Help me buy my headstone

[FellowTraveller]

C/N Help me pick what to say on my headstone.

Folks, perhaps is a bit morose or dark thread but what the heck I need some help making a decision... My wife passed away late last year (yeah crap happens in life,...) and since spring/summer is nearly here I will be in the market for a headstone / gravemarker / memorial / whateveryoucallthem.

The funny thing is that as part of picking out her nice shiny memorial slab of granite, my name will be on it too (which is an odd process for a young man to do when you think about it). Therefore I need to come up with some words which are cool, witty yet perhaps slightly reserved to put on there for all of eternity (or for 200 or so years until acid rain etches the stone away, long past when I am forgotten about) and words that I can look at and smile and be happy with when visiting the graveyard for those coming years that I am still on top of the proverbial sod.

For my wife I think I will have either a beautiful line that I wrote/stole:

"What the noble caterpillar perceives as being the end,
to the beautiful butterfly is just the beginning."

or the following poem (which is an exerpt from the movie Groundhog Day and was said in french):

"And Winter, slumbering in the open air,
wears on its smiling face a dream... of spring!
And Hope without an object cannot live."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

For me, being an engineer I picked this simple little thing for my side of the stone:

R = V / I (but displayed like the equation in the last part of):



(since ohms law is the only law my cremated remains will abide by for eternity). Is that too geeky or stupid? Will I regret that if I live another 60 years I wonder? I am not the type to have tattoos simply because I wouldnt want a permanent reminder of a bad decision but with this process I have to pick something now since it costs nothing to get something etched and I dont want to leave my side blank.

Would anyone in OT have a funny or prolific saying or poem or something better to put there for either me or my late-wife ??

(BTW, the cost of the headstone as I have designed it is nearly $5000 so it better be nice when it is done, it is a low trapeziodal shaped piece of very black 10" thick granite with a thick 6 or 8" base rather than the typical 6" thick vertical square block with slightly rounded top headstone that people normally get).

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[Matt A]

sorry about your wife.

[BacDoc]

Sorry about your wife.

Never take life for granted, but rather take death by the balls. -BacDoc


Some Guiness was spilt on the barroom floor
When the pub was shut for the night
Out of his hole crept a wee brown mouse
And stood in the pale moonlight
He lapped up the frothy brew from the floor
Then back on his haunches he sat
And all the night you could hear him roar
"Bring on the goddamn cat!"

[cnw]

sorry to hear about your wife .

i guess i'm old fashioned in that i think headstones should have nothing more than names. simple, tasteful. (then again i think everyone should be cremated)

if you get ohms law on your headstone i will punch your neck off.

[RallyGuy2k]

Very sorry about losing your wife.

Originally Posted by FellowTraveller

For me, being an engineer I picked this simple little thing for my side of the stone:

R = V / I (but displayed like the equation in the last part of):



(since ohms law is the only law my cremated remains will abide by for eternity). Is that too geeky or stupid? Will I regret that if I live another 60 years I wonder? I am not the type to have tattoos simply because I wouldnt want a permanent reminder of a bad decision but with this process I have to pick something now since it costs nothing to get something etched and I dont want to leave my side blank.

Would anyone in OT have a funny or prolific saying or poem or something better to put there for either me or my late-wife ??

Hell no it's not geeky or stupid...I think it's awesome.

[Neek]

Canadadadians are weird.

Sorry bout your wife.

[OriginalSin]

sorry about your wife.

i will have nothing funny or witty on my or my wife s headstone.

i am of no help

[FellowTraveller]

Originally Posted by chicken n waffles

sorry to hear about your wife .
if you get ohms law on your headstone i will punch your neck off.

Seriously ? I figured it was "cute"... (and I am still leaning towards doing it)...

BTW - I didnt create this thread for sobbing "sorry about your wife" posts. I mean a serious thanks for the kind words but even though there have been and are hard days (Mothers Day yesterday for example) life is good and my life and my daughters life still has to go on so...

[Pheasant Plucker]

Yes. Sorry about your wife. I hope you can come to terms with your loss soon.
Edit - Guess I have it wrong: "life is good and my life and my daughters life still has to go on so.."

Good attitude.

Unlike you I am quite old and so will die fairly soon. My preference would be to not have a (semi)permanent memorial but to have my ashes scattered in a place of great natural beauty. Maybe in the Scottish Highlands where I climbed as a youth.

You really can't top Spike Milligan's epitaph which is written in Irish and translates to "I told you I was ill."

[cnw]

Originally Posted by FellowTraveller

Seriously ? I figured it was "cute"... (and I am still leaning towards doing it)...

BTW - I didnt create this thread for sobbing "sorry about your wife" posts. I mean a serious thanks for the kind words but even though there have been and are hard days (Mothers Day yesterday for example) life is good and my life and my daughters life still has to go on so...

in all seriousness, man, get whatever you want and don't worry about what we think.

we know you're not fishing for sympathy (well, we hope you're not) but you've got it regardless. that's rough.

