I’d love to get eaten, maybe by a shark or a lion. It doesn’t matter what kind of animal really, so long as it’s a noble animal. I wouldn’t like to be eaten by a goat. An eagle would do, if the eagle could get the job done quickly.
A grizzly bear would really make my day.
Nobody expects anything from you if you’ve been eaten. I’d imagine they must erase your deaths. Especially if it was a wolverine that ate you. When the bank hears that you’ve been eaten by a rabid marsupial, they’d have to cut you some slack. Whatever you haven’t accomplished in life no longer matters. Instead of “He never married,” or “He squandered his youth,” they’ll say “His face was gnawed off by a leopard,” and so forth.
If I got eaten, nobody would be sour on me anymore. They’d use words like “valiant” to describe my life and valiant death.
See, if you kill yourself, people tend to hold it against you. And who could blame ‘em? So what I’m saying is, the way to do it is to get eaten.
You don’t have to feel guilty about ending it all if you’re slowly ingested by a Burmese python. But the trick is to train yourself to be more appetizing to carnivorous predators. So that’s why I’ve been basting myself twice-daily in a brown sugar-honey glaze. I know my flaws, and I’m a bony man, so I’ve eating lots of fatty foods to plump up a little. I’d imagine that any day now, some sort of falcon will dive-bomb at my jugular. Well, fingers crossed anyway.
And when it comes, whatever animal it is, and when it ends my life, call the news first. My family and all my friends will find out that way, I’m sure. It’ll be better that way. They’ll all say, “Wow, Bill’s half-eaten body was briefly visible on TV. His showbiz aspirations have all paid off.” Because when I’m gone, that’s all that will matter; my friends will all think I had a glimpse of success right in the last moments. My parents will say, “We’re so proud of what’s left of him,” while they bury my right arm and left leg near the family plot.
“Being gored to death by that wild boar was the greatest accomplishment of his life.”
I wonder what my gravestone would read. Part of me wants it to be more about whatever animal killed me. “Here lies Bill, eaten by an 8,000-pound killer whale named Bingo at SeaWorld San Diego.” It really lifts the pressures of having a cool gravestone if you can include whale facts. Especially if the whale is as magnificent as Bingo (captured in Iceland in 1982, Bingo bore three calves [Laura, Lovey, and Sarah II] and lived to be 35 before she passed away due to respiratory illness).
What man can compete with the legacy of a whale like Bingo? Let her have the gravestone highlights. The important thing is that I’ll die the way I lived.