By Andrew Hoffman
Hello all, I welcome you to the last part an ongoing series on a lighter subject of death, the epitaph. An epitaph is defined as a phrase or form of words written in memory of a person who has died, as an inscription on a tombstone. The words we choose for our gravestone say a lot about how we lived our life.
We have covered comedians, playwrights and authors, but let’s take a look at other celebrities that have some witty, honest and poignant epitaphs on their eternal monuments. Merv Griffin (1925-2007) the American television host and media mogul placed on his cemetery stone “Merv Griffin, I will not be right back after this message”.
Mel Blank was known as the man of a thousand voices and is best known as the voice of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and Barney Rubble. So, it is very appropriate that Porky the Pig’s catchphrase “That’s all folks” was used to adorn his headstone.
Frank Sinatra, another member of the Rat Pack and one of the most influential and best-selling musical artists of all time had his headstone inscribed with the title of his 1964 hit “The Best is Yet to Come”. That song was the last song Sinatra ever sang in public before his death. Sticking with famous musicians, let’s move on to Douglas Glenn Colvin, known to most people as Dee Dee Ramone of punk rock band the Ramones. Dee Dee’s gravesite has the short but sweet epitaph “O.K… I gotta go now.” The resting place is not far from his former fellow band member Johnny Ramone’s grave site in the Hollywood Forever cemetery.
Veteran actress Bette Davis is well known as one of Hollywood’s Golden Age’s incredibly talented starlets. She has 101 feature films and TV movies to her credit. But this film legacy did not come easy. Bette Davis literally had to find her own way to Universal Studios when she arrived in Hollywood at age 22 because the studio representative sent to pick her up left, saying “I didn’t see anyone who looked like an actress”. Her parents divorced when she was 7, then she had a childhood of exile to boarding schools, an apprenticeship under movie moguls that tried to crush her spirit, four stormy marriages and an estranged daughter. When she died at the age of 81, she had arranged to have a line from her 1950 film, “All About Eve”, engraved on her ivory white crypt in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Los Angeles. The line is “She did it the hard way.”
Despite being one of America’s most famous writers, Edgar Allan Poe’s grave failed to have a headstone. Eventually after 25 years, family and friends saved enough money to mark his burial site and, on his headstone, they placed for his epitaph a stone-carved image of a raven and the poetic words “Quoth the raven Nevermore”.
We have come to the end of a fun little rundown of the history of epitaphs and some fascinating epitaphs that are interesting, though-provoking and downright funny. I guess all that is left is for me to tell you what I would like on my tombstone as my epitaph. Boy, that is a hard one. Part of me thinks that it should be serious and insightful, and another part of me thinks that I should use it to laugh at myself or at life in general. Maybe I just need to experience life a little more before I commit to something that will be on a monument for eternity. I hope more people will think about what they want for themselves as their epitaph as the result of this article, and I hope they are not afraid to express themselves. I wouldn’t be surprised that in the next prearranged funeral I do that the family will say “when I die, just engrave my tombstone with whichever post on Facebook of mine got the most likes”. I look forward to seeing you in the next article!
