Not much to say about funerals, they’re depressing and people cry and then they laugh to make themselves feel better and they make off-color jokes about the deceased and remember all the embarrassing things they did in life.
Everyone dresses up, except occasionally the guest of honor gets to wear a comfortable pair of pants and a laid back shirt. No one in attendance can get away with that. Lucky guy.
It’s almost unfortunate that people dress up for funerals. Funerals are uncomfortable enough without a tight collar and a pair of shoes that aren’t broken in because you only ever wear them twice a year.
Who’s ever been to a funeral on a nice day? It’s always hot—especially in a suit—or, if the universe really wants to pile on the cliché melancholy, it’s pouring. Funerals in winter must be a special kind of awful.
No one ever wants to go to a funeral but the idea of skipping it is worse. Guilt, man. It’s a powerful emotion. Last chance to say goodbye and all that. Ever been to a funeral for someone you didn’t know that well but always wanted to? That’s the worst. It’s like saying, “Long time no see” and “Goodbye forever, but we never really had that many memories.” It stings just the same, though.
Something’s beautiful about the ceremony despite its all-encompassing sadness. A waterfall precedes it, but there’s some closure at the end. Not much. Sometimes not enough. But it’s the end of a chapter. The end of a chapter kind of like when a book is really good but it’s too late to keep reading and you put in that bookmark but then get too busy to ever pick it up again. It isn’t a perfect metaphor; a book can be picked up again and reread.
There’s something like that with people, though not as finite. They’re probably never the same twice, but there’s always those embarrassing and off-color stories told at a funeral.
Someone always finds out something new about a person at a funeral because of those stories. Then they get retold and then they’re retold wrong and someone else has a unique impression of this dead person who did some funny shit when they were alive.
A dead person is always funny, because no one ever wants to remember the times they fought with the dearly departed, or how they never really talked as much as they should have.
Then there’s always the thought, “What will they say at my funeral?” It’s morbid but it goes through everyone’s mind, because funerals make death real.
Hopefully, they’ll have something funny to say.
-October 6, 2010
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