Funeral Shit Show

The BBQ Pit
81

Back in 1998, 2 weeks before my high school graduation, my sister Angie died of a massive stroke 3 days before her 29th birthday. She was living in Seattle and was really starting to get her life together. When she didn’t show up for work one day one of her coworkers went to her apartment to find her dead.

The rest of us are in PA, so not only did we have to wait nearly a week for Angie to be shipped home air freight, she had no savings or life insurance so my mother had to take out a home equity loan to pay for the funeral. The funeral director luckily is a good friend of hers so he cut his costs to the bone.

So I’m 18, my favorite sister is dead and being shipped home air freight like a piece of furniture or something, I’m afraid I’m going to miss my finals and how am I supposed to fucking pass a fucking test with all of the above going on…

There were two moments of funny in this whole ordeal. The first came when one of my other sisters had to go buy clothes to put on Angie. Angie was rather buxom and the other sister is flat as a plank; she came in with the shopping bag and announced, “I finally got to buy a 38D bra!”

Then we all get to sit through the afternoon 4 hour viewing and the evening 2 hour viewing, getting kissed by people who are complete strangers and furthermore getting 497 different shades of lipstick all over my cheeks. I went to the rest room at one point and my cheeks looked like Jackson Pollock had been at them.

Then comes the morning of the funeral. The coffin is closed, the family assembled with us kids in the front row. Directly behind us is my grandfather, my mother’s stepfather (she’s careful to emphasize the “step” part in these situations ;)) and one of the great aunts.

After a lengthy discussion about which of my brothers is which (one’s short and a redhead, the other’s tall and dark haired, it isn’t hard to figure out FFS) they have the following conversation:

“So what are you gonna do after this?”

“I dunno, the day’s kind of wasted now, isn’t it?”

“I think maybe I’ll go over Long John Silver’s. I got coupons.”

“I like a nice piece of fish. But I don’t like that Kentucky Fried Chicken. Too spicy. Burns my t’roat.”

“Yeah, but if you don’t like it you don’t have to get it again. It’s good to try new things.”

The remaining five of us kids were all like :eek::confused::mad::eek::eek:

Afterwards, we all thought it was the funniest damn thing ever and to this day none of us can mention fish or funerals without repeating the “nice piece of fish” conversation verbatim :smiley:

82

Is your mother’s stepfather or your grandfather Billy Crystal?

83

Wow, they really put the fun in funeral, don’t they?

I haven’t been to many funerals myself, and the ones I have have been relatively low public drama though not low on emotion. Sweetie was a wreck at his mother’s funeral a couple of years ago; he’d been her caretaker for years, he was in the hospital room when she died, and could have asked them to rescind the DNR order and try to revive her, and… didn’t. (It was for the best. They had good reasons for the DNR in the first place.) It tore him up. It didn’t help that the funeral takes place over two days; the panikhida service the night before the burial, and a full mass the day of. And the Vichnaya Pamyat is the most morose, darkest, melancholiest music ever written, and it drones on and on at both services. By the end of the evening after the panikhida, he was drunk and crying. By the end of the day of the funeral, he was drunk and passed out in his room while the rest of us were downstairs. Not pleasant times.

Then, 40 days later, there’s another memorial service. But about a week before that service for his mother occurred, his uncle died. Lather, rinse, repeat. The day of his uncle’s funeral, we got back to the house to find a message on the answering machine: an old friend of his had died, and that funeral was the next day. (Thank whatever that wasn’t an Orthodox funeral, at least.)

He was … not right for a while, and our relationship suffered for it. Things gradually got better, but I’m convinced that the Orthodox tradition of dwelling on death fucks with his head in an unhealthy way. I’m with **Olives **on this one. Let 'em GO, already. Thing is, the ones who might benefit most from a party funeral like the ones in the link would be the least likely to want such a thing.

84

You have to throw rocks in the quarry.