DanMargarita.com

While my high school years hardly seem like the Dark Ages, visiting the past made me realize just how much things have changed and how much time has passed.

When I was in high school there were no such things as Minoxidil and Viagra. Anyway, even had they existed back then, your average high school boy doesn’t need them and true to the spirit of teenage belief in one’s own invincibility, thinks he’ll never need them.

Music was listened to on a record player and if you said “see-dee” you were referring to a cheap motel. An album was a music disc to be listened to and not a place to put photographs. Pope John Paul II was a middle-aged man.

Yet it wasn’t my reunion or a birthday that recently made me consider the passing years and aware of my own mortality, but filling out some life insurance forms.

The option in question was a “death and dismemberment” clause. To my astonishment, I discovered that my family receives no more money for my dismemberment than for my death, making the use of the word “dismemberment” here seem redundant and unnecessary.

Having no formal medical training, I assumed that one can die without being dismembered but not be dismembered without dying. So if there’s no more money involved in this dismemberment scenario, why bother to put “dismemberment” in the title? Do I need that image in my head?

Thus, if they’re going to mention a potential cause of death in addition to death itself, why choose dismemberment? You could have a “death and asphyxiation” clause, a “death and car-wreck” clause or a “death and falling off the roof and breaking your neck while cleaning the gutters” clause.

In a way, it’s too bad there isn’t more money in being dismembered because then I wouldn’t hesitate to give the following instructions to my friends: If you stumble across my obviously dead, lifeless body and have access to an axe or chainsaw, feel free to go to town on me. Hey, if I’m already dead, what’s the difference? I’m already dead. I’m not going to get any more dead. At least my family would make out better because of it.

Alas, my Webster’s Dictionary defines “dismember” as: “to cut off or disjoin the limbs, members or parts of.”

Therefore, by that definition you needn’t go completely Texas Chainsaw Massacre on me. A toe or a thumb would suffice, as would a Loreena Bobbitt. Yet, it still wouldn’t get me any more money.

Somehow it seemed less gruesome when the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz said “First, they threw my arms over there. Then, they threw my legs over there.”

One of the plusses of the passing of time are the tremendous advances in medicine.
Perhaps if I ever am dismembered, by that time they will have easily replaceable limbs.