Inspired by a recent thread on nice funerals.
I was reminded of my grandfather’s funeral a while back. It was held in the dead of winter inside a chapel at the graveyard, but the side walls were made of vaults ( niche big enough to hold casket/urn, with a marble tile over the opening with names carved on it). Some of the name tiles also had picture frames stuck on, or flower holders. This will become important later.
This grandpa had become rather unlikeable in later life, at least partially due to being addicted to vicodin for 40 years and a slew of other medicine related issues (long, complicated story that involves a false diagnosis of dementia and a meat fork). Anyways. No one, except Grandma was overly sad to see him go.
The silly starts before the funeral even begins. The cemetary, which was also taking care of the cremation, calls my mom who was taking care of arrangements, and explains that after cremation, not all the ashes would fit in the urn. Would it be ok to put the rest in a cardboard box and put it in the grave before hand?
At the ceremony, things are going nicely until one of the picture frames on the vaults falls on to the hard tile floor. This struck most of the people in attendance as deeply funny, but because it was a funeral, nobody laughed, just made faces trying to NOT laugh. This was made more difficult when the special music was played. This was picked out by an aunt and my grandma… it was a bluegrass take on a traditional hymn, played on a bagpipe, from a very degraded tape recording, from a tiny low quality boombox.
The whole thing had a very surreal and comical air, like you were on a hidden camera show.
Anyone else have stories about funerals that were meant to be serious occasions, but weren’t?
Not a funeral I went to, but a good friend of mine. I think it was his grandfather’s funeral, and he and his brother were pallbearers. Apparently the footing around the grave wasn’t that good, and when they were setting the casket on the frame above the grave, his brother slipped and fell into the grave. The image of his brother’s panic-stricken face popping up over the edge of the freshly-dug grave remains fresh in my friend’s memory. As with the funeral you described, nobody laughed, but the effort to maintain a solemn front caused many a dislocated rib.
We went to the funeral of the husband of a coworker of my husband’s a few years back. It was held on the water in southern Maryland, and they decided to have a “Viking funeral” – they put his ashes and special mementos/notes from everyone in a small boat, towed it out a ways, and set it afire. It was very sweet and touching, as his large family obviously had loved him very much.
And then the little boat started drifting with the incoming tide…straight for a thick patch of tall, highly flammable grass and rushes on the shore. :eek:
We all had to stand on the shore looking solemn while the folks who had towed the boat out paddled frantically over to it in their other boat and tried to put the fire out before they set the whole shore ablaze. It was really, really hard not to laugh, obviously.
About a decade ago myself and some friends went on one of those day fishing charters out in the Atlantic off the coast of Florida. Simple fishing boat with benches down both side of the boat. It was a typical hot and humid Florida day and we were all trying to stay cool with the very slight ocean breeze. There were about 20 guests on this charter.
While everyone was fishing there was one guy who just sat at the end of one of the benches near the back looking kind of mopey. Wouldn’t fish and wouldn’t talk to anyone else.
Then in the middle of the trip without any warning the guy pulls a bag out his backpack, opens it, and starts dumping it’s contents off the side of the boat (some sort of powdery substance). Some went in the water but a lot of it was caught by the breeze and blown onto the passengers on that side of the boat and stuck to them since they were already sweaty from the humidity.
Everybody had a WTF reaction and the captain immediately rushed in to stop the guy and ask him what he was doing.
After the captain pulled the guy off the deck for the rest of the trip he came out and apologized to the guests, told them the powder wasn’t anything hazordous, but it was the ashes of this guys father.
Those of us on the opposite side of the boat thought it was pretty funny.
Mr. Kitty’s grandmother passed away after a really, really extended illness, the majority of which was spent in a hospital bed in her son’s (not Mr. Kitty’s dad) guest room. The funeral was my first experience with a Southern Baptist service, and I have no idea how I made it through the whole thing without hurting myself (though being seated next to Mr. Kitty’s dad may have had something to do with it).
The overly enthusiastic preacher was amusing on his own, but coupled with what I later referred to as his “cheering section”- apparently unrelated-to-the-family people sitting behind him on the altar yelling “Amen” and “Praise God” and such- was the stuff comic dreams are made of. But the story that still gets told came about halfway through the euology, when the preacher was going on and on and on in his enthusiastic way about what a Good Christian Woman[sup]tm[/sup] the deceased had been. He praised her for being such a shining beacon of righteousness all her life, and that now that she had passed on to her glory she had become the perfect Christian, a true role model for all to aspire to, for it is only in death that we could join her in perfectness, blah blah blah. Indeed…
Preacher: “What the world needs is more dead Christians.”
