When my Great Aunt what lived with us when I was ickle died, we held the funeral back in her old town. There were hardly any in attendance, as she’d outlived most of her friends and family, and most of the family left were in Australia. Two little old ladies showed up and asked whose funeral it was. Turned out that they did, in fact, used to know her, but neither of them knew she’d died, they just went to every single funeral at that church as a hobby.
Actually, that whole burial situation was a bit unusual. My GG-Grandma had bought 3 double grave plots sometime after my Grandparents had married, by which point it was pretty clear than none of her 3 daughters were going to. The initial plan was for her to share with one of the daughters, the other two girls to share and her son, my Grandpa, to get the last one for him and Grandma*.
Two of the girls died first, and got the first plot, but GGG-ma kept on going til 99. When she finally did die, she was shortly followed by my Grandpa… and the surviving sister and widow decided that it was easier to carry on using the plot they just opened, so stuck my Grandpa in with his Mum. This in turn meant Grandma wound up in buried the final double plot, and Auntie, who died last, insisted on getting the last space, thus sharing the last double plot with her sister-in-law. There, I would imagine, to bicker for eternity.
Apparently my Aussie relatives, who are very religious, are quite offended by this situation, considering it disrespectful to the state of holy matrimony; my heathen side of the family just find it funny.
*If you’re wondering where my GGG-pa is in all of this, so am I. The evidence would indicate that I had one, but no-one has ever mentioned him. My GGG-ma was, by all accounts, so totally domineering that I guess he spent most of his life hiding in his shed.
