When a certain former boss of mine finally kicks off I have a feeling there will be a lot of people holding their tongues only for his wife’s sake. She’s a saint and I don’t think I ever heard anyone say anything bad about her. Even she knows her husband’s an asshole, she’ll probably tell people not to hold back because of her.
Sometimes the SOB has a mama who loves him despite of everything.
My ex’ brother was a downright evil bastard. He abandoned two families (that we know of), scammed his mama out of more money than she could afford (her house went into another of her kids’ name after the family coughed up enough money to keep it from being foreclosed because he’d cleaned her bank account out), he tended to physically abuse whatever woman and kids he was with at the moment and, the crowning achievement, he robbed a liquor store and killed a guy.
He was sent up for life with no parole. Still, Mama would scrimp by without some of the necessities just to put money in his canteen account. When he died in prison, they released the cremains to the family. Mama wanted a memorial service. Only she and his siblings attended and the sibs wouldn’t have but did to support their mama.
Even total wastes of humanity sometimes have someone who will mourn their demise.
Yeah… I find it curious people would go to the funeral of a despicable person.
When my father died this year, people came from near and far because he was awesome. Work colleagues who hadn’t seen him in 25 years brought their families. They flew in, drove in. We ran out of places for people to sit.
Some of his siblings will die and the attendance won’t fill a reasonably large sedan. I wouldn’t cross the street to pay my respects to a couple of his brothers.
Logically it seems to me there’d be am inverse correlation between being an asshole and the likelihood people will attend the funeral. And the people who do attend, like **missred’s **“SOB’s mama,” may not think they’re an SOB.
The last couple funerals I’ve been to the preacher just basically read the obituary, did some bible verses, there were a couple of songs and that was it. No audience participation other than response to the readings.
I think it would be kind of funny if they would picket Charles Manson’s funeral, assuming he has one. Considering how many groupies he still has, it wouldn’t surprise me if he does have one. :rolleyes:
I know a woman whose four year old son was the victim of a murder/suicide by his father.
I did not go his funeral, but I understand the family blamed HER for the tragedy, saying the murderer went crazy because she left him. No, he was whacked out long before she met him.
I can understand despising someone. But I also can’t make myself believe there is anyone on the planet who is an asshole just for the sake of being an asshole. So far I’ve found that the more horrible a person is, the nastier the demons they fight, or have fought. That doesn’t mean I have to like them, or forgive them, or even allow them the chance to change, apologize, and live a better life. It’s an unfortunate truth that a human can be abused to the point where the abuser can never redeem himself to them.
But it also occurs to me that hating someone doesn’t make me a better person, and it doesn’t undo my hurt feelings. A funeral seems like a good opportunity to remember that one day it will be my turn in the box, and to meditate on what might be said about me by people who never lived inside my head and who could never fully understand my motives. In that light I can’t decide whether it is appropriate to praise or condemn at a funeral–perhaps a much loved decedent was in reality a baby-raping puppy-kicker who just hadn’t yet been caught? But a refusal at least to condemn seems like a way to leave a non-negative footprint in the world.
As the HR person, I’m the designated representative for the company at most employee/employee family funerals. Last year, one of the spouses of one of our employees died and I was asked to attend. Everyone here knew her, but not in any favorable way. She used to show up at the office periodically, drunk as a lord, demanding to see her husband, and if someone didn’t immediately pull him out of a meeting to satisfy her, she’d shout and curse and swear and make our poor receptionist’s life hell until we did.
She even died nasty. Drunk, as usual, she plowed her car into a home, injuring two residents and pretty much destroying the structure.
I wondered if anyone would attend and was surprised that many did. They were her family, I was told, and they were as loud and obnoxious as she had been. I did my duty, gave the employee a big hug, because I’d suddenly come to appreciate how miserable his life must have been, and left.
The widower is an entirely different man now. Happy and smiling and seeing someone who is kind and likeable. Good for him! I’ll always wonder, though, how he got involved with such a miserable women as his first wife. I wonder whether she was different before she became an alcoholic, although judging from her family, it’s hard to believe. Sadly for my curiousity, that isn’t one of those questions you can really ask someone. Why the holy heck did you marry that bitch? is all kinds of politically incorrect. lol
I dunno, when I did Karate back in the 90’s, there was this large and extremely unpleasant woman in our school. Half-assed her way through everything, talked smack about people in the middle of the class, etc. I eventually found out that she was married to this extremely handsome guy who only showed up to class about once a month. I guess they married right out of high school. She allegedly was a much nicer person back then, but had gained so much weight, become so unpleasant and had driven off most of their friends and family, that he resorted to alcohol to numb the pain. At the time, we all wondered why the fuck he stayed married to her.
Well, then I went through my own marriage and divorce and learned that despite whatever I thought up front, mentally and emotionally it really isn’t very easy to walk away sometimes.
I’m not sure if that’s a new trend for your area, but there would have been participation, in this particular funeral, if most of us weren’t ambivalent, at best about the whole thing (It’s a cultural thing).
There was an older woman in our church who was bossy, nasty and unpleasant. The only people she could associate with were people who were too scared of her to stay away. They weren’t friends, they were subjects that she could order around.
Her husband died of heart failure in his early 40s. It’s said that he preferred to die rather than live another miserable day with her. No children, no other family.
Eventually she became ill and had to be put in a nursing home run by a convent. My parents would visit her once or twice a year (only out of spiritual duty; they didn’t like her either). She would see my parents and burst into tears, because she would have no other visitors at all. Mom believes that in the end she realized her personality drove people away.
At her funeral were a priest, a nun, and my parents. Saddest funeral they ever attended.
Thanks for sharing that. Mean people all over this world, glad I ain’t one of 'em.
I’m pretty sure this happened at GG Allin’s funeral.
If you don’t know who he was, don’t Google him on a work computer.
He was a punk rocker who was better known for his onstage antics, which almost always consisted of (among other things) defecating onstage during the show, than he was for his music.
This almost sounds like it could be the mother of a woman who posts on another board. The mother was finally diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder after she went into a nursing home, where she was one of those patients who was avoided by other residents, and the staff had as little contact with her as possible.
Years ago, I worked at a place that had a hospice contract, and I sometimes sat in on staff meetings. I remember the nurses and chaplain talking about one client who was afraid that she would be kicked out of hospice because of her husband. I realize this is a reverse situation, but apparently she’d lived her whole adult life being ostracized because nobody could stand her husband.
Never have been to one; to be fair, if there was one & I was expected to go? Flu. cough cough
There have been some truly vicious/horrible people over the years who I’ve seen publicly mourned by some Other truly vicious/horrible people: real phony-assed bastards who’d pretend tears & say how they wished the coffin-muffin was still alive.
I always thought that those platitudes sounded like someone mourning the free range of Small Pox. (Maybe they learned over the years that the Hated need the Hated to watch their backs?)
I always found it odd, because anyone with a lick of common sense wasn’t mourning, but was wishing that the rotting shell would only come to life long enough to drag the other phony SOB straight down to Hell (or the closest Crematorium)
by whatever appendage could be hooked solid by cold dead embalmed claws.