Grave Goods – David Southwell.

Tools of the Trade – a tool/implement without which you’d be lost, whether it’s a pen, trowel, notepad, bottle-opener or scanning electron microscope.

I expect my personal afterlife will be a somewhat sodden, grey-bruised sky English version of the Duat. Therefore I shall prepare to buried for the sort of scrapes that landscape is likely to hold. I am also preparing in alignment with the suspected laws of that afterlife. All heavens, all hells, all the many Empires of the Dead are sticklers for rule by regulation. There is no point trying to fight the eternal set-up, but a degree of hacking the ontological infrastructure may be doable.

The English Duat afterlife is probably like an inflexible RPG where early choices determine your fate. So be it. Moleskin 9×14, classic ruled hardback notebook and a Staedtler 0.5 pigment liner. I will only need one of each as I am confident that the English Duat resets every 12 hours, replenishing all that is consumed, making each grave good infinite. I am also confident that this choice of implement puts me in the scribe class. I have no problem with this. In the afterlife, the hack will hacker, the scribe the wielder of magic. Naming has power. As Alan Moore says, spelling is spells. Give me pen and paper and I will conjure new worlds when dead with as much gusto as I have done when living.

There may be lots of gainful employment opportunities in the afterlife if I go equipped with Moleskine and Staedtler. With no GPS, scribbled maps will be in big demand, people will need to write things down to provide clues that will survive the daily reset and if life has taught me one thing, it’s that there’s always someone who needs to borrow a pen.

Food for the Journey – a favourite portable snack, or a portion of something from your funeral feast.

My choice last meal and the post death feast for any mourners, would be a riot of dim sum. Wasabi prawn dumplings, a gratitude of fried pork and spring onion buns. Lashings of cheung fun and white tea. A heart’s ease of duck nest pastries and fried custard delights. An excess of glutinous rice and bean curd. There will be leftovers. A surfeit of steam baskets full of goodness to be buried with. The replenishing nature of the daily Duat reset means every new day in eternity there will be a banquet that will never pile on the pounds and never jade my palette. My stomach will never be empty, my heart will always be more rested. An added bonus will be that anything I cannot eat, I will be able to use as my basic barter currency. I have yet to meet a god-form, allegedly angelic being or Sunday newspaper journalist that cannot be persuaded to look the other way if the gab is deployed over dim sum. Not that I wish to spend the afterlife playing James Garner playing Flight Lieutenant Robert Hendley, but with ever-replenishing dim sum, it going to be an option when necessary.

Memento Vivere – a memento of a companion/event to bring you cheer (can be an image).

In my perfect afterlife, rather than the afterlife I expect to get, eternity would an infinite version of the Musée d’Orsay to be explored. A version where there are no cases or glass in the way and to touch an exhibit, to touch a picture, would transport you to its original time and location for an hour. All meals as temporal picnics with loved ones or friend feasts taken below the chandeliers and painted ceilings of what was the restaurant of the Hôtel d’Orsay in 1900. To remind me of the perfect heaven to explore, to remind me of the perfect companion to have adventures with for eternity, I’d like to be buried a porcelain badge of François Pompon’s Polar Bear – one of my favourite exhibits at the d’Orsay. To pull that out of my pocket from time to time, would be both the pain of grief till they joined me and the promise of delight for when they did.

Ex Libris – the book or text you are least likely to tire of reading.

An afterlife that restricts you to one book has cruelty about it. The citizens of eternity will rebel against this by having the swapping of books as one of their main daily distractions. While this system will not allow access to every book – no-one is being buried with a copy of Shaun Huston’s Slugs – the Informal Lending Library of the Long-time Dead will provide a fair bit of choice. As it is eternity and everything refreshes in the English Duat, your original book will come back to your way in pristine condition. However, getting your early pick of texts to borrow will require entry with a good base volume. You also need one that offers enough personal re-readings while you hold out for coming across someone wanting to swap their copy of The Great North Road by Frank Morley or the Collected Works of William Blake. While there are books I re-read yearly – Sinclair’s Lights Out For The Territory, Carter’s Burning Your Boats, Moorcock’s King Of The City – to be kissed by the language, I think for swapping potential I will need a good story. So, the choice is down to annually read books with gripping stories making it Roadside Picnic by the Strugatasky brothers or the collected Swamp Thing of Alan Moore. This is a coin toss, head’s for the Strugatskys, tails for Moore. It’s tails. Oh well, bit of a bonus as Stephen R. Bisette’s and John Totleben darkly beautiful artwork even opens me up to swaps with the illiterate.

Lucky Deposition – a bonus selection chosen by the guest – can include transport.

I am confident that through role of scribe I will be able to hack the infrastructure of the afterlife enough to give me self-willed flight – or at least gravity defying bouncing – and access to range of sneaky shortcuts letting me pop up anywhere within its 12 regions. As such, being buried with transport is an irrelevance. Given I have gone through my whole life looking like an urchin or velvet tramp veteran of the Psychic Wars, I’d like to change things up in the afterlife. My lucky deposition would be to be buried in a tailored-to-the-corpse Saville Row suit in a 1966 Mod-style; Edwardian linen shirt with silk ruche; a black Crombie overcoat; Killer Loop Sunglasses; Alexander McQueen cane; Burlington hat with a crow feather; a silk handkerchief with a print of the cover of the 1970 Rupert Annual on it and a pair of Italian Air Force Boots – as it was common belief among many of the mercenaries and militia I met during the Yugoslav Wars of Dissolution that these were the most comfortable, smartest and practical footwear you could get in 1991 military surplus market. I am not sure this look will be much better than my default gentleman refugee of the road, but one lives in hope even in death.

A Message from Beyond the Grave – an entirely discretionary option – leave a note for a future generation to find.

Any message to the future from now should be shame-soaked and apologetic. All else comes across as the sort of hollow justification for the consumerism, usury and might-over-justice based systems of belief that have made us an age likely to be judged as a curse. The far tomorrows will makes us as the dead, more alien than any life discoverable on a Goldilocks planet such as TRAPPIST-1d. Any message we leave may be beyond easy translation.

Possibly the only assumption we can make about a potential, temporal-distant audience is that is that they will want from the dead is the same that we always do, answers. While we usually turn up to the permissive space of séance to ask where Aunt Ethel’s will is, scratch the ghost soil to map to know the extent of inhumation in an Anglo-Saxon burial plot, I suspect the future will demand to know why we became wilfully crazed, apocalyptic enablers. Why we refused to see ourselves as creatures within the slow story of the Earth. I don’t think ‘Sorry, we weren’t all arseholes you know’ cuts it as a message from beyond an early 21st century grave.

Therefore, for my message for the future would be to leave them a bundle inside the grave – Bowie LPs from the 1970s on vinyl, artwork by Dave McKean, reels of Tarkovsky. To avoid the confusion that allows for tomorrow’s equivalent of ‘ritual objects’, the bundle would be labelled: ‘Take these as a gift given free of the poison of transaction. Take these not as payment for a time when mankind became a blade held against the neck of the world, but as a wish for joy. May your bitter words for us be tempered by knowing that we too had our stabs of beauty for the soul.’