All of us are destined to ride in a fancy car once.
We will all take our last ride in a long black limousine.
Rich and famous make sure their families have the longest of black limousines.
Some would just as soon take their last ride in the back of a pickup truck.
Just their luck--it will never be.
That long black limousine will be their destiny too you see.
We are all destined to ride in That Long Black Limousine.

I know of a man that was helping my brother and another man dig a grave for someone that had died not long before.  My brother told me about how he got extra tired, so he and the other man told the other man to go rest in his truck for a while.  My brother and the other man finished digging the grave, and my brother went to check on the man in his truck.  He said, "I got up close and thought that he had gone to sleep."  He said that he reached in to shake the man when he didn't answer to his name only to find that the man had not gone to sleep at all.  He was dead.

 

I wonder, did he think he would skip that last ride--The one in That Long Black Limousine?  Even the man dying at the cemetery didn't help him avoid that long black limousine.  His wife had him buried in a different cemetery.  All his family and friends still got to mourn him when he rode in a fancy car as it went by.

The man was taking his turn in That Long Black Limousine.

 

 

 

I based the poem on Hank Williams Jr's song "The Long Black Limousine".  The summary afterward really did happen before my brother died a Mr. Mitchell died at the cemetery.  I didn't know the man personally, but my older siblings did or at least some of them did.