Here lies Johnny Yeast/Pardon me for not rising
--Inscription on an actual tombstone
Godspeed: a love story is the touching story of a tragic love affair, a humiliating funeral service, and the tender and astonishing events that stream from it in the name of lost love. You can find it at http://www.amzn.to/WS6YlU.
Research for such a theme can take you down a few side roads. For example, the author discovered that like Johnny Yeast, many people have found unique ways to say goodbye, to get in the last word or the last laugh.
An Englishman named John Penny provided that his tombstone read:
Reader, if cash thou are in want of any
Dig 4 feet deep and thou wilt find a Penny
Many people have left this as their last message:
I told you I was sick
Some other whimsical tombstones:
Here lies the body/of Jonathan Blake/stepped on the gas/instead of the brake
Here lies Ezekial Aikle/Age 102/The Good Die Young
What a way to lose weight!
Here lies Ann Mann/who lived an old maid/but died an old Mann
The dust of/Melantha Gribbling/Swept up at last/by the Great Housekeeper
First a cough/Carried me off/Then a coffin/They carried me off in
And think about this one:
Sacred to the memory of Major James Brush, Royal Artillery,/who was killed by the accidental discharge of a pistol by his orderly/Well done, good and faithful servant
And an actual headstone in the Boot Hill Cemetery in Tombstone, Arizona says,
Here lies Lester Moore
Four shots from a forty-four
No Les, No More
Funerals and obituaries might seem like a strange background for a love story. But art imitates life, and the humiliating central incident behind Godspeed: a love story -- a botched funeral service -- actually happened to a friend of the author.
He was engaged to a lovely young woman who was struck down suddenly by cancer. It fell to him to make funeral arrangements, but dazed by remorse and grief, he turned the service over to an irresponsible funeral home and then watched helplessly as they made a travesty of her last rites.
How the hero, a newspaperman, coped with it makes up a good portion of the book. He turns to writing obituaries, hoping he can somehow atone for his guilt and failure by writing beautiful, touching tributes to others, but eventually decides that even that isn't enough. What he does about it makes for an astonishing turn of events.