A song

The group Basement Band has a song "Charleston", which to me has some great opening lines.

I am old.
I am weary.
And I'm coming home to die.
Would you bury me me by the old Oak tree
'tween the river and the ashweed?
Charleston won't you bury me.

That song and Dave Matthew's song Gravedigger, with the lines

Gravedigger
When you dig my grave
Could you make it shallow
So that I can feel the rain
Gravedigger

always hits a chord with me. It's not a fascination with death, but a feeling when we die, we want to be buried where we want to feel home. It's why most people commiting suicide pick the time and place carefully. It's important to them to be and feel safe when they die. Somewhere they're at and going home.

Home to be there and home to die.

It's why I know the next time I think about it enough to follow through, I know where I'll go. It's my favorite spot in Mt. Rainier NP, a remote, little-used trail where you can fit a place off the trail away from everyone and watch Mt. Rainier and see the glaciers in the endless dynamics of nature's forces, a volcano, constantly building, destroying and rebuilding a mountain and glaciers, the product of the volcano's location constantly craving their space and place against the mountain and weather.

Not a hard choice to make, the location that is. Dying is the harder part for me and why a third time won't be a success unless the forces are so overwhelming to lose all feeling and connection with life. It's either go there to die or someone share my ashes there.

Either way I'll be there. Leaving this world behind me.

No, I don't believe there is a heaven or some after-death place we go. We just die and our ashes returns to what it was before to start anew. Remember we're all stardust and we should all go back to being stardust. Anything else is cheating the universe of ourselves. Our efforts will carry on in the hearts of those who loved us and those we helped in our life. Let's not be stingy with our ashes and not share them with the future.

Or so that's my story, and until something better comes along, as Jimmy Buffett sang, "That's my story and I'm sticking to it."