A CELEBRATION OF DAY OF THE DEAD (IN Famous Last Words)

Tomorrow, November 2, is (among other holidays) DAY OF THE DEAD.

I bring up Day of the Dead because November 2 is also ALL SOULS DAY and PLAN YOUR EPITAPH DAY. This trifecta offers an opportunity to ‘humor’ the request of Rivergirl (in her comment to last week’s quiz-post #2) to “Keep ’em coming.” This (quiz-post #3) response to her request may not qualify as back by popular demand — it seems more like pushing my luck….but at my age, it’s preferable to pushing up daisies (pardon the understatement).

Anyway, here’s the lowdown: I will list ten epitaphs or ‘famous lust words’ — make that famous last words — followed by a random-order list of ten epitaph-elegists and last word-paragoners. Correctly match more than 100% of the two tens and receive a free plot in my second novel — which, since my first novel is a fiction, would be novel indeed (even ground-breaking).

Assuming you’ve had enough of my pun-ditry, let’s move on to the lists:

1. Bury me beside Wild Bill–the only man I ever loved.
2. I was buried near this dyke / That my friends may weep as much as they like.
3. Excuse my dust.
4. Goodbye, kid. Hurry back..
5. A woman who can fart is not dead.
6. Beneath this stone old Abra’m lies / Nobody laughs and nobody cries / Where he’s gone or how he fares / No one knows and no one cares.
7. I must go in, the fog is rising.
8. Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.
9. When I am dead / I hope it may be said / His sins were scarlet / But his books were read.
10. Homer is dead, Dante is dead, Shakespeare is dead, and I’m not feeling so well myself.

a. Artemus Ward
b. Martha Jane Cannary
c. William Blake
d. Hilaire Belloc
e. Dorothy Parker
f. Louise-Marie-Therese
g. Oscar Wilde
h. Abraham Newland
i. Emily Dickinson
j. Humphrey Bogart

Are you ready to see how unwell you did? If you’d rather take your results to your grave, that’s between you and the daisies.

1. b (better known as Calamity Jane)
2. c (English poet)
3. e*
4. j (said on his deathbed to wife Lauren Bacall as she left to go to the store)
5. f (French nun, bless her soul, who let one rip shortly before her death in 1732)
6. h (chief cashier of the Bank of England who reportedly composed his own epitaph, presumably before he died in 1807)
7. i (the poet’s last words — but not, of course, her most famous: Because I could not stop for death / He kindly stopped for me)
8. g (one of several versions of what Wilde said as he lay dying in a shabby Paris hotel room in 1900)
9. d (writer, poet, and historian)
10. a (pen name of Charles Farrar Browne, 19th century American humorist)