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Of course it’s totally normal to have a favorite tombstone!
Personally, I have a little list of them. They’re just awaiting the necessary demises.

Your tombstone reminds me of a “toy” I had when I was about 6 years old called the Mattel Thingmaker. I used to cook up skeletons and chain them into a toy dungeon.
All completely normal

A favorite tombstone? Of course….

Hillary’s!

Your favorite tombstone is from Pirates of the Caribbean?

Hey! Look, we solved Jeff Epstein’s, uh, suici…

who?

Hey, all,

Sorry I missed the Dorothy Parker post. Dottie, as her friends called her, is one of my favorite writers: sure, for smart remarks and poetry (not all of which had a “smart remark” last line — she has 3 serious poems about Jesus and Mary, for instance!), but also her short stories. There’s a reason The Portable Dorothy Parker has never been out of print, and received a new big-format edition in 2006.

Try “Big Blonde,” “Arrangement in Black and White,” “Horsie,” and “Glory in the Daytime.” Others, like “The Little Hours” and “Just a Little One,” are very funny.

Yes, she had a depressing life. But the work still stands.

Wolfus: mention of The Portable Dorothy Parker always makes me think of this sentence from Lawrence Block’s The Burglar in the Library:

“The whole idea of a portable Dorothy Parker intrigued me. You could take her along on trips, and every once in a while her head would pop up out of your Gladstone bag and deliver some smartass remark.”

Comment from Can\’t Hark My Cry
Time: August 27, 2019, 2:40 pm

“The whole idea of a portable Dorothy Parker intrigued me. You could take her along on trips, and every once in a while her head would pop up out of your Gladstone bag and deliver some smartass remark.”

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Exactly why I enjoy Lawrence Block, in both his serious (Matt Scudder) and his lighthearted (Bernie Rhodenbarr) modes.

Block’s been around since the very late Fifties, I think. When he goes, we will have lost another of The Greats.

Dottie’s line, in which a female character wants to deter a potential suitor: “It’s so nice to meet a man who isn’t a scaredy-cat about catching my beri-beri.”

My version of that, a similar female character: “So nice to meet a man who isn’t turned off by my little case of stress incontinence.”

So, more than 50 years after she passed away, Dottie still inspires writers.

Oooooh!! Do you know the John Keller books? First one is Hit Man. As you’d expect with Block, Keller is not an ordinary guy. The Keller books also are in a form I’ve always found fascinating–linked short stories, where every chapter is a complete story by itself, but there is also an overall story arc for the book. Really cool.