If beheaded and given a chance at last words, 7 things I would want to say...

I'm sorry if you're tired of my beheading drama...I really need to knock it off and realize the seriousness of what I'm saying, yes? 

But I have to say one more thing....as I was contemplating what it would be like to be beheaded, I wondered if I would be given a chance to say something (which I probably wouldn't) what I would say.

I've heard that every person should write their own obituary now and then to give themselves perspective, so in the spirit of that exercise, here goes. 

I would want to be able to say some sentimental things and some poetic things and some practical things...
1. I wonder what my mom will say when I come bouncing into heaven to find her!

2. I'm going to miss twilight, the time of day when the darkness and the light trade places, especially on the streets of Elkhart, or in Marshfield where I grew up. (But maybe there's a twilight in heaven.)  I think I would like for just one moment to set foot in America again....just to walk into a gas station to buy a Diet Coke after pumping a tank of gas, or to walk over the uneven cement of a sidewalk or to run at dusk to the river and clatter across the wooden bridges in the park....to see the Badlands of South Dakota again, or eat a buttery biscuit in Alabama, or sit quietly in a library among the odors of paper and the click of computer keys.  What a great life I have had, to have so many tiny little wonderful memories.

3. I wish I could see my weekly videos and photos of my niece Mya, watch her and all her cousins grow up, and play word games with their parents and aunt and grandfather and argue about geeky things no sane family should argue about at Christmas. But, maybe there's a peek hole in heaven.

4. I wish I could go to work again and get brutally teased by the surgeons and quizzed by the case managers and cornered by the pharmacists and questioned by the other nurses and paged by the cath lab and and ridiculed by the physician's assistants for eating a sausage pizza from the bistro. 

5. I wish I could walk home from work and stop at my hang-out house on Laurel street and eat a couple of gummy O's and lounge on my favorite couch and shoot the breeze before crossing the Sherman Street Bridge to my own house. 

6.  Oh death, where is your sting? Oh grave, where is your victory?   The trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed...

7. God is with me...and this realization, the most powerful force in the world, is stronger than all hate, than any nation, than any defeat.  

I hope I could think clearly enough to say a few things like that.  

What seven things would you say?  

(No guillotine talk next week!  Promise!)