When I first started dating my wife, her family called me “The Angel of Death.”
As soon as we started going out, her relatives started dropping like flies. Within six months of our first date, she lost both grandmothers and an uncle.
We had only been seeing each other for a month or two when the first grandmother died. My girlfriend made it clear that I shouldn’t feel any obligation to go to the funeral but that she would really like me to go with her. She looked up at me with unnaturally large, shiny, Bambi-like eyes and I realized that the whole “no obligation” thing was, strictly speaking, a work of fiction.
To my relief, the wake and funeral were held on the same day in a sort of graveside double-header, so at least the process wasn’t dragged out too long. Everyone was to view the body at the funeral home for a few hours, then go straight to the church for Mass. The funeral director, who was very good at his job, went around to each group of people at the viewing and surreptitiously found out the names of other mourners so he could call them by name if he needed to speak with them. After an hour or two, he called for attention and announced that it was time to move on to the church, but first, he would like to call people up to the casket one at a time to say their final goodbyes to the deceased.
The first name he called was mine.
Let me take this opportunity to point out that I had never met the deceased before and in fact, nobody in the room had the slightest idea who I was. Realizing, however, that the situation would only become more awkward if I mentioned this to the funeral director, I decided to go up and introduce myself to the old girl. On my way back from the casket, most of the family looked at me in utter confusion, except for my girlfriend’s mother, who looked at me with such dewy-eyed gratitude that I suddenly realized that by showing up here at all, I had effectively announced my intentions.
A month or so later, her other grandmother passed away.
By this time, the family had apparently accepted me on some level, because they had me write the eulogy.
“Hey,” I was told, “you’re a writer—you write it.”
Um, okay.
So, now it’s three years later and my wife’s grandfather has just passed away. He was very old and had been very sick in recent years, so while everyone in the family will miss him, nobody begrudges the fact that he is finally getting some rest.
Ironically, it is this lack of tragedy that has led to angst and emotional turmoil. When someone very young dies, it is a tragedy that tends to pull a family together. When someone very old dies, friends and family are under much less obligation to act with decorum. People’s real feelings come to the surface, and as any family counselor will tell you, real feelings aren’t pretty. Most lifelong, intra-family vendettas start at funerals.
At this point, I feel like something of an expert on these funerals. Here are my rules for getting through one:
1. At some point, things will look chaotic and disorganized. You will probably say to yourself, “You know, somebody really ought to organize these people.” You are not that person.
2. If you are a pallbearer, wear suspenders. Your hands will be full and your odd, shuffling walk as you carry the casket will jog your belt off your waist. Trust me—in their time of grief, none of the bereaved wants to look at your butt crack.
3. At some point, someone will be mean to your wife and you will think that someone really ought to make them apologize. Once again, you are not that person.
4. Drink heavily.
Understandably enough, my wife and I have been talking a lot about this sort of thing lately and we have come to the conclusion that we should probably make plans for ourselves, just in case it turns out that some file clerk at the FDA mixed things up and it turns out that tofu is bad for you and you were supposed to get as much asbestos as possible. I have told her that I really don’t want a big funeral or anything, but if we have a lot of money by then, she should endow a chair at a college in my memory. She has pointed out how unlikely it is that we will actually have that kind of money, so I have given fall-back instructions: if she is unable to endow a chair at a college, she should endow a barstool somewhere—but not a very comfortable one. The John Fladd Memorial Barstool has a nice ring to it.
I also like the idea of waitresses commenting someday on how appropriate it is that it pinches their butts.