Cheering Section: “AMEN! PRAISE THE LORD!”
:eek:
I looked over at Mr. Kitty, sitting up front with the pallbearers, just as he looked back at me, and in that moment I knew the only choices were to get out of the church before I completely embarrased myself, or somehow hold back the building laughter.
I had fingernail marks on my arm for weeks from where I drew blood, but I made it through the service before retiring to an out-of-the way spot and laughing 'til I was nearly sick.
I hear the funeral for the great-grandmother, where the (different) preacher went on and on about what a wonderful woman Ms. Gomer was, and how he had come to know Ms. Gomer so well in her last days, etc., etc., while the family fumed in the front rows until the deacon whispered in his ear that her name was Tomer, was also a gut-buster, but that was before my time.
My uncle Smitty, who looked just like you imagine him, died on a barstool (well I suppose he died after falling off the bar stool, from a heart attack).
He was the epitome of the word “redneck” but one of those citified rednecks who’s kinfolk grew up huntin’ and farmin’ but he installed aluminum siding and worked on junk cars in the driveway. He was the crabby old bearded drunk guy who always wore his hat and sat quietly in the living room watching TV.
Anyway, his funeral consisted of a lot of drunk rednecks in the funeral home in the middle of the city, crying and singing along to sad country songs. I think “Why Me, Lord?” was one my aunt (who is quite “city” and very little “redneck”) played on the little boombox.
There was coffee and cookies provided in the gathering area downstairs…and apparently there was also a old cooler full of Stroh’s down there too. The funeral director was not too pleased and appealed to the most normal-looking man in the room, my brother (as far from “redneck” as one can look), to please ask the rednecks to take their beer elsewhere.
Someone did manage to toss a can of Stroh’s into the casket, though. Only fitting, as uncle Smitty had his hat and his boots on too.
We still snicker about this funeral to this day, 10 years later. It’s much different than any funeral we’re used to, and our friends like to hear about it too.
My great grandmother had been ill for a while before she died and her loyal cat Sara (who wasn’t in too good of health herself being 16 years old and having lost most of her teeth) had been at her side through her entire illness. When she passed away Sara, curled up against her side, cried until she also passed away a few hours later. We had them both cremated and had a funeral where my great grandmother’s ashes, which had been placed in a large plastic box by the funeral home, were deposited in a lake near her apartment. Since the cat had passed away and been cremated as well we decided to put her ashes in the lake also since my grandma had loved her so much.
The vet that had cremated Sara had placed her in a beautiful metal box that was gold in color and engraved her name on the front of it. It was obviously meant for display. The minister that had poured my great grandmother’s ashes into the lake stood and fumbled with the metal box for a few minutes and finally got out a swiss army knife to open it. After a few more minutes of prying at the box he managed to open it but cut his hand in the process.
At this point my cousin leans over to me and says, “When I die, have me creamated at the vet.” :eek:
I burst out laughing and disturbed the entire ceremony. When everyone looked at us to find out what was so funny we told them what he had said and everyone else, including the minister, burst out laughing as well.
My mother was a fan of naughty nursery rhymes all of her life. Her favorite was:
*Mary Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
“With silver bells and cockle shells,
and one goddamned tulip…”*
At the funeral home, one of her church friends sent a beautiful bouquet. She paid a king’s ransom for the florist to find a single tulip in November and put it in the arrangement. My sister and I were on emotional overload so we didn’t even notice it until it was pointed out to us. We liked the gesture so well, we had a single tulip put on her headstone.
In the meantime, I spent every slow minute trying to bribe the undetaker to get lost on the way to the cemetary. Mom was never on time, and I thought it was appropriate for her to be late to her own funeral.
Background – my grandmother was half Irish, half Cherokee, all spitfire. She did not so much suffer from paranoid schizophrenia as enjoy the hell out of it. She was an amazing woman who literally gave birth to 4 of her 16 kids in the middle of the tobacco field (squatted, squized out a kid, bit the cord in half, tossed the placenta off, shoved the kid in her basket amongst the tobacco and went back to work). Oh, just for the record, only 12 of the 16 lived, surprisingly, all 4 of the tobacco-babies made it!
She was areligious, and quite anti-organised religion. She detested the thought of any of her children or grandchildren going to church because they were all whore-houses and only taught little girls how to be whores while worshipping a bastard. Yes, my grandmother considered Jesus to be a bastard, because his parents were not married when he was conceived. She was a very interesting woman. To say the least.
Upon her death, a bible-beating Baptist was hired to preside over the funeral. My sister and I could not help but sit in the back giggling our heads off in the belief that Gramma was going to sit up in her casket and start going off on everyone for having that crap at her funeral. As an aside, it is the only funeral to which I have ever been where people wore dirty overalls. Many of my father’s family is trailer-trash hillbilly folk.
