US News

ED’S GRAVE SITUATION

How’m I dyin’?

Former Mayor Ed Koch has made a bizarre dash for the afterlife, propping up his already-engraved tombstone at a Manhattan cemetery although there is nothing apparently wrong with the 84-year-old.

“Everybody thinks its strange, he knows its strange,” one pal said. “He’s been talking about this for a couple of years.”

The unadorned tombstone, planted firmly on a hill at Trinity Church Cemetery in Washington Heights, carries an inscription that hails his Jewish heritage, as well as his life in public service.

“He was fiercely proud of his Jewish faith. He fiercely defended the City of New York, and he fiercely loved its people,” the headstone reads.

“Above all, he loved his country, the United States of America, in whose armed forces he served in World War II.”

A close friend said the city’s 105th mayor, who suffered a stroke in 1987, a heart attack in 1999 and underwent hernia surgery in 2006, chose those words because they summed him up the best.

“At the end of the day, those were most important values to him: being a New Yorker and a proud Jew.”

“That’s his core,” the pal added.

The friend insisted that the three-term mayor is merely “dealing with the last stages of his life.”

“I don’t think that’s the case,” he said, when asked if Koch was close to death.

Also carved into the stone is a common Jewish prayer as well as the last words of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded by Muslim terrorists in 2002: “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.”

Neighbors in the three-term mayor’s apartment building in Greenwich Village said the move was just an example of Koch’s out-sized personality.

“He’s a bigger-than-life character and I guess he wants to be bigger than death,” one female resident quipped.

Another tenant added: “He’s accustomed to having the last word, so this doesn’t surprise me.”

But some neighbors thought Koch has been looking frail lately.

“I saw him the other day and I thought, ‘My God, he’s having trouble walking,’ ” a woman in the complex said. “He was barely able to get on the elevator.”

Others were amazed that Koch is still able to work as hard as he does.

“He still does his TV and radio shows, he looks fine to me,” a building employee said.