She had just come from her Nana’s funeral. The “trading card” would be the prayer card. I too call them trading cards and find this notion hilarious. I always have.
They’re the closest things to real life trading cards that we have. Each card represents someone, with some lifetime stats (DOB - DOD). Perhaps a picture, and possibly a prayer or prose. We are forced to collect these cards. The only alternative is to toss it. And how in good conscious can you toss Nana’s trading card?
If you are at a funeral and you pick one of these up, it’s yours for life. You may keep them in a shoebox with other old memories like movie tickets or birthday invitations, or in the upper chest pocket of your favorite suit. I prefer to keep my in the top drawer of my night stand. It’s what I call my junk drawer.
I have a dozen or so trading cards. I see them as death’s equivalent to Facebook. I am friends with…Um, I mean…I was friendly with Joe L, John F, John D, John R, Mary K, Dolores K, etc., etc. I’m really not looking for more friends, per se, but if the opportunity comes to pass, per se, then I will certainly take home another trading card to add to my drawer.
In Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut talks about one man’s circle of beings as his karass, “If you find your life tangled up with somebody else’s life for no very logical reasons….that person may be a member of your karass.” That would make my trading card collection members of my karass, if they weren’t members already.
In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell further investigates how people are connected to each other citing that “we associate with people who occupy the same small, physical spaces that we do…. Proximity overpower(s) similarity.” What he’s saying is that we don’t necessarily like the people we are with…We’re just near them.
Like Facebook friends, these collections of souls say almost nothing about me as a person. These are lives that have somehow touched my life, directly or indirectly. Some are close family. Some are close friends. Some are friends’ family, and some are family’s friends. And some are people I have never met, not once while they were alive.
All the while I cannot allow myself to throw these trading cards away. I usually come home from the funeral, take off my jacket and stash the trading card away in my junk drawer. This latter motion is intentional at best, obsessive at worst.
I know the people are in that drawer. I allow them to live there. I believe that you are only dead when no one remembers you, and I refuse to let their memories die.
I find these memories both soothing and haunting all at the same time. I see them when I reach for my vitamins, my penknife, my matches, that ointment cream and my notebook.
There’s one that haunts me more than the rest; the most telling prose on the back, and a picture with the most telling smile on the front. It’s a death that is both close to me and miles away. I can’t say exactly how I feel about his death, other than to say it challenges me every time I see him smiling at me. It’s a reminder of my life, more than a reminder of his death. I feel more alive every time I see it, every time it sees me. These are the types of moments that keep your blood running.
Most of the trading cards I have are ….well… kind of boring. The prayers are predictable, and too often reused. The dates say nothing but life’s mathematics. And the picture usually is of some man in a dress..Ok, well that’s not that boring.
Make no mistake; this death trading card business is a multimillion dollar venture. See http://www.momorialcards.com/ for background choices, sample fonts and preprinted sample cards.
I collected baseball cards when I was younger and if the industry contained some consistency I would still be collecting them. My favorites were the veterans. Take any rookie Topps card circa 1986. The back was empty of stats, mostly filled with large font of generic goodness. The font was big and the intelligence was vague and vain. However, take any veteran circa 1986 and you have a font so small it’s almost impossible for any 11-year-old to read. Take Bert Blyleven 1986 card, sixteen years of statistics. What a beautiful collection of numbers.
When I die I want my card to stand out. I want a picture of myself. Not a picture of how I looked just prior to my death, but a picture of when I was 11-years old. To say nothing bad about any other time of my life, at 11-years old I was more myself than I was anyone else. I was more pure, more innocent. I knew exactly who the hell I was and I was proud to be that kid.
And as far as my stats I would prefer just a listing of some major events/moments/quirks of my life. That would go something like this…in the smallest font available…as if they ran out of room on the card to accommodate all my greatness.
…he sliced a double down the right field line twice to win both the National League majors championship and township wide world series in the same week…. his wedding song was Van Morrison’s Crazy Love…he was in the 92nd percentile of fatherhood according to http://www.usdaddy.com/. ….he visited one less city than he wanted to….cabernet liked him… he always had the right cards in his hand, he just often misused them…in hindsight he realizes dressing like a Drug-Free School Zone sign for his high school Halloween dance wasn’t a good idea…he could listen to music as good as anyone could play it…he could keep score of any baseball game….his first musical purchase was Whitney Houston’s initial self-titled cassette album, and he stood by it…he was always afraid of the dark…he was a Leo for you weirdoes who thinks that makes a difference… had a crush on Matt Damon…he won the heart of his high school sweetheart forever and that’s all that matters…he wore a size Medium T-shirt…he was a quirky, funny son of a bitch.
Originally published in April, 2010 at http://www.mypatheticblog.tumblr.com/
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