A musician friend of mine died suddenly at 27. The service was absolutely packed with his friends and many acquainances from the local music scene.
The music for the funeral mass was a soprano accompanied by an organist. The soprano cracked and missed notes and tried to make up for it by vibrato-ing as widely as she could. The organist seemed like a person somewhat familiar with the keyboard looking at the music for the first time – pauses, missed chords. I daresay there were 40 or 50 people in the pews who could have improvised better music on the spot. Some people were suppressing laughs, some were appalled. But it was a terrible sendoff for a musician. (The priest using the sermon to berate the younger generation for abandoning religion didn’t help matters.)
My other memory of the funeral was that me and another pallbearer were close to the front of the procession, in a 1970 beater Impala I had borrowed for the occasion. Right as we were starting from the church to the cemetary, the car wouldn’t turn over. The other pallbearer laughed and said, “We’ll get a jump off the hearse! IT’L MAKE HISTORY!” Fortunately the car turned over on the 5th or 6th try.
All of these wonderful stories. And it’s: (long, complicated story that involves a false diagnosis of dementia and a meat fork) that’s sticking in my mind. Please tell me you’ll start another thread some day to explain this.
I was once at a funeral in a church with bare wooden pews, and somebody in the pew in front of me cut the loudest, longest fart ever. It rattled on the pew so loud I know half the church had to have heard it. I mean, it went on and on and on, and then there was an aftershock. My mom doesn’t think farts are very funny, you know, and even she had a very hard time not exploding into gales of laughter. We just put our heads down and tried to control our faces, but we were just shaking with it! And then we had to stand up and sing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”, and I just could not keep it together. It’s hard to sing when you can’t hold your huge grin in.
This isn’t so much haha laughable, but laughable none the less.
My ex’s mother was a fairly religeous woman, though far from a zealot. She always liked having a minister in her life. When she went into the nursing home, she had a minister, but she’d never met him, until one night when we were all convinced that she was just about to go. He showed up and sat with us for maybe a good couple of hours, then left when she stablized. She never saw him again, though he saw her again just after she left us.
The poor sap delivered her eulogy. That meant, of course, that he had to summarize all that was good about her life. It was a life that he didn’t know squat about. The only time he talked to her, she wasn’t really in a mood to chat, what with the crushing chest pain and all. And between her death and the funeral, family members were too grief stricken and busy dealing with all the stuff that goes on during those times that no one had a chance to give the minister a biography.
He had no material to work with. Just nothing. He ended up reminiscing about his own childhood, with his brother, back in Jamaica, and how they had this lemon tree in the back yard, and sometimes they’d go pick some lemons, and take them back to the house, and go into the kitchen where their mom was there cooking up a chicken with some really hot spices, then she’d serve it with some potatoes and beans, then dad would take them out to the fields where they’d watch the fireflies, then it was off to bed where the mom would read them a story, then the next morning they’d…
Oh yeah. She seemed like the kind of person who when life handed her lemons, she made lemonade.
She wasn’t. Especially not the one time he met her. Life handed her sixteen bushels of lemons that night, and it nearly killed her.
This thread is further confirmation of why I’ll be having a very small and quiet funeral, and then a massive party in celebration of my life. I want people to laugh, and have fun remembering me.
Not laughable, but I wondered what the minister could find to say about one of my first husband’s uncles. The man beat his wife, was an unapologetic drunk, molested his daughter (she didn’t say anything until he was dead), trolled the town dump for clothes and household items, and shot himself in the shoulder with a shotgun so he could collect a disability benefit.
So the minister talked about judgment and forgiveness.
That reminded me of the memorial service for my maternal grandfather, who had been born in Annapolis (the capital of the state of Maryland) and grown up in Baltimore (the state’s largest city). The preacher obviously misread the biography that had been prepared for her, as she said that Grandpa had been born in Minneapolis a few months before his family moved to Baltimore. He had indeed lived in many different states during his career, but Minnesota was not among them (although next-door North Dakota was). I thought of coughing and correcting the woman, but figured that Grandpa probably wouldn’t have appreciated it – although he was scholarly and attentive to detail, he had also been a member of the clergy himself!
My mom and I both are easily creeped out, and neither of us like open-casket funerals. At my grandmother’s funeral (my paternal grandmother), my mom leans over to me and whispers, “Make sure it’s nailed shut if you have to, but DO NOT let anyone leave my damn coffin open!”
I had the giggles all the way through the ceremony.
:eek: