In any case, the Victorian version of Billy Mays did a brisk job selling things like coffin bells and underground speaking tubes, and writers like Poe turned a quick buck writing stories with names like, you guessed it, “The Premature Burial.”
Still, as time has passed, this fear had receded to the back of our consciousness—while we still might occasionally remark on it (“Man, that would suck”), we don’t obsess over it like we once did. Which is a good thing. Or, at least, that’s what I thought, until I had my son, Clyde. Because having Clyde around has got me started thinking that I should add a codicil to my will that calls for coffin bells, speaking tubes, and maybe even being buried with 3G. Because Clyde clearly has a problem differentiating between “dead” and “alive.”
I found this out the hard way (well, not the really hard way—that would be by being buried alive) when Clyde called me at work to tell me the sad, sad news that his new pet lizard had, unfortunately, expired. Passed on. Crossed over. Slipped the mortal coil. Or, as Clyde put it, was “not breathing. Not even a little.”
Due to the fact that thus far in his life Clyde has been spectacularly unlucky in pets (although, obviously, not quite as unlucky as the pets themselves), I already knew the routine: offer my sympathy, promise pizza for the evening, and go home and dispose of the evidence before Clyde returned from school. Which I did. And yet, when I got to the third part of the plan I met a minor snag: the lizard, in the words of Monty Python, was “not dead yet.” In fact, it was feeling rather spry, so spry that when I picked it up to send it to its final reward, it turned and looked at me.
Not in an aggressive way. Not in a threatening way. But still: how aggressive or threatening does a lizard have to be when it is in your hand, supposedly dead, and then it turns to look at you? If lizards could have heart attacks I’m sure this one would have died all over again from the shock of being screamed at and then flung back into its cage. As it was I’m sure that I took a few years off of its (probably already short) life. That’s only fair, though: it did the same to me.
Since I didn’t want Clyde to spend the rest of his day moping around about his supposedly “dead” lizard, after I had recovered somewhat from my shock I texted him to let him know the happy news. His reply? “Can we still get pizza?”
Forget the part about speaking tubes in my will: I’m putting something in there about how no one is getting any pizza at my wake until at least three doctors have confirmed that I am well and truly dead. Hopefully, that will do the trick, but, just to be on the safe side side, I think I’ll add an extra clause about how, under no circumstances, is anyone allowed to flush me.