I couldn’t come up with anything snappy, so how’s about:
“Here lies Spiny.
He loved life, tried not to hurt anyone
and laughed a lot. If he knew he was dead
he’d be mad. Spare him a thought sometime.”
S. Norman
Heh. I like that.
My personal choice:
“I have loved the stars to greatly to fear the darkness of the night”
This is a rough paraphrasing from a quote in Carl Sagan’s book Cosmos (btw if anybody happens to have the exact quote handy, would you mind posting it? I had it written down at one point but I lost it).
I’m also partial to:
“Well now, that was unexpected…”
“Life in a box is better than no life at all.”
Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
[sub](BTW, DRY, if you’re using the Hamlet quote, I wanna be buried next to you.)[/sub]
How about…
“Oh, so NOW you come by to visit!”
BROK LEE
1977-20XX
R.I.P.
(and in really really fine print…)
broccoli! is the Official broccoli! of the NFL, NBA, MLB, the NHL, and Jester’s Imperical Legions. Any use of broccoli!'s corpse without his expressed, written consent will result in an extremely horrible haunting. So there.
SISTE VIATOR -
HIC JACET
MATTHEW MCLAUCHLIN
MCMDCCCI - ?
“OBESA CANTAVIT”
Or if I die serving some cause, it will read:
Matthew McLauchlin
October 14, 1981 - ?
They can cut all the flowers
but they will not stop spring
“I’ll be back.”
::snicker::
Sorry…
Or, “SMILE! You’re on Candid Camera!!”
Or, more seriously, “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” It’s a line from a song (no idea which one, I hate that song).
How about…
I’m buried face down; kiss my ass!
Abort, Retry, Ignore ?
You can have my gun now…
I’m actually standing behind you right now…laughing at all the absurdities people thought were important.
I’m gonna be real obscure. My cemetary plot overlooks the Great Lake where I was raised and where I live now, and the cemetary contains two sets of greatx3grandparents, one set of greatx2grandparents, and my parents. The stone will read:
Et Earello Endorenna Utulien. Sinome Maruvan Tenn’ Ambar-Metta!
It’s Quenya for “Out of the great sea of middle-earth I am come. Here I shall abide until the ending of the world!”
I think I’m the only one in the entire county who knows what it means.
I think the following would be rather fun:[ul]“Hi! I’m not alive right now, but if you’d like to leave a message…”[/ul]Of course, it’d work better if there was a blank piece of marble right at the gravesite with a hammer and chisel… but I suppose that’d be too elaborate?
~~Baloo
The song is “Closing Time” by Semisonic
[sub]please don’t hit me…[/sub]
Why? Because I’d finally have shut up? 
Here’s a suggested epitath (sort of) to my good friend screech-owl:
“And, when [s]he shall die,
Take [her] and cut [her] out in little stars,
And [s]he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.”
–Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene ii
“he finally snapped and they had to put him down”
[screeching halt]
No, for the juxtaposition of quotes from Hamlet and the anti-Hamlet, as it were.
[sub][Note: I am not saying that R&G is THE anti-Hamlet; it was just much easier to type than “the play based on Hamlet but from the point of view of two very minor stage-dressing yet somewhat necessary to the plot characters”.[/sub]
That’s what I’m saying.
[/screeching halt]
We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread of morbid pithiness, already in progress.
“Utterly useless. If you knew him, forget him. If a stranger, count your blessings.”
I’m going to be cremated. But if I were to have a tombstone it would read:
Please don’t shake me.
No, don’t wake me.
Leave me where I lay.
I’m only sleeping.
I’d go with the lawn one. I burst out laughing reading that one.
I don’t know what I’d want on mine…