[Kiel]

Sorry to hear about your wife

I'm all for something witty/nerdy on a headstone but I'm really not getting the "aha!" of using Ohm's law. Why not the differential for total change in an entropic transformation? Slightly more appropriate for a mass of atoms left behind

[Neek]

Care to share your wife's story with us? What happened? If it's too personal, then obviously forget it.

[Matt A]

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me.
The Carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality
~Emily Dickinson

[jms]

What are you going to do if you get remarried? Can you plot an eternal threesome?

[hikeeba]

Sorry aboot your wife, FT.


To revise what BacDoc said, 'Never take life for Granite.'



I think you having Ohm's Law would be fitting and awesome. Think of how long your headstone will be in existence. Now think of how many people will look at the inscription and get it. For those two people, I think their beaming smilewill have made it all worthwhile. Seriously, I love the idea. Anything on a headstone that provokes some sort of thought or otherwise sparks the imagination is an excellent thing that is mostly absent in the world today.

[Magic Marker]

Sorry to hear about your wife. When I had to figure out my father's stone, I was annoyed as it was thousands of dollars for a rock. A nice rock with lettering, but a rock none the less.

[FellowTraveller]

Originally Posted by Neek

Care to share your wife's story with us? What happened? If it's too personal, then obviously forget it.

Naw, thats okay,... She had a fairly rare thing that she was the one of every 50,000 people or so who get a certain type of brain-tumor that occasionally hits people in their early 30's... She survived 2 years knowing what was coming,... Her bravery and strength outweigh mine by several orders of magnitude so how can I not keep going day by day. Never once in 19 years together had I ever questioned her trust or honesty or fought with her or broke up or considered leaving,... You never know exactly the value of what you have in life until just before it is taken from you.

Even though I had over 2 years to prepare myself to be ready for the final moments, this winter I went through a few months of sadness bordering on mild depression and then had a failed 1-2 month relationship with someone who should never have been anything more than a stress-releving hookup or semen-repository at the most... Live and learn they say and I hope to someday find happiness with someone else of the female persuasion but for now my daugher and I are as happy with life as it is as we can be under the circumstances and that is what my late-wife would have wanted for sure...

C/N cancer sucks, brain-cancer really sucks. Life changes when you are left as a single-parent of a 6-year old... Still not sure what to put on the headstone.

[BacDoc]

Keep yo head up. -2Pac

Quit thinking about your headstone, it's scares me.

[hikeeba]

FellowTraveler, if you are not under a time constraint, don't worry so much about the headstone stuff. It'll come to you. The worst thing you want to do is force something that will likely be around for many lifetimes.




And I'm sorry, but I couldn't help pondering your circumstances, and imagining you and your daughter as Big Daddy and Hit Girl maybe six years from now.

[FellowTraveller]

Originally Posted by hikeeba

And I'm sorry, but I couldn't help pondering your circumstances, and imagining you and your daughter as Big Daddy and Hit Girl maybe six years from now.

My meme awareness and geek level is pretty good but I have no idea what that means, off to Goggle it now (yeah a friend of mine calls it goggle).

Also thanks for saying not to rush the process...

[justincredible]

"There was still so much I wanted to do and have done to me." - Apu Nahasapeemapetilon

[chapstien]

Sorry for your loss. I saw one yesterday that was something like "Finally together again."

[Asinine]

My condolences.


As for the issue at hand... after reading your background as an engineer, and your thoughts on your late wife, the concept that immediately comes to mind is the quantum mechanics theorem (the name escapes me at the moment) in which two separate particles a great distance from each other can be "intertwined" such that the behavior of one affects the properties of the other--just as your late wife, though gone, will always have a lasting influence on your life.

Perhaps if someone could spark my memory as to the name of that particular theorem, I could whip something up.

[scaryfastskier]

I've seen a million faces and I've rocked them all.
-bon jovi

Grant

[Neek]

Originally Posted by Asinine

My condolences.


As for the issue at hand... after reading your background as an engineer, and your thoughts on your late wife, the concept that immediately comes to mind is the quantum mechanics theorem (the name escapes me at the moment) in which two separate particles a great distance from each other can be "intertwined" such that the behavior of one affects the properties of the other--just as your late wife, though gone, will always have a lasting influence on your life.

Perhaps if someone could spark my memory as to the name of that particular theorem, I could whip something up.

I believe you are referring to quantum entanglement:

Quantum entanglement, also called the quantum non-local connection, is a property of a quantum mechanical state of a system of two or more objects in which the quantum states of the constituting objects are linked together so that one object can no longer be adequately described without full mention of its counterpart—even if the individual objects are spatially separated. The property of entanglement was understood in the early days of quantum theory, although not by that name. Quantum entanglement is at the heart of the EPR paradox developed by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen in 1935. This interconnection leads to non-classical correlations between observable physical properties of remote systems, often referred to as nonlocal correlations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement