I once had an idea for a business where instead of spending money on a funeral, a person’s loved ones could send them on an adventure that they’d wanted to do in life but never got around to. This might be skydiving, or it might be a cruise to the Bahamas, or even a quick visit to an underground opium den in NYC’s Chinatown, which unfortunately don’t exist anymore.
It was going to be called Deadventures, and our catchphrase would be, “Do all the things in death that you missed out on in life!” We’d use a lot of exclamation points in our advertising to really emphasize the excitement your dead loved ones could expect with our services. I admit it has a kind of Weekend at Bernie’s feel, but I think we’d probably require that the person be cremated, otherwise you’d run up against all kinds of regulations against doing things with dead bodies that the living don’t want to be in close proximity to.
For example, you couldn’t just put a dead body on an airplane, probably even if you purchased a first-class ticket. And if a person had wanted to, say, go bungee-jumping, you probably couldn’t just harness them up and push them off the platform, because what if the inertia of the bungee springing back after reaching maximum tension caused a limb or two to fly off? They say no publicity is bad publicity, but it seems like that could be bad publicity. So ideally our clients would be cremated, and we’d take their ashes on adventures.
It’s a pretty selfish business idea, I admit. What I remember thinking at the time was, wouldn’t it be cool to go on all kinds of adventures and have someone else pay for it? I’d always hoped to be a kind of travel writer, one who took a lot of drugs and got into all kinds of crazy stuff on someone else’s dime, but that didn’t work out, so I looked into being an entrepreneur and that’s one of the ideas I came up with.
I even came up with a commercial for it:
Scene: A woman appears on camera holding an urn.
“Hi, I’m Betty Ferguson, spokesperson for Deadventures, the first significant innovation in funeral services in, well, just about all of modern civilization!
Are you struggling with the cost of burying a loved one? We know that traditional funeral services can be expensive. Coffins aren’t cheap, and neither is a cemetery plot. Stick a piece of carved marble on top of that soon-to-be skeleton and pretty soon you’re breezing past 15k!
Plus, aren’t funerals boring?”
Cut to people dressed in black, crying a little but mostly looking super bored.
Betty continues: “That’s why today, more and more people are choosing Deadventures: Adventures for when you’re dead!
Whatever your loved ones wanted to experience while alive, we’ll make it happen now that they’re dead!
Because death shouldn’t be boring. Make it a celebration!”
Betty is now on a beautiful beach and has loaded the ashes from the urn into an old style cannon. She pulls a string and ashes explode outward onto several nearby attractive women in bikinis.
Betty: Call today!
Fade to black.
I think I actually wrote a couple commercials for the business, but I’ve always enjoyed the idea of a business versus the execution of an idea for a business, which takes work that I’m not interested in doing. However, that said, if you know someone who would like to go on an adventure after they die, I’m more than willing to take their request into consideration, so long as all of my expenses are paid. In the meantime, try to do the things you want to do while you’re alive!
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