“When we hit our lowest point, we are open to the greatest change.” - Avatar Aang.

It was an odd feeling showing up at your own funeral. I never believed in ghosts, so I was excited that I had the whole life-after-death thing all wrong. 

But then, it hit me. Oh, I died. I. Am. Dead. The idea seemed to stun me as I stared through my ghostly, transparent hands. 

There I was, leaning over my own coffin, gazing into the open casket, wondering how I died. I don’t even remember dying. Knowing me I probably died ingloriously, like slipping on a banana peel or choking on my toothbrush.  

“God this is depressing,” I said to myself as a few of my colleagues shuffled past my coffin to pay their respects. It was one of those sad empty funerals where no one was particularly close to the deceased. 

It was hard for me to watch, but the longer I stood there, the more it threw all my life’s failures back in my face. I had been an English and Humanities teacher… and a workaholic. My family were my students. But they all graduated in the end. So where did that leave me? Where will I go when this funeral ends?

My students would move on, and I would be forgotten. No one needed me any more. My whole identity was socially constructed.

I mean, who was I now without my work and my students? Who was I if I couldn’t be a teacher anymore? Even though I was still alive in some form, I felt dead in a way I couldn't come to terms with at that moment. I had lost my identity.

I don’t know why, but I kept thinking about poetry as I looked over my crying students saying their last goodbyes. I know it was silly, but poetry was the last thing I had taught them. So I stood there, over my dead body, muttering lines of poetry, like an incantation.

I whispered, “Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me.” I imagined Death rolling up in a carriage to take me to eternity like in Emily Dickinson’s poem. So when Death did show up in a carriage drawn by two skeletal horses, I was a bit excited, scared and confused all at once. 

There Death was, in his classic get-up, black cloak, shiny scythe and all. 

Needless to say, I freaked out a bit when he walked through the wall, pointing a bony finger at me. But no matter how much I tried to hide, Death just strolled right up to the place where I was, under my own coffin — a stupid place to hide in hindsight, I know — and he said, “It is time,” In a deep scary voice. 

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I stood up from my hiding place beneath my coffin and straightened my ghostly teaching outfit. Death just waited. It must not have been a very busy day for him. 

I looked him up and down, and his black hole of a hooded face looked back at me all spooky-like.

It struck me that I really didn’t want to go with Death. It didn’t seem fun at all. For some reason, Dylan Thomas’ poem popped into my head, egging me on, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’ 

And why not? What have I possibly got to lose? 

So I said, “I think you’re forgetting something, Death.” In my coolest action movie voice. 

To my surprise Death didn’t drop a beat and said back to me in his scariest movie villain voice, “Oh yeah, what’s that?” 

Now, I don’t know what made me say it, but it just felt right at the time. 

I said, “I know kung fu.” And I punched him right in the black hole of his face. I didn’t actually know any kung fu. But if I was going down, I wasn’t going down without a fight. 

Instead of connecting to something solid behind his black hole of a face, my fist went right into his hood, and I got stuck in there. Death just froze like a broken computer, and I was left awkwardly attached up to my elbow, flopping about trying to get my arm out of his hooded face.

The sobbing mourners around us seemed completely oblivious to my struggles. That’s when I felt it. Inside wherever my arm had disappeared to, was a hard, smooth pebble, like a skipping stone you might find at the beach. So naturally I grabbed it and tried to pull it out of Death’s face. 

It was a tad stuck in there, but I managed to snap something and pulled it out of Death's face-hole. I don’t think he appreciated that very much because he immediately deflated, and his cloak and scythe clattered to the floor.

So there I was, maybe just having murdered Death, holding a smooth black gemstone that came out of Death’s head. It was the size of an eyeball. It felt very heavy for a little stone.

Don’t ask me why I did it. It was my funeral. It was an emotional day for me, okay, and I wasn’t thinking at my best. So I put the gemstone in my ghostly eye socket. Yeah, stupid decision, I know, but like you’ve never put Death's eyeball in your head before. Don’t judge.

Anyway, the gemstone stayed in my ghostly eye socket, and I couldn’t get it out, but I was kind of thinking, why not go all the way with this? I’ve just killed Death. Why not steal his stuff and go on a magical journey in his car-carriage thing? I mean, you only die once, right? This could be my big holiday that I always wanted to go on but never did. I couldn’t go back. So why not go forward into the wild unknown like the badass I never was in life? Yep, that settled it. 

So I put on Death’s cloak; it was a bit smelly to be honest, and picked up his scythe. Now, all I had to do was steal his ride. So I confidently walked right into the wall that Death had come through, and bumped my face. That really hurt. Okay, so I couldn’t walk through walls. I was learning. This was good, I told myself. Have a growth mindset, now, just like I had encouraged my students. 

So I waited for someone else to open the door and slipped out after them. I didn’t want to go around scaring people with doors opening by themselves. This was my retirement holiday, and damn it, I was going to have some fun, even if it killed me … again.