Dead Metaphors

There are dead metaphors buried all over the world
in shallow, fallow, and callow grave sites and no one,
not even a literate English teacher, rare as they are,
knows where the dead metaphors are buried.

In case you're wondering, it is linguistic scholars that
tell us that the definition of a dead metaphor is a metaphor used so often it has lost the power of its
original imagery and has become a lifeless cultural cliché, a figurative roadkill.   

I understand the definition, having stepped over many
clichéd metaphors lying prone on the sidewalks of
popular fiction, but what happens to a metaphor after it dies, after taking its last breath of implied comparison?  
 
Where, for example, does "the mouth of a river" go when rivers no longer have mouths? Where does "kick the bucket" go when there are no buckets to kick? Where does a "rollercoaster of emotions" go when emotions are ticketless to board a rollercoaster?

Ever seen a dead metaphor listed in an obituary column,
I haven't, one written say, as an elegiac recitation of the dead metaphor's career milestones, perhaps highlighting the time the dead metaphor appeared in a
presidential inaugural speech?

I have no trouble imagining a linguistic cemetery located somewhere that officials are not telling us about, maybe on the Southside of town, the dingy part of town no one goes to after dark, where one can view the tombstones of deceased figures of speech.

Take a leisurely stroll some time through a chilly cemetery on a moonless night, slashing rain muddying your path, and you just may discover that dead metaphors are buried in a separate section, a section away from
all the other forms of expression.

While on the other side of the cemetery, the side with magnificent river views, the dead similes are buried.
Hard to imagine a rhetorically segregated cemetery
even exists, one where "life is an open book"
would never be buried next to "life is like an open book."

I am hopeful when I die that family, friends, and colleagues will regale without fail and tell memorial attendees (if any) a few of the quixotic quips, quotes, and anecdotes I expressed during my short but aphoristic life.  

Or will my preprandial eulogizers imply in finicky, choosy critiques that most, if not all, of the metaphors I used during my, some would say, verbose life on earth,
were as dead as I now appear to be.